In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, a fascinating conversation takes place between Alice and the Cheshire Cat:
Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't matter which way you go.
Alice: so long as I get somewhere.
The project charter in the Define stage helped us to create a roadmap of where we want to go. However, any roadmap is of hardly any use unless we know where we are beginning the journey from. The Measure stage establishes exactly that: the current, as is state of the process that we want to improve. It helps us to establish the current baseline of the process under improvement.
The key deliverables of Measure are:
Identifying key measures
A data collection plan
Measurement system analysis
A detailed process map
A Baseline performance measurement or process capability measurement
Let's explore these deliverables in detail...