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Anjuvadhu Anjaamai Pedhamai: Anjuvadhu

Anjal Arivaar Thozhil

Not preparing for the unprepared is ignorance. Preparing for the unprepared is wise’s way.

Risky unplanned fails. Risks

planned leaders ways.

Risks are for sure to exist in any project regardless of domains. If not planned to consider the impacts and cause elimination and control, will lead to long term failures. Kanban is an excellent way to keep track of project progress and risk control. Agile effectively uses this Lean concept in reducing wastes and improving effectiveness of the product deliveries. Collaboration Hub can synchronize with Product backlog and ensure that all the stakeholders have visibility to all activities of sprints and product development. Upstream misunderstanding in architecture and design phases prior to sprints can become very minimal and risks are majorly contained by use of Kanban boards.  Unlike the detailed project management  activities carried out in waterfall model project managers cannot afford to have bandwidth in sprint based Agile models. In these cases Kanban is great way to monitor development and contain risk.

Development is focussed on giving personal experience to the product user. Improving customer perception about product is the objective of all vendors. Many of the products / services / tools experience are decided by the first few looks and thoughts of customers when it comes to web.

This augurs well with the fact that product should give a feel of personal experience(development) to its user. However from the testing point of view all the critical paths need to be tested so that the product does not fail in the customer’s expectation. We can say that defect effacement is the tester’s manifesto. Other words, try to break the requirements from all needs and expectations of customer.  Requirements related to Performance, user, functional and non functional testing covering optimum scenarios must be tested if products need to be successful.

A product should be evolved by using quite opposite perceptions and contradictions at the same time. Personality development (developing customer personal experience – the product) and defects effacement (impersonal testing, testing to break all developed features) are great examples that fulfill the criteria of  TRIZ Principle 13. The other way round.

Use harmful factors to achieve a positive effect

- Using Heat wasted for generating electricity

Bugs arrival rate can be increased by Agile deliveries during the initial few sprint with more review effort using many resources. Early sprints produces more defects, because of many reviews and less product acquaintances. This increase of upstream product bugs will mean there will be less bugs in the later part of the product sprints(as initial sprint bugs are carried forward as features in subsequent sprints) , increasing their software Quality. Also during the mature stage of the product iterations, less resources will be working (because of less bugs ). This will give leeway for the project team as they can release extra testing/ review resources to another project during later product sprints. just my thoughts on TRIZ principle 22 “Blessing in disguise” or “Turn Lemons into Lemonade”.

Recycle waste  material from one process as raw materials for another.

Using defects as tickets for helpdesk system. The root causes of the defects with their cause eliminations can become lessons learnt and best practices for future project management

Eliminate the primary harmful action by adding it to another harmful action to resolve the problem.

Turn the waterfall development overheads by eliminating them through use of Agile Management practices

Amplify a harmful factor to such a degree that it is no longer harmful.

excess waiting time or  unnecessary sign-offs of work products are impediments to Agile product deliveries. These sign-offs from stake holders should be amplified to such an extent through visual KANBAN and collaboration hubs, that all stake holders literally have online visibility to the product development and can approve(“sign off”) or comment whenever there is a delay or defect of any kind in the product life cycle

Y = F [Risk Manage (Quality Cost and Delivery)]

Risk optimization = (minimize cost, maximize Quality and meet Delivery Schedule)

In the services scenario Risk should be planned from Contract stage and initiation itself.

There are many methods like TRIZ, FMEA, KAIZEN, Lean Six Sigma, Quality function deployment(QFD) for efficiently managing risks.

Since knowledge management is more subtler than material management Risk has to be defined in the right context of the organization, customer and other stake holders involved.

There’s a tendency of Project managers to stick to PMI or any other tools for managing risks. Though tools are really great source and improve the productivity of the projects, over depending on tools and standards may limit the project deliverable in the long run. If a project manager is interested in long term satisfaction of all stakeholders, he can think in new paradigm. Understanding the dynamics of various risks specific to each customer is the key.

Risk is best managed by intuition rather than tuition. A candle  is lit by another candle  and not by reading about the candle or by looking at  the pictures of it.

Likewise Risk and Project Management is best carried out not by reading PMI or understanding various tools, but by Risk and project management experience.

Ideality =  (Useful function) / (Harm(resistance) + resources(systemized))

Resistance itself is a great bottleneck in any useful work flow and here we refer to system resistance that is to say more organized resistance that follows logic and reason and ensure total resistance.

A simple story that comes to mind here is about two frogs that had accidentally fell into a  small pot of curd.

They were struggling to to get out of the Pot and got jammed at the bottom of the pot.

One frog was a rational thinking web 2.0 frog and used his logical skills and told the other frog “we got fixed and there’s no way out, really”, “why waste energy and just remain as they were”

The other frog replied “I see your point well, there’s no use in our effort to get out of here”, “however I will keep hopping and jumping”, “may be something might happen”.

The second frog not- so- rational, after few hours by continuous hopping churned the curd into butter under its limbs . From the solid butter that was formed,  the frog came up to the brim of pot by using the solid butter  and jumped out of the pot eventually.

There will be Resistance to processes and standardization initially. QA team with passion and conviction can churn out traps (of resistances) into values (butter) and see the way out for their organization.

Lessons Learnt  : Passion beyond perceived reason make impossible things possible.

Oh my customer, non existing will I be,

devoid of your demands exigent.

Kano’s must-be’s my business rationale

while performance begets continuance

Attractive demands trigger  fortune hopes

best of design and product experience

caused by your demands,

commerce and transactions that you set

roll the world, guarantee and support

support business because you support

in a way understanding support service

makes you the provider and well wisher

unto you, I offer thine own.

If  Quality in its attribute form is weaker then we have many issues with Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, maintainability taking major hit. On the other hand Quality function is weaker either because of lack of expertise, less control on the delivery processes or resistance from the development team, customer satisfaction will get hit.

Quality in its all form should become preferred culture rather than pleasured lecture. For this root causes instead of symptoms need to be strongly analyzed and eliminated. Setting up of CTQs(Critical to Quality) is essential for the continual improvements of the products / organization. CTQs are specification limits that are defined as quantifiable parameters as small as possible needed to ensure customer delight. Functional, Non functional, Safety and user friendly requirements for a product are not just enough to be identified. These requirements have to be broken down into small manageable measurement attributes that demonstrate customer needs.

Root causes of errors / non conformances from previous audits, peer / customer reviews, walk-throughs  are a great source of understating the gaps and converting them to CTQs. Group reviews of  customer contracts/requirements before and during the course of project will further refine the CTQs and in fact will serve as the future Best Practices. Quality can be strongest by converting the weakest gaps into CTQs.

Follow process…………. embrace darkening blindness (greater darkness).

Skipping processes will never be good for the long term stability of the organization. Chaos will prevail and products and services will be delivered based on few Heroics rather than disciplined methods. Since it depends on few heroics of extremely talented resources, if those talented resources move out there will be major pains faced by the organization. This will involve more costs; dip in the bottom-line leading to losses.

On the other hand “following” ill defined or yesterday’s process without regard to today’s field realities of customer, market, technology or trends of future will lead to a greater failure. Because projects / people who are ignorant about process can at least be trained to understand and map their processes to efficiency. However not accepting innovation, sticking to older principles without concern for dynamics of customer, market will only help the system to fail in methodical manner. It will be counter productive to use older processes for current or future problems. Less process compliance at least will save some time and overheads.

Don’t skip (good) process, or blindly follow (old) process. Rather keep modifying the work flow to suit the market and technology demand. Innovation is they key here.

Set process or workflow based on current demands of the market; continuously attune the processes to address current and future dynamics of the market. INNOVATE.

Some methods:

• TRIZ helps in reducing costs resulting in productivity improvements.
• TOC advocates identifying bottle necks and handling them rightly to maintain work flow leading to higher throughputs
• Lean propounds WASTE elimination
• SIX SIGMA helps in getting the RIGHT product or service to meet customer delight with very minimal or NIL defects.
• KAIZEN instills disciplined improvements on continuous basis.

By following any or combination of the above methodologies any organization would do well to improve their positions in terms of revenues, market share and sustenance.

How soon  Delivery team liquidates account receivables? How fast customer pays the invoice? depends on customer acceptance of the delivery Quality.  Delivery Quality is determined by the strong upstream control in Requirements management, great design, less defects through construction and testing. These all dependent upon the understanding of the customer requirements by resources in development. These are preceded by Sales in its ability ability to judge how the customer requirements can be met by their delivery team. In order to reduce the gap of sales’ understanding the customer needs, it pays to have Sales people with previous experience in development.  This is how (development and sales) system generate money through sales need to be looked at, if  Throughput is to be maximum.  Thanks Goldratt for giving direction.

Inventory: All the money the system invests in things it intends to sell.

Maximum percentage of total investment goes to resources. Followed by software, systems,hardware, infrastructure etc.

As per TOC the money invested means Human resources invested and how their skills are intended to be sold. Technical skills, soft skills, domain skills, customer interaction skills become THE investment that can be sold. These are the skills that organisation should consider as Inventory. Have  great resources, excellent training, develop passion in serving customer needs. That could be a way to create Inventory the Goldratt’s TOC way.

Operating Expense: All the money the system spends in turning Inventory into Throughput.

Training the resources, providing them right tools and systems are the Operating expenses that will ensure Inventory(Resources) to turn their expertise into Throughput(Money)

Current practice of useless time sheets data, incorrect entries, guess estimations are really the pains that need to be treated the TOC way.

WALK the TOC !