Zero Ego Team with One Goal in Focus, dealing with Two states, the current and future, uniting Three stakes (Organization, customer and users) in synergy with Four pillars (People, Process, Technology and tools) as foundation avoiding Five dysfunctions and following Six Rules of Kanban by cultivating Seven Habits (Stephen R Covey) everyday, wonât need Eight days a week for a breakthrough, to be in cloud Nine to reach a state of perfect Ten that brings out Infinite Smiles
….. putting it together First and last “Zero Ego Team with Infinite Smiles / Infinite smiles with Zero Ego team”đđ
âToo early for next classâ, heard a base voice in pin drop background. We (two of us)left the room, silently. Voice was from our Professor. Room was our Mechanics Class room. We made slightly late to the class, after the fresh hot coffee . It was Two consecutive hours of same subject, Mechanics. We ‘understood’ the satire that we were late for the first hour and left the class room. After few months we were entering the class again slightly late, blamed it on hot coffee. Second time, no voice, just a smile and we made it to third desk. Not quite sure we understood why we were allowed (not that we understood the lift and drag forces of buoyancy, better), we were trying to figure out the reasons for permitting us. After the classes (two hours) got over, we gathered courage and asked the Professor as to why we were allowed second time to enter the classes as we were late by few minutes. He said, we were doing better at the subject and occasionally missing few minutes (for the right reasons) wonât be an issue for us. We understood that it was meant to be âwe were ready for the next class (second hour) with our grasp on the subject, even with few minutes of absence from the first (hour) classâ and He never denied entry in both occassions! Thatâs when we understood his famous quote of saying âThere are many ways to do a thing, but thereâs only one Elegant wayâ. How elegant was He in making us see the beautiful meaning behind âToo early for the next classâ. Trying to work out elegant solution wherever possible
During one of the lean coffee conversations, couple of years ago, there was a thought that came about using comic strips to codify project scenarios. All of us were trying to share an idea. I came with this idea on triple constraints of a project. Thanks to my favorite Calvin and Hobbes! Let me know your thoughts
Maths-la evlo? Two magical words Meaning how much score in Mathematics?
Teachersâ day thoughts! Typically for kids doing 10th – 12th grade, a common question asked to them at home, family gathering, schools, family functions is Maths-la evlo?
Call it cliche or care, concern or trite, most of us would have faced this question.
After spending 25+ years into corporate , came to realize how this probing question helped most of all through the years.
Art of Approximation and Problem solving for many of us from Math skills is most beneficial in all phases of Education and Work like;
Planning for time boxes for final exams in 10th, 12th and grads based on whether its 10-mark, 5-mark, 2-mark of one-mark questions.
Be it anchoring a proposal technical bid / priced bid
Preparation for business travels, personal vacation
Finalizing an apartment, automobile, gadget, laptop
In transformation initiatives, empiricism is key lever in getting quick wins and long-term success
I have great reverence for all my Teachers from school, university, work place who kept asking probing questions .
Approximation skills from basic Mathematics, and Maths-la evlo? question have been guiding principle always.
Truly admire the importance of Math skill in life!
Why theory and practice are different?? Are they really?
Some random conversations from Interesting people
Questions differ but the idea of the questions is strikingly similar!
1.Student :
School taught us Ohmâs law. “Current in a circuit, is directly proportional to its applied voltage and inversely proportional to its resistance.
I = V / R
However, in real life, applying them to get accurate results is challenging, why?
2. Playground (Cricket).
We are thought only the close ups, deep fielding stances . Seeing magical catches at boundary line in IPL matches, they are not taught or mentioned about! Why?
3. Work â estimations / achievements
We factored all scenarios, used hindsight, dependencies, still couldnât reach target, Why?
One response to all questions. Theories are good. Optimum solutions need to be worked out applying the context by considering the premises!
Beautiful Ohmâs law almost 200 years back by Georg Ohm gave us the fundamental principle of FLOW.
The path of least resistance!
Be it electrical circuits, sport or wok, Flow happens wherever there is least resistance. Ensure Flow, by path of least resistance and it is not about just the formulaic notations!
Create Path of Least resistance and ensure Values Flow !
A gentleman was once visiting a temple under construction. There, he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. He observed, just a few meters away, another identical idol .
Surprised, he asked the sculptor, âDo you need two statutes of the same idolâ. âNoâ said the sculptor.
âWe need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stageâ. The gentleman examined the sculpture.
No apparent damage was visible. âWhere is the damageâ asked the gentleman.
âThere is a scratch on the nose of the idol. Replied the Sculptor.
Where are you going to keep the idolâ? âThe sculptor replied that it will be placed on a pillar 20 feet high.
When the idol will be 20 feet away from the eyes , who is going to know about the scratch on the nose?â The gentleman asked.
âThe sculptor looked at the gentleman, smiled and said, “God knows it and I know it “.
The desire to excel should be exclusive of the fact whether someone appreciates it or not.
Excellence is a drive fromâ Insideâ notâ Outside.
Culture is an internal alignment that reflect elevated ethos, not necessarily fetching âcomplimentsâ or âgood scoresâ
Carving out values is a bit blend of Math and Logic. Its easy to add that extra one gold plating in Technical, Process or People dimensions. However with practice and Product knowledge, a focused team with a clear Goal can identify and build great Products.
Brian Laraâs greatest performance that busted the myth of velocity metric. March 30, 1999, 21 years back, Brian Lara displayed terrific batting performance considered by Wisden as the second-greatest Test innings of all-time. After many years this story gets remembered by news papers and tabloids.
This third test at Barbados saw Australia leading in run rate in both innings. On the runs per minute both teams are almost equal. West Indies won the test. (Scores image attached) Velocity and burn down did not matter (Run rate and runs per minute),
Brilliant leader Lara, leading from the front worked great partnership with tailenders. Contrary to the common belief of focusing on high Velocity / Productivity which are fallacies, always look for signals that challenge our current understanding.
Taking actions only within the comfort-zone is a wide-spread compromise of the conflict. Identify, Exploit, Subordinate and Elevate the leverage ( CCR- Critically Constrained Resource) to reach the system Goal. Here the CCR is sticking to wickets for maximum time and subordinate to the leadership â Brian Lara.
Awesome Lara and TOC was in action – result â Top most performance in cricketing history.
An ode to Being Asleep đ¤Â not necessarily AgileÂ
So many times we keep hearing about Doing Agile VS Being Agile. Most folks may not be 100 % sure what is the differentiator though.
However Iâm very sure about difference between Being Asleep đ´Â Vs doing (putting effort to sleep) sleeping.The very fact that we are putting effort to sleep means we are awake. The moment we stop the efforts we are asleep.No more efforts just Be sleeping.
As a Product student, I wish to submit my thought defense on building (right) product.
Goal: Build a bird nest
Scenario 1:
Plan: perfect
Design: Excellent
Built: exactly meeting the dimensions like specifications, material
Longevity: Very long, extending into decades
Environment: Friendly in all environments and weather conditions
Compliance: Gold standards
Users   :             Toddlers (temporary) and Museum (permanent)
Â
Scenario 2:
Nest built by intuition and caring for the purpose called life
No Planning, design and testing.
Risks: Its susceptible to strong winds and heavy rains
Its goal is to nurture and sustain lives. In fact, after some time, the younger birds go and build their own nests for future generations. They donât worry about the structure of the nest and how long it will endure.
They simply pass on the spirit of life for generations to follow.
Users: Generations after generations
Conclusion: Case two is inspirational and recommended for building the Right Product where lives are sustained.
Are we building the right lively products or only building âgoldâ standard products ârightâ?
Product professors â do I get a pass in this thought defense?
Gemba is generally associated with actual place typically at shop floor in manufacturing and in Agile development right at the sprint teams.
How about using them in Sales. Some thoughts. Should Sales team simulate customer usage and customer experience and customer communications too. May be yes worth trying out.
Customer usage : How customer tests and uses all features of the product in functional, performance and security aspects. How is the user environment response? Perhaps Devops has simplified this aspect in major way.
Customer experience : The initial response, feeling. This is quite complex and difficult as this pertains to customer emotions. Perhaps using a third party representative from the same domain will give some idea.
Customer communication : Simulation activity as if customer reacts after release of product into user environment. Here in addition to present requirements, customer will think of using the software vendor for future requirements also if the vendor product behaves as expected or more.
These said, it is easier to simulate above perspectives for existing customer, however for new customers it maya be a challenge. Still it is better to try it out simulating than being at the receiving ends.
Time management – is not the end solutions. Time management has become more of task management and completing the tasks within the time frame. Efficiency ! Local optimization.
Time management is more of individualistic and compartmental. Goal is more apt for successful product development and sustainable organizations. While pursuing goal we need to share our cooperation by sharing our saved time / effort to people who may be struggling. So it’s the collective time and effort of the systems that is important than managing individual time / tasks.
It starts from the top and percolates down to the floor.
Attune to Systems thinking and avoid local management.
Product Acceptance criteria – understanding the stories requirement clearly and preparing the stories completion as per the criteria. Mostly Product owners decide these. Development needs to understand them.
Sufficient
Definition of done (DoD) is a set of checklists and ‘musts’ before the release of sprint / product. It covers the acceptance criteria too. DoD is generally a guideline and remains the same during the sprint.
Necessary but not sufficient
Set of product acceptance criteria for all stories without considering the whole sprint release falls under this category. Larger picture is more important and valuable than the sum of individual stories
Meetings should be done if required with relevant people only. Preparedness is mandatory and sticking to agreed agenda is time saver as well as motivator. Minutes is just action plan which creates a platform for everyone involved to help each other to complete the common goal.
Having standard agenda irrespective of the meeting’s objective with templates to comply will make the inventive mind demotivating. Mostly in project management scenarios meetings serve as record for minutes. It is not bad, but not sufficient. Can the moderator of the meeting ensure wherever the bottleneck is and ensure all other functions / subordinates to help ease the bottleneck . Can the flow of the work be made smooth through the bottleneck. Then meeting works. Less the time, better. Frequency of meeting can be adjusted depending upon the flow of the product / solution.
(To) sufferings, create sufferings, by sufferings
these(people), don’t suffer
Whenever there is a misery, (leaders) don’t suffer by this, rather they choose to create hardship for the misery.
Great saint poet revealed this powerful gem of a wisdom 2000 years ago in his work Tirukkural.
It is relevant in today’s constantly changing world. Changes and complications are constantly happening in the business world today in a rapid manner. It is here the great leaders takes them and convert it into opportunities. While principles like embracing change is the beginning to handle and manage the changes for business survival, the leaders create change by thinking ahead of the curve and innovating. Honestly when no product or solution can expect to live beyond 10 years it is all the more important to identify and innovate ahead of the curve. convert risks into opportunities and give risk to risks.
Same thing can be both a bottleneck and a flow. How can some thing remain a hurdle and an enabler.
In the Pole vault example the player pegs the pole after the run-up and swings to the top trying to reach the bar with aim of crossing the bar. The Goal here is crossing the bar without displacing it from the poles.
Initially during run up and reaching the bar, pole served as a tool and a process of swinging. Pole was an enabler. After reaching the bar, the pole vaulter will need to let go off the pole to cross the wooden bar. Here the pole is a bottleneck. Player gets rid off the pole and cross the bar and reaches the Goal. Within a span of few seconds same object worked as tool, process and a bottleneck.
This is so true in any game like for example a soccer, where the center forwards want to hold the football and keeps passing between their teammates. Finally one player gets rid off the ball but with a focus and direction. The Goal is literally achieved.
In Software development parlance we can map these processes to usage of checklists, referring of process assets, best practices by developers. This phase all these are artifacts. However for an adept developer he works on his own experience and indeed goes beyond the checklists and best practices to delight the customer with product quality. Here, adept developer gets better off than the lists and goes beyond for delivering innovative products.
Will not be nice if we work on contexts on usage of processes rather than getting polarized with “either use or throw”.
Already there are plenty of resources available on Out of the Box thinking, reaching out to parallel industries on getting ideas and solutions.
Some questions on this to ponder :
How much of these practices are really practiced?
What were the success rates?
What are the inhibitions on the organizations to reach outside of the company?
The way we do things always here, restrains these type of approaches. Can we take a shift in mindset?
Do we need external people as coaches for looking out to get more knowledge or can we train our own coaches?
Will there be any impact on the existing business in terms of schedule, cost or quality in the long-term or short-term to try outside the box?
I am sure there are many other points that can be added to this list. Once these questions are answered, it will become reasonably easier to reach out for better solutions.
Delivering a product, by heavy processes and hierarchical structure is possible. At what cost? Possibly 2X or more than delivering through iterative agile processes. End is product release, means are as important. Using automated tools, testing early and often, customer involvement during development all are not only effective means but also enjoyable. Here the journey becomes lively and also ensures smooth landing at destination.
Employees are happy as much as customers are. Attrition will be reduced. Referrals of new open positions will be easier to get from motivated and happy employees. This makes HR function work easier and enjoyable. So it is all the more beneficial to have excellent journey in product development. It helped all stakeholders who are not technical also.
Journey and destination are mutually complementing.
Engaged workforce is created by grounding people’s principles. If the new (fresh graduates) employees get a feeling that the company they have joined is an extension of their college, they become engaged.
For the lateral hires, the welcome and the reception they get really have great impact. They look forward to settle down with help of existing teams, HR function, training function. Good induction and initial policies appraisal, et al make them feel they are getting equipped. Gradually after initial settlement, they will launch straight into their roles as per the expectations of the new company. More importantly there should be a culture of trying the innovation at work. Encouraging everyone’s though process and sharing.
Some of the exceptionally talented people who join these kind of pro-people company remain for very long time with the organization. Benefits will be mutual.
Disharmonic convergence – can bring breakthrough results. It has to be properly planned and directed. Limiting the work / reducing the velocity of an Agile sprint is on one hand looks like missing a beat on velocity patterns of the few sprints maintained. However a good retrospect that has participation from all stakeholders might actually want to ensure the stories planned and being delivered are defects free. In addition fixing od previous defects if any. Here the convergence is getting all stakeholders in one page on defect free product that prove stable. Users will be happy. To get this convergence we may need to disharmonize the velocity a little bit.
So context and goal is more important than consistent productivity.
Even though embracing and welcoming changes any time is a great concept in Agile, how many products / services have actually accommodated this?
Let us call this welcoming change any time as Changes Any Time (CHAT). There is a better effective way by ensuring the changes are not too much during development. This is more important especially at least for two sprints or so you should not change requirements. So that some stability is developed. If the development team gets in touch with product team at customer side during requirement formation itself, it will be great. Joint Application Development (JAD) have been successfully used towards this direction by IT companies. Here we take a step back and involve even during product conceptualization with development / domain expertise from development teams to reduce or eliminate unwanted features getting in to the product backlog. Involving in scope development to arrive problem definition (Scope Driven Problem development) will simplify CHAT. Then it becomes CHATS (Changes Any Time Simplified)
Systems thinking creates an aura across all levels in the organization. If successfully implemented all employees and stakeholders will resonate this spirit unconsciously. I have seen this in my personal experience also where people talk about their current and ex-companies and how they felt every aspect as being wonderful about their companies. ( yes you read it right, their companies and not the “companies they worked”). There’s no correlation between the pay they earned and work they cherished. In a span of say 25-30 years of work experience, people feel that “oh that was the company that made me feel special” They will remember the product, specifications, procedures and policies and many moments. These companies may not be necessarily in the late chronology of their career, it can be early too. But the memories got carried because of the emotions it brought on them.
Personally I had experience in a company where the senior most in HR said during offer “you can attend interviews on Saturdays too, we are five-day work-week-company”. It was a manufacturing one at that. Similar ethos were shared by senior technical people they said all things are informal, and no hierarchy here. Only performance counted. Be it canteen equal for everyone, one can pick up a smoke from one’s VP’s table and all travel same class and stay in same accomodation levels etc.
Waste elimination is removing unnecessary wastes in effort, time, resources, etc. Risk Management is ensuring there is back up and business continuity just in case if some risk scenarios occur. In case of services industries resource planning and risk planning involve some additional buffers in terms of resources and buffer. How do we balance then the waste elimination and risk management through back ups.
Guess there is no any single silver bullet fixing this issue. For the established organization with resources more than 5000 it is easy to loan out some resources who are not completely loaded into projects that require critical resource support. This way without increasing the organization’s counts of employees resources can be managed.
However for the start-up scene, this is a significant challenge. It will be better of to chart out the make or buy decisions for the organization in deciding what to build and what to outsource. Automation of possible activities will also help a good deal, though in the initial stages it might appear expensive. In the long run s the business scales up, Risk and Waste elimination can be combined effectively in beating the cost through attainment of more business acquisitions.
Flow is about ensuring value flow is optimized through bottlenecks, not necessarily debottlenecking. Because debottlenecking might create bottleneck somewhere else in the system. Therefore, Goal might me out of focus if the intent is debottlenecking.
Balancing the demands from the market with the value stream and throughput of any system is critical to get breakthrough improvements. This will prove success in the short and long run. We can’t really rule out any bottleneck in the flow, in case even if that happens, the system elements of the non-bottlenecks should de-prioritize their own tasks and subordinate their priority to bottleneck by helping hands to make the flow smoother along the bottleneck.
This is not easy to bring about in a larger established system. It takes some mindset change, commitment from the leadership and patience from people concerned.
Respect for people is one of the key principle of Lean and Theory of constraints. It creates an environment for people to understand their team’s views on all aspects of development and release of product. If open-minded conversations are allowed freely, the flow is very effective for product / solution flow. Some times learning comes from outside the company’s scope or even industry segment’s scope. The team should be encouraged to attend technical forums and meetup on the same domain as well as cross functional domains.
The moment complacency sets in terms of ‘knowing all’, the learning will stop and slowly the competition will take edge over the complacent organization. A further step in this direction of learning can be setting up some free hours say every quarter of the business year say some 10 hours of best practices learning from outside company will go a long way in refreshing and innovating new solutions
Effectiveness is achieving the intended objective of the organization which will make all stakeholders happy. Even if there is a slight delay in project deliverables, it will only affect immediate milestone in the short-term. Once the blocks and hurdles are carefully analyzed and removed, there will be all round performance of the product / solution in the long run.
Efficiency is ensuring productivity is very high and resources are utilized maximum to ensure more work is carried out within short time. In the world of complexities involving customer expectations, most probably the efficient systems will produce short-term outputs. In the long terms there will be defects emanating from earlier releases which will involve long rework and make the product / solution very costly by 3X or 4 X time than originally thought of.
Of Course there are remarkable products that are developed as a blend of high effectiveness and optimal efficiency. They are superstars, indeed
Physics velocity is a vector quantity and is direction aware. Sometimes this “direction”, the objective of building the right product (or features) that will be really used / required by the customer / end user is not thought of. This leads to building maximum features to achieve maximum velocity at the cost of building right product with very minimal or no defects.
If only velocity was fully embraced from physics :). Just my thoughts friends. Do you agree?
Long terms growth of any business is key as it determines the sustainability of the business. Innovating by advanced thinking tool techniques like cloud diagram, current and future reality tree an organization can maximize effectiveness of its life cycle of delivery. By brainstorming the bottleneck that creates impediments to flow, Thinking Tools facilitates identification and elevating the bottlenecks. Some practical tips that can aid speedier results will be :
Create an environment of understanding Systems Thinking
Promote and nurture psychological safety
Empower teams and motivate them for innovation
Avoid multitasking
Provide focus and clarity
Respect people
Be the change ( of Leadership) that is expected from the team by leading as an example
Building the product right follows building right product.
Since building right comes first, it would be better to start the product building at source. Yes right from customer perceiving the product theme, software development organizations need to involve themselves. Quite possible that software organization vendors have been working with customer for long and understood their domain well. Also possible that there are some shifts in the customer organization at the senior levels / product domains. In this case software vendor would do well to suggest right features and good insights about the upcoming new products to them. The features, possible uses, user prospects et al can be some useful ideas that can come straight from vendors. This is cocreating right from problem space of product development.
Next phase of building it right will effectively follow by Agile development practices. This way Agile is extended beyond just the development areas toward wholesome product making.
Throughput of the system is the real metric recommended by Theory of Constraints (ToC). Velocities, defects, releases, effort, schedule and cost are some useful measures that are important for internal stakeholders. However focusing on them is confining and might lead to local efficiencies.
Instead focus on throughput of the system – that is producing a product or service. Throughput is directly related to the dollar value earned by converting the investments (inventory) through operating expenses into useful Goal units. These Goal units are as felt by customers and therefore all stakeholders.
Attune to TOC metric Throughput for current and future revenue realization
Agility is enabling and empowering. Hierarchy is command and control.
Empowered teams enjoy their challenges at work. Commanded teams get demotivated and somehow try to show their work as efficient and resulting in local efficiencies. Local efficiencies mean less alignment to the links and interfaces and compromise the overall effectiveness of the organization Goals
Agility is inspect and adapt. Structure is following the pre defined plan.
Agile methods provide Quicker response to market conditions, demands and fluctuations and ensure all stakeholders in the supply chain are happy. Product becomes useful immediately after the release in short delivery cycles. Customer participation in product development results in right product is developed in the right ways. Quicker time to market enhances returns on investment for all stakeholders. Following predefined plan leaves the product development with too much processes that inhibits growth particularly in changing requirement scenarios. These days there are hardly any innovative products that do not undergo changes frequently.
Where to start applying Theory of constraints in Software organizations.
At Sales planning with Senior Management level – Hmm, sounds good, ” we are too busy with current realities, will consider in future”
At Finance level, hmm ” Good concepts, however we can’t just have simple metrics, should tailor the TOC towards increased number of metrics, will think it over in next year”
At Operations (Development and projects team), ” Awesome principles, should try out in a small pilot project , we are running short of cost budget and schedule already”.
Quality Assurance and Process implementation team ” Amazing management model, let us add some resources after getting approval from management, to start the TOC journey”
Somewhere one or two persons who have read books like Goal and CCPM already started in their project and say ” We are happy at least we have discovered how to ensure flow and optimize the operations”, “We have already seen some cost reductions in operations and making deliveries in advance satisfying all stakeholders” . This is the group the senior management need to listen with open mind towards innovating in break through scale. Do you agree?
Theory of Constraints (TOC) perspective on Work units (Approximately stories in Agile) is beyond Definition of Done(DoD). DoD in most of the cases are good working stories / sprints iterations to complete software development and testing phases. Sound good. TOC takes slightly a step back and evaluates the value delivered by the delivered features and its conversion into revenues.
If the Product manager and Software Team ensure all working stories are delivered right, it will be good to see what happens even downstream of deliveries? Do the product / features delivered completely used? Whats the percentage of features mostly used. If its less than 50%, then why don’t the product manager and Software Development team understand what is the market expectations? This can be done by cross functional reviews between Sales, Marketing Senior Management, Customer. Development team should work closely with customer even during problem definition stage and not take the requirements and convert them into features. Well this requires mutual trust and confidence on capabilities, skills and expertise on both sides.
Thinking principles of Theory of constraints can be of great help if practised by experienced professionals to ensure maximum value delivered by the features.
“No matter what. Get the Velocity committed”, seems to be the tone of the Product Managers in some organizations as regards to Scrum teams KRA / Metrics. Though velocity in itself is good enough metric of the product development in scrum based models, will that alone suffice? May be or may not be.
Given the nature of the complex product requirements from the customers and customers’ customers in new product development, it is essential to complete the prioritized good stories to completion. It is okay (as per the spirit of Agile) to cut few stories to ensure rest of the stories are 100% meeting DoD requirements. This is where the Lean development principle of limiting the work in progress items comes.
Once the nature of the first two sprints are clear and complete, velocity can be always improved from next sprints onwards. Taking too much pressure on the velocity from first sprint onwards which might lead to defective releases, will not only impact the vendor and customer work flows but also the end customers. The motivation of the product development teams will also come down.
Focus on completing prioritized stories in the first few sprints by limiting the work in progress. Then scale up velocity in following sprints. What is your experience?
Some of the Key reasons process implementation fails :
Nil or scanty support from senior management: Senior management is busy investing time effort and money on sales, production and delivery. Production covers complete engineering aspects while delivery taking care of testing, releases and support aspects. Sales is pre sales + Engagement and customer satisfaction. Where does process fit in this premise? ISO certification, CMMI adoption or any other domain specific certification aspects like PCI DSS or SOX or HIPAA or any other? Even if it’s the case of certification, it is looked at by senior management as one time exercise where it can provide budget for cost and effort. Subsequent periodical assessment becomes less expensive and kind of integrated, is what the senior management thinks, for the right reason indeed.
Business Process Excellent / Quality Assurance focuses too much on checklists and audit exercises pertaining to the standards and models rather than demonstrating the real ROI of adapting any model.
Process is not aligned with Customer’s requirements and making it too much      towards complying with strict procedures and workflows.
Good case studies / process assets are not captured articulating the values of process initiatives
Lack of motivation for adapting process models. No rewards for good process    performance
Once certified the system doesn’t look beyond for upgrades or scaling up.
These are some of my thoughts. What is your view /Â experience?
Systems thinking avoids wates in any environment. Here we look ways that helps avoiding wastes in software.
Over estimated time and efforts : Teams thought process is calculate each and every team member’s individual tasks and add up the total. This is a gross mistake and contributes to lots of waste as unproductive time in project progression. How? Welcome to Critical Chain project management of Theory of Constraints. Calculate the total effort required for the project completion and add project buffer as a central buffer available to total project. This way not only the project progress is focussed, it also creates an atmosphere of system thinking among the team members and every one starts to focus on project rather than individual productivity. Scaled Agile Frame work (SAFe) have addressed this to a certain extent.
Yesterday’s post shared thoughts about how multi tasking could lead to decreased productivity in project management activities. We have also briefly touched upon how group reviews can help overcome burden of a project manager who handles multiple projects. Kanban diagrams and kaizen principles can be coupled to address the multi project multitasking challenges. While Kanban is a great tool in visualization of project milestones with clear visibility to all stake holders, kaizen is an improvement tool that provides continual improvement functions to key activities. Visibility to all stakeholders coupled with continuous improvement means projects and people perform progressively as they move along the milestones. In Agile projects the impact of the Kanban-Kaizen will be reflected in the improved velocities between successive sprints and releases. These tools in addition providing direct impact on productivity of projects that applies these, they collect the process assets and knowledge along the way. These lessons learnt will be key assets for the organization for learning and development for future projects
Multitasking : Much used term in management especially in services sectors like IT. Theory constraints sees multitasking as an activity which mostly reduces the productivity. If a project manager has to run three projects simultaneously with three different customer domain (which is the case generally in SMEs) say retail, health care, BFSI etc he/she will be mostly doing management of people deployment and the progress of deliverables. All the three customers will be equally demanding the deliverables w.r.t to agreed milestones, as per schedule with acceptance criteria for the quality (that’s the very reason the projects are given to the It vendors)
If the project manager is focusing on all the three projects, with tight deadlines from all of the, switching between tasks and projects will be tasking and will create much pressure on the project manager. This will lead to none of the projects are delivered on time or even if that be the case there will be compromise on quality or extra resources deployment. Any of these symptoms is an extra cost due to non value addition caused by bad multitasking. We are not talking here about a multi skill and trait a manager need to posses in terms of leadership, technical competency, managerial acumen or communication abilities. These are all multi skills which will be naturally used by an effective project manager during project management (as against multitasking). Having special horizaontal groups like Subject matter expertise, advanced technology group, Software Process Engineering group, Business Analysts, UX group and using their exprtise to do reviews at appropriate levels and phases will ease out the pressure from project teams. This is one way an organization will improve overall productivity which help teams avoid bad multitasking.
Just my thoughts. Please share your views on this.
I have discussed about CTQ and CTC in this post about Agile development addresses Critical to Quality and Critical to Customer dimensions.
As Quality and Customer requirements have become more clear due to the collaborative nature of Agile and Lean Development, products are developed faster and better. No issues upto this. Another parameter along with ‘better and cheaper’ that needs to be inbuilt is cheaper (competitive context), this where the flow and systems thinking that need to be embraced within the organization and its customers and suppliers.
Theory of constraints (TOC)Â offers Drum buffer rope, Critical Chain project management and Thinking tools to address this third critical parameter (cheaper = competitive) of any product. Processes can be automated to the possible and required limits. However Thinking process differs from project to project depending upon the many stakeholders involved. It takes domain, experience and System thinking skill sets to achieve the smooth flow . lean and TOC have their focus mainly on Systems thinking and on careful, patient and full application of these management models, super productive systems can be achieved. Continue reading →
Budgeting – for sales, production, inventory, finance, quality, testing, new initiatives, Research and many more functions / departments is done as per the context and the focus of any organization. Organization take into consideration factors like revenue streams, cost of compliance, support and future business etc.
Best results will be accrued by reducing operating expenses and minimizing inventories. inventory. Theory of constraints key focus is around these premises. While it is understandable in principle on reducing operating expenses and minimizing inventories, in practice it is not very easy to achieve this goal. How can we make a positive difference in realizing these improvements? One way could be after identifying budgets for each and every function, the leadership should look at the interfaces and interplay between multi departments and then work out suitable budget booth in terms of cost and effort. To understand the interplay and interfacing activities, it is better to set up a small team by choosing good champions from each department and create one interrelationship maps between all the teams and leadership together. Then every six month this interface map should be reviewed and revised as per the current realities.
Now it will be easier for management to understand the effort and cost allocation and budget to the each team. After the allocation, the champions teams can take their respective teams into confidence and impress upon them about details. This way organization will have more probability for smooth sailing as flow.
Teamwork – When did we perform best and felt elated about reaching our targets / goals at work? Just think on these lines whenever there are challenges due to competition, complexities, changes, technical advancement or any change agent that is coming your way. Perhaps the solution will come to us by deeply analyzing about our best performances in the past , someone else’s best performance about how did they beat all odds to become successful in what they did.
Sometimes, you get ides and insights from external sources like domains completely unrelated to you. Keep watching Ted Videos, and other platforms both in digital and non digital spaces. I am sure it will throw a lot of new ideas that will be refreshing. Agile, SAFe, LeSS, PMI have all been inspired some way or the other from Lean Manufacturing, Toyota Production System, Systems Thinking, Supply chain domains. Now Agility have improved upon these models and mapped to IT environments by created great concepts like Scaled Agile Framework (SAfe) and impacted breakthrough improvements in the way software products / services are delivered. Not only this, Agile concepts have started giving back to manufacturing on the improvements and new thought processes where manufacturing gets benefited. This way the system of systems keeps evolving. Let us be attuned to Systems thinking.
Convergence of all sub system produces one super system called organisation.
Light getting dispersed through Prism produces brilliant colours like Rainbow. The White light sums of all the seven colors and shines forth brilliantly.
Sales, pre sales, account management, development, business analysts, testing teams, UX, HR, Facilities, Administration, Finance and Leadership all put together form a brilliant organization. We can’t say Red color is better than blue , green is better than yellow et al. All departments are components of a great chain, and the interfaces between them are links that binds the values of the organization.
If one or few of the interfaces / links get too much stressed out or lagging, rest of the teams and interfaces can get into huddle with the struggling interfaces and can offer their support to improve the working. This is self-organization in Agile, subordinating all activities to critical constraints in Theory of Constraints, Systems thinking in lean. Different models, similar values.
Gemba walks by Leadership teams occasionally to the desks where action is happening will be a great boosting moral for the teams. However it needs to be performed without giving a feel like micro managing of teams. Some ways and thoughts on Gemba walks by senior management.
Visit to the real place and seeing teams putting their work , genuinely understanding if the teams need more support in terms of tools, training and helping hands in resolving any technical issues goes a long way in having empowered employees. Teams will not only be happy they will also go to the extra miles bracing any limitations on their way.
Gemba walks originally designed for operations place like shop floor reviews, we can use the spirit for motivating people to become empowered. This way Gemba walks rings true with Evaporating cloud phenomena of Theory Of Constraints. (TOC)
Quality Assurance (Process QA) function in IT organizations are normally viewed as compliance and certification function. What are the ways by which Process QA can get more attention?
QA should capture the best metrics that define the business and its growth dimensions. Typically Throughput of the product / services delivered by organizations are super effective indicator of the business and its progress.
QA should design the processes considering key critical success factor for maximizing the throughput of the organization. It will be better to have the Top down approach in identifying the business objectives and then deriving at the project level objectives. Measure team’s outcome and not individual’s output.
How are the Win4all factors integrated in formulating the throughput metric?
Does each and every department’s / program’s processes are focused towards attaining this Win4all?
Since QA has more visibility with most of the departments of the organization, they should proactively work with all teams and enable the entire system works towards achieving / exceeding organizational goal.
Avoid Creating an impression that QA is compliance function . Go to teams during normal working days. Don’t focus only during audits.
Being empathetic and understanding about Business processes: Each and every team might be different, make metrics and processes relevant to the team based on their contexts
Only measure Team metrics relevant to business
Share industry knowledge and latest trends through links, materials, webinars etc to team.
Update your technical skills of the core functions to a level where you get some useful inputs as to how best the team’s process can be tailored.
Appreciate good work always and don’t just restrict to raising non conformances.
If me = Employer, it will be employee productivity, employee billing capacity, employee developing himself / herself and the teams, employee loyalty, et al.
If me = Customer, it will be Faster, Better and Cheaper not in any particular order, it will be trust, trust about feeling confident that the customer data, design, requirements, proprietary assets are safe with vendor, it will be vendors help customer’s business grow
If me = Supplier, it will be good business, show casing of vendor’s capabilities that delights customer, repeat business and of course invoices getting paid on time, referrals and testimonials
If me = Statutory and Regulatory bodies, it will be good compliance to regulations and applicable acts.
If me = Project manager, it will be mile stone completion by teams, less attrition, cooperation and team development
If me = team member, it will be good work that satiates their technical appetite , good growth for them in the corporate ladder, motivation, work life balance et al.
Then we have other categories like research and development team, testers, finance, sales and marketing where we can derive the “whats in it for each one them” if they are equated to “me”?
How the enterprise understands all the “in it for me” considering all the “me personalities” will determine the business in the long and short-term. There is need for creating total organization’s “in it for me” by combining all of the individual “in it for me”
Some of the awesome concepts like System thinking, Theory of constraints, Lean and Total Quality management either independently or in combination can improve the harmony of the organizations. Great leaders have been able to demonstrate in all walks of lives, this super enlivening harmony and created lasting positive impressions.
3point4 - Systems Thinking 