Key Variance Analysis comes from the literature on Socio-Technical Systems
An excellent, but probably unpublished, explanation, called "A Socio-Technical Analysis (including a variance matrix and a social systems grid) for The Cotter-Cherns Scottish Sandwich Corp., Ltd.," comes from E. Lauck Parke, now Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of Vermont.
The Key Variance Analysis lists the steps in a (any) production process and, within each step, what can go wrong. The following example uses this tool to analyze the ranking of XB Memos:
| Start correcting memos | Don't start soon enough | ||||||||||||||||
| Initial Memo | People don't initial memos | ||||||||||||||||
| Comment on Memo | Don't correct grammar and spelling errors | ||||||||||||||||
| Write the same thing on everyone's memo | |||||||||||||||||
| Don't offer suggestions | |||||||||||||||||
| Don't write enough | |||||||||||||||||
| Rank Memos | Don't have sufficient means to rank | ||||||||||||||||
| Bias | |||||||||||||||||
| E-mail list of ranks to Control | Forget to do it | ||||||||||||||||
| E-mail is down | |||||||||||||||||
| Mis type names | |||||||||||||||||
| Put memos outside Sr. Mgr's office | Area is locked | ||||||||||||||||
| Can't find the right folder | |||||||||||||||||
| Forget to do it | |||||||||||||||||