Always show the data!

This week I began to encounter a little bit of resistance mainly due to perceived priorities.  A lot of people have a lot of passion for the issue I vaguely posted about last week, but have hesitated to make time to review the roadblocks to making a permanent change, yet I need their input to progress.  How can I influence them to change their priority?  With data!

Armed with historical trends (showing a significant spike in occurences of the problem in question) and  verifiable information on the "culprit" (a single component used on several assemblies), I can clearly show the impact of the problem in the following areas:

• customer service
• inventory accuracy
• rework costs (labor and materials)

Couple this with the frequency of the problem occurring, others would likely want to make changes somewhere.

Instead of approaching an engineering manager to ask for a moment of his/her time to talk about a lingering problem everyone is aware of, which he/she says will have to wait, I can now bring the quantified results and ask him/her to take a look and let me know what they think.  This approach will be perceived as a quick discussion and will create the window of time needed to get the input I need to move ahead.