Starting from scratch, Gil had slowly built a small business and was running it quite successfully. He was a professional at heart: He gained the confidence of customers and prospects, met their expectations, negotiated better prices, and provided personalized service. Life was good. Things were settling in. And then the tide turned.

Initially, customers’ issues centered around unfair prices (or perceived value), or an occasional slip in quality. More recently, complaints reflected a lack of client interactions via technology (e.g., outdated web presence, no social media). The comfortable days of getting by and resting on his laurels were gone. Gil started seeing a decline in business and realized that he had become complacent. Customers started rejecting the status quo. Something had to be done.

The IT department of a school district supported itself by providing application development, database maintenance, training, and other services to its internal clients, although no money exchanged hands. The school’s outreach unit, which provided training and education to local organizations, also maintained its own profit and loss statement but was having issues with invoicing. Somehow the invoiced amount always seemed to be different from the quoted amount, which meant manual corrections, delays in receivables, and most important, unhappy clients.

As one of the more experienced analysts, Joel was brought in to resolve this issue expeditiously. He quickly identified an anomaly, which led him to assume data corruption as the culprit. He dove right in analyzing data, working backward from the output data, looking for patterns. Not finding anything, he delved deeper and discovered tiny data issues surfacing randomly, and he failed to detect a pattern that would point to a root cause. None of the data defects he found affected the invoices uniformly. A supposedly quick IT project was turning out to be a nightmare, and the outreach unit was getting anxious at the number of hours it would have to pay the IT department.

You check into a high-end hotel for an exorbitant fee. You are tired, thirsty, and you want a drink of water. Either you find no water or the bottled water costs an additional $5.50. You see a coffee pot and complimentary coffee or tea, but you don’t want to drink something hot; you want water. Coffee is free; water is not. Reluctantly, you open the bottle of water and wonder why the hotel would nickel and dime a customer who’s paying hundreds to stay overnight. Hotels are in the hospitality industry, but they just don’t get it!

This same lack of understanding occurs in food oriented scenarios. Back at the high-end hotel, breakfast is included with the room. What is served? Danish rolls. Who wants sweets and likely a glucose crash when you need to be on the ball for your meeting? How about something healthy that will sustain the body until the next meal?

What about lunch? Yes, serving many people quickly and with a nice presentation is important, but the nutritional content of the food isn’t a priority. Pasta is commonly served because it’s filling and cheap, but it fails at boosting brain power.

Lights, camera, action! Sound familiar? Given the continuous release of movies, we are all familiar with this phrase. But what does this have to do with the quality profession or strategy?

“Lights” make more visible the area to be captured on film. “Camera” indicates the readiness of the equipment or personnel to begin recording. These steps essentially create the framework within which the action is to take place; it provides a clear boundary within which the actors are to limit their movements and keep the background (or context) in perspective. And of course, there’s “action” toward the end result. “Lights, camera, action” eventually lead to a deliverable that the producer expected.

How does this differ from the many continuous improvement initiatives currently experienced in the business environment? For example, Six Sigma’s define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC) starts by defining the problem—or throwing light on the issue to be addressed. Clarifying the problem helps the project team gather the necessary data to measure and analyze to ensure they are “focused” on the correct issue. The “action” occurs during the improve and control modes.