Comments on: Hoshin 102 http://www.dailykaizen.org/archives/199 A blog about improvement in health care Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:37:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Ted Eytan http://www.dailykaizen.org/archives/199#comment-511 Ted Eytan Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:31:38 +0000 http://www.dailykaizen.org/archives/199#comment-511 Karl, it's nice to hear about your use of affinity diagrams. It normalizes this way of planning for me and the team I work with. This is very useful at this stage of the journey. Thanks for the comment. Karl, it’s nice to hear about your use of affinity diagrams. It normalizes this way of planning for me and the team I work with. This is very useful at this stage of the journey. Thanks for the comment.

]]> By: Karl McCracken http://www.dailykaizen.org/archives/199#comment-507 Karl McCracken Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:17:36 +0000 http://www.dailykaizen.org/archives/199#comment-507 Affinity diagrams are without doubt one of my favourite tools. They provide an excellent means of exploring complex issues, where the nature of the problem itself is unclear - the method kind of taps into the 'wisdom of crowds', allows for a great team focus to develop. Problems that I've explored with this technique: o Strategic planning for companies o Kaizen prioritisation o Market & customer segmentation o New product development / market niche identification I even worked with one company to integrate the outcomes from the Affinity Diagrams into their newly established Balanced Scorecard. They'd initially had difficulty populating this, but with some work with affinity diagrams, the targets, measures and relationships just seemed to fall into their laps! Affinity diagrams are without doubt one of my favourite tools. They provide an excellent means of exploring complex issues, where the nature of the problem itself is unclear - the method kind of taps into the ‘wisdom of crowds’, allows for a great team focus to develop. Problems that I’ve explored with this technique:

o Strategic planning for companies
o Kaizen prioritisation
o Market & customer segmentation
o New product development / market niche identification

I even worked with one company to integrate the outcomes from the Affinity Diagrams into their newly established Balanced Scorecard. They’d initially had difficulty populating this, but with some work with affinity diagrams, the targets, measures and relationships just seemed to fall into their laps!

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