During a recent stay at a reasonably nice hotel, I was looking for a place to hang up my wet raincoat when I noticed this sign on the wall, up high. Clearly there had been problems in the past with sprinkler malfunctions, and after one or more incidents of ‘defect correction’ (fixing the sprinkler malfunctions), someone did root cause analysis (e.g. why? … why? …), identified coat hangers as the culprit, and took this action to try to prevent future defects.
Commendable, right?
But I looked around the entire hotel room and realized I still had no good place to hang my wet raincoat.
This exemplifies a saying I recall hearing in an SEI Six Sigma training class last year, and earlier in a QFD class:
“Just because nothing is wrong, doesn’t mean anything is right.”
Taking corrective and preventive actions, and driving defect levels towards zero, may be useful and necessary, but is not sufficient to achieve true high quality. Satisfaction of real customer needs matters most. It would be neither hard nor expensive to install a coat hook somewhere in the hotel room for wet/snowy/dirty/… outergarments. Adding this small amenity would not only dilute the temptation to guests who might otherwise hang wet coats on the sprinklers, they’d be less likely to drape them over the chairs in the rooms, which probably isn’t good for the wood or upholstery, …