The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth, 2nd Edition

Technique 58

Control Plan

Ensure that your new solution becomes commercialized as planned.

 

A control plan is critical to ensuring that your innovation will be produced or delivered according to your careful design, regardless of location, personnel, environment, or other variables that you won't be able to control. The plan helps you mitigate risk when moving from a controlled environment (such as a lab) into an operational environment (like the factory floor).

Customers have been conditioned to expect consistency thanks to businesses like Starbucks, McDonald's, and countless others that strive to deliver the same product regardless of location. Control plans enable any organization to replicate the customer experience by clearly documenting how to keep the process in control, what to do if it goes out of control and who is responsible for putting it back in control—all of which results in a reproducible process that delights customers and maximizes profits.

It takes many hours, even days, to complete a thorough control plan. This time can be minimized if you have already applied several techniques including Process Map/Value Stream Map (Technique 51), Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (Technique 44), and Measurement Systems Analysis (Technique 52).

Steps

Scenario: Imagine a drive-through fast-food chain that recognizes customers using facial recognition software, and predicts their orders based on their most recent and most frequent preferences. A control plan, if ...