The Kaizen Business

OK, don’t let the name of this post scare you away… Common cause variation is in fact a very simple concept to understand and the good news is its even easier to avoid in your business systems and processes.

The gist of this post is that every process, including those that are in control (by controlled they are well documented systems), have a certain amount of natural variation or undesired results or defects. The problem is people like to tinker with or change something in a process before letting those results happen and allowing the full picture to develop.

Ed Deming demonstrated the perils of making changes too frequently due to common cause variation with the funnel experiment. The purpose was to position a funnel over a target and attempt to hit it by dropping a marble into the funnel. Essentially in three of the experiments after each marble drop the funnel would be allowed to be repositioned (tampered) to adjust and try to hit the target more consistently. In one of the experiments the funnel was to be held in a constant position and was not allowed to be adjusted.

Guess which funnel had the best overall results? The funnel kept in a fixed position for the duration of the experiment.

So how does this apply to you in the real world of business? A perfect place would be your sales pages, I know I have been guilty of tweaking a sales page without sufficient visitors… I have pretty much cured that habit by using MuVar and letting it do the continuous improvement, I simply add more elements at any time and let it handle testing them and ruling them out as unprofitable for that sales page.

But what if you’re not using a tool like Muvar? Be patient but don’t blow your wad buying PPC clicks for an untested sales page… You have to remember that with online sales pages a single digit conversion rate is actually doing well and at that sort of pace it can potentially take hundreds of visitors to a page to get a sufficient sample size to start drawing conclusions if your page is any good or not.

-Jim Sansi