This article is Part 4 of the framework for How to Build a Business Case for Quality.
Business Case Framework
- Introduction: How to Build a Business Case for Quality
- Integrate Quality with Your Company Strategy
- Achieve Executive Buy-In
- Gather Feedback Across Your Organization
- Establish Actions for Your Business Case
- Deliver a Compelling Business Case for Quality
- Implement the Actions of the Quality Business Case (article forthcoming).
Starter Questions
- How do you analyze input from across an entire organization?
- Should you use AI to help analyze the data?
- How do you develop the right plan for your company?
Analyzing Conversational Feedback
As you gather feedback across your organization, record the specific themes you hear:
- “I was never trained on the program.”
- “We need more templates to guide us.”
For each comment, develop a solution. For example, for the team member who was never trained, one solution to fix that would be to “Provide regular training.” A solution to the team member requesting additional templates could be: “Create additional templates.”
| Comment | Solution |
| I was never trained on the program. | Provide regular training. |
| We need more templates to guide us. | Create additional templates. |
Continue doing this for all your conversations. In my situation, there roughly 600 comments from 298 interviews with 24 different corresponding solutions. A dummy table is shown below with example information.
| Comment | Solution |
| I was never trained on the program. | Provide quarterly training. |
| We need more templates to guide us. | Create templates for meetings and inspections. |
| Leadership is too busy to focus on this. | Create a culture of quality. |
| Field teams have too much on their plate in their daily work. | Hire dedicated regional quality managers. |
| People don’t understand the current plan. | Simplify the current program. |
| Need to hold our teams accountable. | Hire dedicated regional quality managers. |
| Meetings are not beneficial. | Improve meeting structure. |
| People are not comfortable sharing their mistakes to learn from. | Create a culture of quality. |
| Inspection templates are too long. | Simplify the current program. |
Note: The above data is for informational purposes only and not actual content from my interviews.
Next, sum up the number of times each solution comes up.
| Solution | Sum |
| Simplify current program. | 24 |
| Hire dedicated quality managers. | 11 |
| Provide regular training. | 9 |
| Create quality culture. | 8 |
| Improve knowledge sharing. | 4 |
| Hold teams accountable. | 3 |
| Improve estimating quality. | 2 |
| Improve meeting structure. | 2 |
| Improve quality of third party partners. | 1 |
| Create additional templates. | 1 |
| Improve design quality. | 1 |
Using those sums, create a bar chart of the information.
These solutions are the actions for your quality business case (forthcoming in Part 5). In this example, it was clear that the existing program needed simplification. You’ll need to identify which solutions to focus on first and include in your business case. You could choose the top five issues or ten – it depends on your capacity, the capacity of your team, and the capacity for change in your organization.
You’ll also need to select solutions that directly address the concerns of your executives. For example, pretend that one of your executives stated you could not add any new tasks or processes without taking away two other steps. If you simplified your existing program and removed redundant steps, not only are you addressing the concerns of superintendents and project managers based on the feedback in Figure 1, but also those of your executive. Simplifying the program also helps with training and knowledge sharing because it is easier to train on a simpler system.
This makes it easy to get your business case approved because it addresses and resolves problems and objectives at all levels.
On the Use of AI
Analyzing subjective feedback from conversations is a difficult task. There are more robust statistical methods than what I leveraged here, however I did not have those tools available during this effort. (Take my methods holistically rather than scientifically.) Also, I could have leveraged AI to assist me.
Why did I not just record these conversations in Microsoft Teams and loaded them into Copilot, asking for a summary? That could have saved me a lot of time.
As tempting as it will be, I encourage you not to use AI in this effort, other than to validate your findings and help with the presentation effort (forthcoming in Part 5). I am a proponent of AI and love the technology, however it does not replace critical thinking, which is what is required to build a business case.
Had I leveraged AI (for example, recording the conversations and inserting them into Copilot, asking it to conduct the analysis for me), I would only be replicating the data in the business case versus articulating my own critical thinking. When you present your business case to your executives, you will get hard questions about it. “Why should we approve your business case?” You will not be able to answer that intelligently if you do not do the critical thinking. You can’t just say: “Because the data says so.” You’ll need to fully understand the feelings and context behind it, which AI can’t fathom.
Analyzing the feedback yourself prepares you for these challenging conversations, which we all encounter throughout our careers at all levels. Because you put all this in your head during your analysis, you will be the best-prepared person to lead the effort. This is how you become the right person with the right plan – using data from team members at your organization to develop the actions for your business plan. You will have the context and information to back up your intentions and be able to articulate them in high-pressure situations.
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