Section 03. Affinity


03. Affinity

Overview

Affinity is used in the Lean Sigma roadmap primarily in the context of Voice of The Customer (VOC), to take the fragments of Customer Voice collected from Interviews and Surveys and collate them into a structured usable form. Affinity has a much stronger and more detailed counterpart, known as KJ,[4] which is used extensively in Design For Six Sigma (DFSS) to develop new products and services. The level of detail that KJ provides is obviously better, but is not deemed to give additional worthwhile value in Process Improvement projects for the significant extra effort expended.

[4] For more detail on KJ see Commercializing Great Products Using DFSS by Randy Perry.

Affinity is a simple tool and common to most improvement approaches, but has a few subtleties with which Belts sometimes struggle.

Logistics

Affinity is absolutely a Team activity and should not be attempted by the Belt in isolation. Also, it is sometimes tempting for Belts to try to make a start before a Team meeting (a straw man) to speed things up. This is not a good idea and actually tends to slow things down, as well as potentially undermining the Team's buy-in to the end product.

A session to create a Customer Requirements Affinity Diagram takes about one to four hours total for a typical project. The Team needs an area of wall space to work on, a large sheet of paper (two flipchart pages side by side works well), sticky notes, and pens.

Roadmap

The roadmap to create the Affinity Diagram of Customer Requirements is as follows:

Step 1.

Transfer the Customer Needs (sometimes called "Voices") from the transcripts of Customer Interviews and Customer Surveys to sticky notes. This is by far the most important step in the process and can potentially cause the biggest problems. It can also take a significant amount of time, usually more than half of the total tool time. It should be possible for a single person to transfer the needs from a transcript to sticky notes provided that person was a Scribe during the interview process and heard exactly what was said during the interview. There are times where input is required from others present at that particular interview to clarify points.

Thus, the transcripts are distributed back to the individual Team members who wrote them. By slowly scanning through the transcript, Customer Needs are highlighted (it is a good idea to do this physically with a highlighter pen) and the Needs are then each transferred to a sticky note. A Need or Voice is an individual thought, idea, or statement that is to be considered and can stand on its own merits. It is a statement of need and should avoid implying a solution. During the Interview process, if a solution was mentioned, the Interviewer should have probed to discover the underlying Need that drove the Customer to conclude that the particular solution was necessary. The Need should be written as said, from the Customer's perspective, and it should not translate or summarize needs.

Write only one Need per sticky note and write them legibly in block letters. There should be no ambiguity in the statement on the note, so write in complete sentences; don't just write a single bullet or a couple of words. It doesn't matter if the Need isn't written absolutely perfectly; it is the concept behind the written Need statement that matters.

If a Need is still not understood by a Team member, seek Team input and if it is still ambiguous then seek clarification from the Interviewee.

After all the Needs from the transcripts are transferred to sticky notes, there should be a large pile in front of each Team member.

Step 2.

Prepare the work area using either large chart paper or two flipchart pages side by side. Losing work can be very frustrating so write the project name in large black marker in the upper left corner of both sheets.

Step 3.

Place all the sticky notes on the paper, in no particular order.

Step 4.

Each Team member should take time to read all of the notes before moving any. This takes time, so everyone should do this in parallelit's usually a tight squeeze around the work area.

Step 5.

Have all the Team involved in moving around the notes into logical groups. This is done in silence to begin with and is a skill in itself. The trick is to think from the Customers' perspective, from what was heard in the interviews. Try not to group by internal factors, for example, "those are all our quality-related problems;" rather, try to do it from the external standpoint, from how the Customer perceives the process.

Try to avoid creating huge groups of notes; the meaning behind them might be lost. Groups might be just two or three notes to begin with but make sense to be placed together. There will probably be replication of notes. Remove only exact replication. Do not be tempted to keep a loose summary note and assume it would represent a few others. Keep the detail; do not lose information content.

Keep moving sticky notes until the Team comes to silent consensus.

Step 6.

Discuss and title each group. The title is based on why that group of notes addresses the same Needs. It is effectively a theme for the small group it represents. The titles are best written in a different colored pen and preferably on a different colored note to distinguish them.

Step 7.

It might be obvious at this point that some of the groups themselves should be grouped. Complete this as a Team and title the major groups. The titles are best written in yet another pen color and preferably on a different colored note to distinguish them again.

Step 8.

After the Diagram is complete, the Team should sign and date the sheet. The purpose of signing is primarily to ensure that each Team member agrees with the structure and wasn't just "going along with it."

A completed Affinity Diagram is shown in Figure 7.03.1. The example in this case is from a project aimed at reducing Length of Stay in an Emergency Department. The Diagram in this case exhibits only a single level of grouping.

Figure 7.03.1. Example Affinity Diagram showing grouping structure.[5]


[5] Source: Columbus Regional Hospital, Emergency Department Throughput Team.

Interpreting the Output

Affinity Diagrams are one in a series of tools to capture the VOC. The output of any Customer Interviews along with output from Customer Surveys are affinitized and then translated into a Customer Requirements Tree to identify the Big Ys or Key Process Output Variables (KPOVs) for the process.




Lean Sigma(c) A Practitionaer's Guide
Lean Sigma: A Practitioners Guide
ISBN: 0132390787
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 138

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