Failure demand

The Hidden Drag On Professional Services Profitability

What is failure demand?

A very large part of professional services work or effort is the result of failure demand. There are two types of demand on our time: demand for our value-added services and demand that arise from processes that don't result in the expected outcomes. This requires some do-over and is usually accompanied by superfluous supporting work. Reducing failure demand makes a firm more profitable, nimble and staff more engaged. Along with the way, people become better problem finders and learners, ramping up kaizen efforts.

"From a design firm perspective,
Failure Demand is a topic on point with something we ‘deal’ with on a regular basis. I cannot imagine this is unique problem."
Danile M. Deboo, AIA, LEED® AP BD+C
NCARB Certified
Senior Associate | Senior Project Manager
HOK and NYC LCI CoP Leader

FREE RESOURCE
How you can tackle Failure Demand at your company

The free material consists of a presentation and a handout to start tackling failure demand at your company. The material is creative commons licensed - please use, improve on it, and tell us about your improvements so we can help others.

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Presentation + Handouts (Creative Commons License)

Your workshop has two parts: a general failure demand workshop and an exploration of implementation approaches to use at your companies.

Use the presentation and supporting material to learn how to identify the four sources of failure demand, to recognize where in their workdays they are doing work that has failure demand as its source, and to "try-storm" countermeasures to learn how to remove the failure demand at its source.

After that, explore in groups how companies are successfully or not successfully attacking failure demand in their organizations. Use this content to learn about tools, organizational approaches and frameworks for identifying, tracking and leading an effort that jump-starts enterprise-wide kaizen. 

Failure Demand is developed for you by
Hal Macomber and Calayde Davey,
with Sysun Howell