2. Analysis at work (Part 1): Buffy’s™ Fitness Center

Introducing Buffy. Buffy started off as a gal who assembled some exercise equipment to help her get in shape after the birth of the twins. She kept track of her success on her old MAC SE and logged every step of her progress, never straying from her goals. So remarkable were her results that her neighbors and friends began seeking her help. What was a personal effort became a very successful small business. And then the local TV station did a story about her. A college pal, Elron, saw it and invited her to lunch. "I've got some money from an inheritance. Let's start some other small, storefront Buffy's™ all over Massachusetts and Rhode Island," he said. "We'll buy used equipment that looks good, but nothing too expensive. And we'll staff it with middle aged folks, no ingenues. And we'll keep track of everything on old computers, so we can track their progress and jump on it when persistence flags. We'll take the Buffy™ concept and buff it up, ha, ha."

And so they did. Buffy now has 312 small fitness centers franchised across the USA. She's not yet profitable, since so much capital has been invested in getting started.

What’s on Buffy’s mind? She’s concerned that Buffy’s™ has lost some of its specialness, its personal touch, the elements that were so attractive to her customers.

Renewals are down from the same quarter last year, and she hasn’t been able to get ‘good data’ from the computer system on the progress of individual customers at centers across the country. She wonders if the franchise owners really know how to turn these small fitness centers into places of nurturing and growth. And she recently visited a center in Des Moines and found the computer in the closet. The woman who worked there said nobody knows what to do with it. And the nutrition program that Buffy worked with a Harvard expert to conceive needs to be rolled out across the country soon. It’s important to get that right.

Buffy isn’t sleeping well. She knows she needs some help, but isn’t quite certain what to ask for. Elron thinks they need to start offering courses for franchise owners, especially since having a training program helps with closing the sale for each franchise. Buffy thinks that might be a good idea, since she supports education, of course.

 

Helping Buffy through performance analysis. Buffy believes that success is in the hands of the the franchise owners and managers, often one and the same person or couple. Are these franchisees doing what Buffy did to make her fitness centers successful? When you ask Buffy to identify the key areas, she lists them readily:

Once a general picture of needs has been established, such as those just above, it’s time to find out about drivers and causes of lack of performance. This is called front end analysis (FEA) and we will talk about it in depth later in this text. Ask the questions about each of the needs, since drivers will vary with the particular need. Why aren’t they personalizing for customers via the computer and software? Why are customers failing to persist? What will it take to successfully ‘install’ the nutrition program in Buffy’s™ centers across the USA?

Let’s take one of the needs listed above, the one that focuses on computerized fitness management. This is front end analysis associated with the automation aspect. In this case, the sources would be franchise owners, managers and employees. Now we ask questions about WHY it didn’t happen.

 

Helping Buffy through training needs assessment. Let’s hypothesize that our performance analysis shows us that it is appropriate to invest in education and training, particularly in the domains associated with the computer and fitness. Specifically, we found it necessary to teach Buffy’s people about customer record management. Then, we would hand-off to developers to build those solutions with a TNA as the method they would use to generate the ‘right’ content. For the purposes of the training needs assessment, we would ask Buffy and her software experts the following:

Task and content analysis will be critical here, with an emphasis on content analysis. Do you know why? If we were tackling the customer service or community building goals, it’s likely we’d rely most heavily on goal analysis. Do you know why? Read the next section to get to know the different analysis techniques.