Strategy C&E Cause & Effect matrix

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Question - Where could my plan go wrong?

Answer - We have two tools that address this issue:

1. the Strategy C&E Cause & Effect Matrix, which helps you identify which aspects of your strategy are most critical for you to execute effectively

2. the FMEA Failure Modes & Effects Analysis, which subsequently explores the most critical parts of your plan for why things could go wrong, and either how you could prevent this happening, or how you could take remedial action, or both

Key action points

Six Sigma is probably the most trusted of the quality improvement methodologies currently around, having been adopted by several global corporations who report significant business gains as a result of its deployment.

As with all quality improvement processes, it is most suited to manufacturing environments or large scale repetitive processes, but it can be adapted, with care, to more general business and brand marketing processes.

For a broad introduction to Six Sigma, click here.

The C&E Cause & Effect Matrix is designed to identify which aspects of your business or brand marketing plan are likely to have the greatest impact on your overall results.

Six Sigma draws heavily on pareto principles to encourage you to improve the most important parts of your process first.

The outputs from the Cause & Effect Matrix are then fed into a Strategy Failure Modes & Effects Analysis to help you assess what might go wrong with the critical aspects of your plan.

In more detail ......

There are 5 key stages in the Six Sigma DMAIC process:

1. Define
2. Measure
3. Analyse
4. Improve
5. Control

The C&E (Cause & Effect) matrix is used initially in the Define stage to prioritise the issues to focus on. What you are looking for are the Pareto issues - where 20% of your effort will give you 80% of the gain.

This is a Strategic Planning adaptation of the C&E matrix - helping you identify the aspects of your plan that are most critical to its overall effectiveness.

We have built in 8 generic desired outcomes for your plan, but you can change these as you wish:

• sales
• profits
• sales growth
• profits growth
• increased cashflow
• brand/reputation
• customer loyalty
• employee loyalty

Each aspect of your plan ("X" in Six Sigma terminology) is scored for its impact on each desired outcome ("Y" in Six Sigma terminology).

You can use any scoring scheme you wish. We recommend using both positive and negative scores, and leaving gaps to avoid trivial differences. So our scoring scheme uses -10, -8, -6, -4, -2, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10.

You can score the issues as a group, or have each person score them separately and combine the scores.

What you have as a result is an analysis of which areas of your plan you need to "bullet-proof" in order for your plan to be first credible, then effective.

Unless those who are tasked with implementing your plan have a "proven belief" in it, they will not commit to delivering it. For more details on a "proven belief" process, click here.

To buy this tool, click here.

© 2006, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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