Engineering Leadership and Management Courses. Free Management Library (SM) Management Methods | Management Models | Management Theories. The CEO Refresher Archives. 12manage - The Free Management Encyclopedia and Network. Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing. When planning new products, companies often start by segmenting their markets and positioning their merchandise accordingly. This segmentation involves either dividing the market into product categories, such as function or price, or dividing the customer base into target demographics, such as age, gender, education, or income level.
Unfortunately, neither way works very well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and 95 percent of them fail. “The jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?” The problem is that consumers usually don't go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially "hire" a product to do that job. Seven Management and Planning Tools. The Seven Management and Planning Tools have their roots in Operations Research work done after World War II and the Japanese Total Quality Control (TQC) research.
In 1979 the book Seven New Quality Tools for Managers and Staff was published and was translated into English in 1983. The Seven Tools[edit] Affinity Diagram (KJ Method)[edit] Affinity diagrams are a special kind of brainstorming tool that organize large amounts of disorganized data and information into groupings based on natural relationships. It was created in the 1960s by the Japanese anthropologist Jiro Kawakita. Interrelationship Digraph (ID)[edit] This tool displays all the interrelated cause-and-effect relationships and factors involved in a complex problem and describes desired outcomes.
Tree Diagram[edit] This tool is used to break down broad categories into finer and finer levels of detail. Prioritization Matrix[edit] This tool is used to prioritize items and describe them in terms of weighted criteria. References[edit]