Process
- Record each idea on cards or notes
- Look for ideas that seem to be related
- Sort cards into groups until all cards have been used.
Once the cards have been sorted into groups the team may sort large clusters into subgroups for easier management and analysis. Once completed, the affinity diagram may be used to create a cause and effect diagram.
In many cases, the best results tend to be achieved when the activity is completed by a cross-functional team, including key stakeholders. The process requires becoming deeply immersed in the data, which has benefits beyond the tangible deliverables.
Read more about this topic: Affinity Diagram
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish. For him the truncated process of creating will always be an interrupted act of love, and his style will bear the shame of it, the impoverishment.”
—Yves Saint Laurent (b. 1936)
“The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)