A legend goes in Indian history. Great King Janaka in his dream perceived himself as a beggar. After waking up he started questioning his very identity whether he was a king dreaming himself as a beggar or a beggar dreaming himself to be a king. Which state was his true state?

He decided to clear his identity confusion with his Guru and great sage Ashtavakra. Guru whispered into the ear of Janaka, neither this nor that is real. Neither meaning he was neither a king (The LEADER) nor a beggar (the led). But the Atman – The God Principle. Simply it means the self realization is the state of every aspiring human. In the contemporary world we should consider everyone as a leader. Only few manifest themselves by removing their ignorance (a feeling that they are not leaders) as leaders and others still clouded by their “subordinates” feeling remain to be led by others.

I was greatly inspired by this story that has sort of cleared confusion over my mind with regard to leadership, Quality and all positives attributes of Business. The debate as to whether leaders are born or made has almost become a non-issue. Leader is one who realizes the leadership ability in oneself. People who realize their potential (and remove the feeling that they lack leadership) become leaders, those who are clouded themselves with numbers and statistics (on the qualifications, social and educational backgrounds) as to who makes the leader, will not make leaders on their own or take a very long time to become leaders.

No statistics can be a pointer in determining whether Leaders have school background, university backgrounds, business education or wealth. Though education is a great aid in becoming a leader. What sort of education are we talking about? Is it about degree certificates / internships / on the job training in curriculum / Web based training? / class room / Web 2.0 kind of training? Yes all these can again be aiding the leader in grooming himself / herself. Great Leaders get motivation from common people and in turn motivate others. Great leaders did not require other people to make them, they realize at one point of time they have their inner abilities and go about working on it and finally realize thier leadership ability

A leader is one who identifies his potential and produces his best in the interest of the society. All mothers are leaders for they are selfless. All social workers, community workers, soldiers and serving people are leaders indeed.

A leader is neither born nor made but identified himself / herself and performs to the fullest potential of oneself.

A great Management and Productive thought of Thirukkural

Verse :

EthirathAk  kAkkum Arivinaarku Illai

Athira Varuvuthor Noy

Direct meaning:

Those people of capable intellect who can feel the imminent pains and have plans to tackle them,  know not of any fear from sufferings.

Lean Six Sigma inference

A Six Sigma methodology foresees and expects pain points and adresses them with fall back plans. This when combined with lean practices makes perfect formula in eliminating wastes and mitigating the unfavourable impact. 

Six Sigma uses FMEA, Risk Planning, Forecasting – Hence expects and reduces pains and preapres the solution. Lean eliminates waste increase productivity and beautifully compliments Six Sigma.

Preferable over Pleasurable

It is easy for the start ups and small organizations to choose the delectable (no process) the electable (disciplined process).

These delectable ways like skipping the upstream activities of development like Architecture, good design, non commitment to testing-early and committing downstream mistakes like avoiding unit testing, not doing enough test coverage, poor regression testing all these leads to failure of project deliveries. New start-ups and small organizations that do not have long term vision and trying to skip these best practices may pick up few wins initially from small customers but suffer in the long run.

The big problem that they will eventually face is Scalability and not able to even sustain the present growth either owing to the so called “path of least resistance” ways chosen and cultivated them deep into DNA’s of their organizations. Having been used to delectable ways of cow boy coding, ‘code and test as you like’ methods suddenly the organizations realize that they could no longer hold to present level of  raw processes.

Then the organizations will start to use some kind of “silver bullet” that would never work. They seek the help of external consultants and fix the process problems temporarily. Finally maintaining the ‘made up’ process becomes more painful than ‘no process’ state. This is the point delectable organizations will feel maximum disappointment. From no process to “forced quick fix processes” . Then they engage into activities like training, mentoring and motivating the staff and the self (Management themselves). All these come with huge cost and time expense.

Have a fairly long vision and deep insight in this competitive world of web 2.0, elect best practices and desist from delectable short cuts.

Choose the Preferable (Best Practice Process) over the pleasurable (skipping process).

Nallthorum Nadi Muraiseyya  Mannavan

Nallthorum Nadu Kedum.

 King who daily seeks to Analyze not, will lead his nation gradually perish

 A Leader who does not seek and analyze data will come to see his nation / corporation leading to attrition.

 In Agile analogy the product owner who is not collaboratively involved with his scrum master and the team on the status of backlogs daily,  will have difficulty in reaching his goal or will have to compromise on his project / iteration success.

Defects. Production of defective parts or firefighting to correct the defects. Rework, scrap, replacement, and inspection mean wasteful handling, time, and effort.

Defects in software development costs heavily to the vendors and customers alike.  Detecting the defects early by using Agile approaches likes TDD, Pair programming, Extreme programming, having defect prevention plan in place are critical for producing high quality software. Finding and fixing a software problem after delivery is often many times more expensive than finding and fixing it during the requirements and design phase.

Agile helps to minimize the defect age of software by typically reducing the presence of defects age by (maximum) a day or two. As customer and all stakeholders are continuously collaborated in making decisions Agile suits best for faster and better quality software development.

Better to prevent defects by identifying causes and systematically eliminating is the key to sustainable software development. Having solid reviews also benefits the projects in defect reduction. Using automated test suits and code integration tools are best solutions in preventing defects.

Peer reviews catch 60 % of the defects. Objective based reviews catch 35% more defects than non-directed reviews. Toyota puts it beautifully about removal of MUDAs as WAR on WASTE.

Motion (Unnecessary movement). Spending extra time and wasted motion of employees during the course of their work to find relevant information about the tasks and projects, such as looking for, reaching for, or stacking parts, tools, etc.

In software development projects spread-out-teams in different locations within the organization should be avoided. If Dev, Testing and support teams are available in same location, easy to schedule stand-of meetings and less movements that leads to increased productivity.

Wastage of time and energy to find information is called Motion in seven types of MUDA. Teams not maintaining proper libraries for components, tables and process assets. This means every project has to reinvent the wheel all the times to start from fresh for building all components. Best way to address this to have intranets that has collaborative platforms marinating various technical and process assets of the company. Holding regular knowledge sharing sessions, lessons learnt meeting will help to minimize the Motion Muda.

Over processing. Taking more steps than necessary to accomplish tasks. Using poor Quality Tools, incompatible software and hardware result in poor product design, producing defective product outcomes.

In software development Over processing normally results in requirements gold plating, design gold plating, etc. This means taking extra steps and sequences when the task /activity in hand can be completed with minimal steps.

Too much documentation, trying to cater more than what is required for the application / product. Developers not adhering with best code practices by avoiding comments in the code. This introduces lots of person dependency leading to costly maintenance for the code. Improper planning by project heads and inefficient task assignments in random manner all contribute to poor code quality. This loads the reviewers’ and testers’ time and again result in reworking the code for the developer. Good project management practices as per PMO could address these issues

MUDA-4 Excess inventory

Excessive storage of raw material, assembly line work products, finished goods waiting for shipments and the associated storage costs for all these situations form the MUDA 4 – Excess inventory. It can include defects and downtime issues also.

Excess Inventory in Software development

Code is waiting for review and testing for long – typical waterfall model habits

Product / Application – Waiting for cross platforms, multi OS testing because the testing and user environments are not yet ready.

Depending upon third parties or vendors supply for getting tools.

Too many resources on buffer waiting for the tasks to arrive

MUDA – 3  Transportation

Moving parts, components and other materials between location to location often with less planning leading to wastage of time and effort on the part of the workers and the task being done.

In software development  sending artifacts between different people and getting this reviewed, approved and commented and implementing the feedbacks are considered Transportation waste. Again Peer review, pair programming and Test Driven Development approaches of Agile help to a larger extent in avoiding to and fro movements of the work products between different resources at different levels within the project.

Since the Product and Sprint Backlogs represent the exact status of the Sprint / iteration in Agile projects it greatly reduces transportation of various artifacts between stakeholders.

Right from Project Planning, prioritization, tracking, review and retrospective everything happens within the sprint development with focused and self empowered scrum team, Transportation wastes are almost fully eliminated in Agile development methodologies

Waiting  :

Agile is based on Lean Principles and best addresses this MUDA – Waiting .

In manufacturing environment a worker waiting to get other parts ready before he can go ahead with his component machining. Waiting for tools, material supply or simply waiting for any resources before the worker could start or continue working on his present task.

In software development following could be MUDA – waiting time

1. Unnecessary Hand-offs , waiting for approval for artifacts like Design Document, Requirements document, Code base for review etc.

2. Excessive change request approvals (developed habits from waterfall models)

3. Server set up time, tools installation

4. Uninformed absence of team member waiting for a replacement resource et all.

Agile best addresses this by recommending customer collaboration, shared source code, daily reviews through white boards and backlogs status reviews, empowered team working on self managed basis etc.

While I do not know of exact  data on how much idle time (non productive time) is spent in waiting time in software projects. In manufacturing industries they have been able to identify and eliminate significant percentage of this type of waste leading to very high levels of productivity and improved product Quality