R Rajesh

Definitions of Constraint and Bottleneck: Constraint : It is a limitation or a restriction forced upon on something by someone or by somebody or by something. Bottleneck : From a business context , it can be defined as one which delays or hampers the development or progress of something. When Can a bottleneck happen ? If a constraint is bound to happen for a particular activity or thing and if there is going to be an impact to that activity/thing , then it will result in a bottleneck for that activity/thing, unless there are any other alternatives to that constraint. Just to tell an interesting point on bottleneck If you had observed traditionally 'Soda' or soft drink bottles (nowadays tinned cans are the order of the day :-), the top part(neck) of the bottle would be narrow. It was designed to stem the liquid gushing to the throat(to regulate the liquid flow) and with that narrow neck, it was easy for a person to drink the fluid(be it water or any soft drinks or any liquid) slowly and ensured the person took only what he/she could drink/sipping.This regulation slows or delays the flow of the liquid. Applying this in a business context, bottleneck means a delay happening on something. Let us see some examples for constraint and bottleneck, how constraints impact bottlenecks. Eg.1: Imagine a National Highway passes through your city. The National highways department and City administration have started constructing a bridge(fly over) and hence work has commenced in a key road. Suddenly that 200 ft road is reduced to 150 ft road as digging work for the construction , has reduced the original space. This is the case for atleast 1 km of distance. The traffic becomes jammed and this stretch alone takes 30 minutes for you to pass through everyday(assume you travel by this route to your office daily) and you cross this normally in 3 min. What do we know from this ? There is a constraint here which is 'lack of road space'. This was imposed by the National Highways Department. Whats the bottleneck here ? The bottleneck is the stretch of 1 km where the road is narrowed and as a result of which the movement of vehicles are forced to go slow. This shows that the constraint causes the bottleneck to happen. Eg:2 Assume you are the team lead of an IT company. A critical project is going on. Just on the week of software delivery to the customer, your experienced human resource with relevant domain expertise(SME) is not available, whatever be the reasons. Is that not a human resource constraint? Yes it is. Will it create a bottleneck ? Yes, very much likely [unless there are other SMEs or if there is no explicit need for that SME's knowledge- but it could be still a risk ]. Why bottleneck - because it will hamper(or delay) the progress of the software delivery. So what is the constraint here ? 'Non-availability of Human Resource- Domain Expert(SME)' is the constraint and bottleneck is the unnecessary waiting time for SME to return or elapsed time/extra time (of working by other people or involvement of other SMEs) involved in this delivery process. Eg:3 We will see a similar but slightly different one than Eg.2. Imagine you manage a software project. Your team is finalizing the project design this week. Unfortunately your technical architect has not turned up to office for 2 days. Again this would be a constraint. But whether it turns out to be a bottleneck or not , depends on how it impacts the team. If the team has sufficient technical SME knowledge or take help of other technical architects from other teams who know this project's technical architecture or find some other ways to wriggle out of this issue, then it may not cause a bottleneck. Else there would be delay in finalisation of the project design with respect to the technical architecture. 'Non availability of human Resource-Technical Expertise' is the constraint. 'Delay Involved in getting technical expertise' is the bottleneck Can the impact of a constraint be prevented,eliminated,mitigated/minimised? Is that possible. In other words, can bottlenecks be avoided, eliminated, mitigated or minimised? Yes quite possible. Let us see some examples.In Film Industry, every movie has to be certified by the Film Censor Board.Censor board has to approve the movie for release and provide a rating to the movie. Unless the approval comes from the Censor Board, a.movie cannot be released. Now this is a regulatory constraint which means this is mandatory. Normally when a movie is all set to be ready, it is sent to Censor Board for screening and getting the board's feedback and approval. The point is that in case the movie does not have any objectionable scene or language used or any other action or gesture which is seen by the board as objectionable one, then it would get cleared by the board. In such a case, there would not be any more delay in the release of the movie. Therefore, the bottleneck(delay in release) is avoided here. In case, the movie is having objectionable scenes, languages, gestures, in the opinion of the board, then per board' s guidance , the film unit has to act and this can delay the movie release. As we had seen the impact of a constraint getting eliminated here, let us take another example for mitigating the impact of a constraint.Take the two examples related to the non-availability of two human resources- the SME and the Technical Architect. What if there were backups available for these 2 resources ? Imagine, the project teams survived the duration (when these key folks were not available) in a very difficult way, but managed to survive, thanks to the secondary or backup specialists (could be some experienced professionals within the team or may be pulled from some other projects within the Organisation). In this case, the effect of the constraint is mitigated. Let me give one more example for avoiding the impact of a constraint. Reconsider the road traffic example. If you know that there is a parallel alternate route to your office and that you can cover the same 1 km distance (where the bottleneck stretch is there in the national highway road) in 15 min, instead of that 30 minutes, would you not try it out? Extend this to the business world. How many times you would have come across scenarios where customers would insist certain proprietary rigid tools of theirs, alone to be used by you(as a vendor) and how many times you would have gone to use some other better tools(in whatever ways) to achieve the customer stated purpose. Note it could be other way (vendor tools not good enough) as well. [Quoting "customer" side tools, here simply because customer is the king for any business. ]. Thus, we can avoid the impact of a constraint. Conclusion: As we have seen , Constraints are limitations/restrictions placed upon on something. It can be a mandatory constraint (regulatory/legal), project needs, situational(that could be circumstances based). Outcome of a constraint can result in a bottleneck, if there is an impact to the activity or a thing on which the constraint is applied upon. Therefore, constraint and bottlenecks are two different entities or aspects and bottleneck is the effect of a constraint getting happened or applied.

If I were the hiring manager, I would handle this on a case-to-case basis. If I see a candidate who has changed jobs frequently and I would try to enquire him/her as why these many job changes have happened. I will ensure that there is no legal or criminal record against the person (as much as I can confirm that). I will also check if it's a good bet to have a person who has made many changes , essentially to identify what X-factor he/she can bring to my organisation. That will be a key factor for me and after ascertaining the facts that why he/she jumped from other organisations and if the answers are convincing, then I will take a call accordingly. So no criminal record or legal issues, Genuine reasons for leaving organisations and X-factor (value add to the organisation) can make the candidate hired in.

Make no mistake, Six Sigma can bring huge advancements in any of the industry that uses it. There has to be a compelling reason as why you go for a Six Sigma project, especially more so if it is for IT industry. The reason being two fold primarily. 1. IT industry helps more often than not in expanding the business for the customer rapidly, exponentially and ensures the time to market the business is reduced. 2. Agile is the modern day buzzword in IT industry. Agile model brings the requisite aspects to ensure the businesses of an organisation's customers are expanded rapidly and their end-users's changing demands are met on the fly. Now the issue is do the IT organisations have the time, energy and resources (and the related costs associated to this) to invest on Six Sigma which is a laborious and time-consuming and intensive approach, for dealing a perennial or persistent problem. More often than not many organisations take alternative viable approaches. But some IT organisations do invest on this, if the Return On Investment (ROI) is very high- it could be say a huge cost reduction for.the customer. Otherwise, this approach is not considered. Assuming Six Sigma project is started. Two areas , I feel straightaway problematic are Data Collection and Hypothesis testing. Data Collection- it's difficult to get the actual data and the veracity of.the data..Also getting the right volume of data(sampling size) will be a challenge as the data collecting rigour will not be good/great (in many projects) . Hypothesis testing will not be straight-forward, as well , in general. These are general symptoms that are associated with Six Sigma projects in IT sector. However, there are some six sigma /quality tools, which can be used in Software Industry. Kano Model (when customer requirements need to be prioritised. Useful so that minimum viable product can be developed at shortest possible time), FMEA (for Risk), Pugh Matrix (when choosing an option with multiple criteria) ,Fishbone and Pareto Chart(Causal Analysis) etc..,. Conclusion: Even if an IT organisation is not doing a six sigma project, applying the six tools.and techniques (wherever possible) in a software project can show a difference in the way how a process related to that activity is behaving or improving (the activity to which the technique was applied). Or the activity itself can get transformed to a different level. Also, as and if there is a good data collection process- wherein by , if we are able to identify the source of the data, have enough data and the data is actual and the customer is agreeing for a Six Sigma project and if there is a proper measuring system to measure your data , then you can start a Six Sigma project (assuming your sponsor okays the project). If this is an internal project (that can also be done), then the internal customer can guide you with relevant information. Getting these prerequisites is the key. In this fast-paced world, how.many would want this approach, is the question.

5S is a lean approach for Workplace discipline. Later the sixth aspect of Safety came into picture for making the working environment a safety place for the employees and also focus on employee safety specified, as well . However this safety addresses only the physical safety aspect of an employee, the mental aspect of safety is missing. This is probably due to the fact this lean technique is based on a disciplined approach of how systematically each of these aspects of 6s is working in an organisation which applies this technique. Therefore, the mental aspect of safety (or mental safety) is not captured as part of the 6th 'S' of this technique. Having said this , how important is the mental safety. What is mental safety ? What are the different aspects of mental safety? Why do we need that ? Well, let us take a deep dive on that. Mental Safety: In my opinion, it is the ability of a person to keep his/her mind in a stable state at all times , irrespective of the situations/ environment that he/she is in. Ideally there could be several factors which an individual has to cope such as Stress, Fear, Anxiety,Excitement. He/she has to take care that even in adverse situations, the mind should be in a state of equilibrium(Steady state). Let us see some of these influential factors, which i believe, can affect the mental safety of a person. 1. Stress: It can be either physical or mental. We would look onto the mental stress. This can happen either because of undue worrying/ excitement or putting so much effort and get mentally tired, in the process.This mental stress can happen both in Personal and Professional life of a human being. In this context, we would focus on the professional stress . Let us take a quick glance as what can cause a person to be under stress in his/her profession .[Note: I will use the term employee to highlight the fact that we are discussing about a person who is working in an organisation.] Factors causing Professional Stress: a). High work load (Lot of work to be done beyond the limit of a single person- could be prevalent in quite some of the mid-sized organisations) b). Constant Work pressure (office environment not conducive- micromanagement, peer-to-peer comparison) c). No job satisfaction - in terms of - work being done, monetary benefits, lack of rewards and recognition .With a stressful mind, it becomes difficult for a person to focus on his/her work. He/she cannot produce a qualitative work as the mind would be cluttered with some kind of thinking(with or without the individual's knowledge) and therefore may not be productive. His/her performance might droop and he/she might disengage themselves with the work quite often. The employee might have been working continuously on extended hours for quite a few months.But over a period of time, he/she may loose the interest to work with as he/she cannot cope with the demanding work for long, that too with a low/no motivation at a non-conducive environment. Therefore Errors might creep into his/her work. For eg, in a typical IT industry, if the employee works as a developer, then he/she might make some mistakes in writing new codes which will hamper the quality of that work and then those mistakes need to be fixed. Therefore that would also affect his/her productivity rate of completing further of the new codes. The performance of that employee would have a downward graph from being a finisher of work(at right time) to mistakes-inducing developer - in other words to a bad performer. 2.Depression: Too much of a mental stress can lead to a state of depression . This can lead to at times, an errant or muted behaviour(not responding properly to theneeds) from the employee. This can affect the quality and productivity of an employee's work. With a depressed mind, its difficult for the employee to think of the work as there would be constant thoughts bickering over the mind and hence focusing on the work on hand is difficult for the employee. Therefore Productivity will also be poor. The employee might also seclude himself with the rest of the team as he/she cannot think other than the problem that he/she has in his/her mind and any engagement with the team would be cut-off and performance would be a downward slope for the employee. 3. Anxiety: Too much anxiety can at times result in a bit of Stress , though it could be momentary(or for some time). Imagine you are buying a Benz car(a Costly car for many people - is it not ?) and the Showroom Salesperson told that it would be delivered tomorrow.You have told your most important friends that you would give a party to them in 2 days of time, from the time of delivery.Now the salesperson calls you and says that your car would be delivered 2 days later. Now you get tensed whether you would be able to have the car before the party time. The anxiety of how the new car would like, when seen in reality would soon give way to a stress of seeing the car at or on time (before that planned party - which could be of high stake for you due to various reasons). This is just a crude example. I will give another example relevant to an Industry . Imagine an IT employee needs to deliver the software to the customer in this week. Its going good at this point. As its the first delivery for her, in the new project, she starts thinking more on the delivery and is unknowingly putting pressure on herself because of this commitment to delivery . Soon this becomes a stress to her affecting her, health. The moment a person is stressed, you know what can happen to that person's work(Quality of) , productivity, performance. 4.Fear: Fear can be due to multiple factors. a). Fear of Failure - An employee is working in an IT Organisation for quite some time, in Retail domain. Now she has been asked to work in Banking domain. She is worried too much about how she would perform in a domain which she does not have enough exposure. She needs to stop worrying before it can affect her work , performance and productivity b). Fear of backlash(read Punishment) - Assume an employee joins a R&D company for Space Research. He works hard everyday 12 hours and is mentally fatigued. One day the employee wrongly designs a panel unintentionally and a demo that was supposed to be shown to various eminent scientific scholars and to the President of the Country fails because of the malfunctioning of the panel. Now he feels that his job position is under scrutiny because of this mistake. c). Fear of Appraisal - An Employee joining an Organisation recently may not be fully aware of his Organisational culture, environment(or he still might be getting accustomed to that) and how the organisational matrix is structured. Also he might not have had a chance or enough time to prove his mettle to his boss (Supervisor). All these things would be running on his mind when the appraisal times comes into play. What would the supervisor say about his appraisal ? How it would go ? These questions would go through the mind of the employee . d). Fear of Unknown - For some people (read employees), there could be always a fear factor unnecessarily creeping in their mind, probably because by nature either they are having that mindset or they would have joined newly or the working environment/culture may not be conducive to them(probably they feel that is hostile to them). As we have seen, Fear can impact the work by producing negative thoughts in the mind and disrupting the flow of positive and good thoughts which can hamper your professional progress. The Performance of an employee can get decreased and productivity slips as working rhythm is disturbed. The employee becomes aloof as he/she becomes susceptible to fear and his/her engagement with the team or project work gets minimised or alienated. 5.Work-Life Balance - This is a very important part in a professional's life. This is all about having a balanced way of life - where an individual satisfies both his/her professional needs (his/her Organisational needs and his/her Professional career aspirations) and his/her Personal needs(Personal needs and primarily Family needs). Devoting enough energy, support to both these needs make a person's professional work and personal life, a balanced one. Often when the professional work ethics are met and personal(read family) needs are not met, then there is a considerable stress and even depression on the part of the employee. This can happen when too much work pressure of when too much expectation is there on the employee. Often Key members in a team can have this problem or employees in critical role or higher role in an organisation can have this problem. These are some of the factors which can influence the Mental Safety of an Employee. How to address these influencing factors which can destabilise the Mental Safety of an Employee? Can Organisations help their employees on this regard ? Can the Individual him(her)self be able to help ob his/her own? The answer is yes to both of the preceding 2 questions. Let us see some of the ways of addressing the issues, created by these factors. They are not the only ways but they are among some of the many ways of resolving the issues created by the aforementioned factors. Ways of Eliminating the issues, created by some of the factors which can destabilise the Mental Safety of a Person (read Employee): 1. Stress: To avoid stress, a). An employee has to have a mindset change that there will be constant workload for everyone. Its not for a single person that workload is too high. He/she should have the passion to do the job,but must ensure its not overshoot. b). An employee has to see if Meditation, listening to music, playing music, playing games, doing physical exercise, Yoga,etc.. can lower his/her stress and do which is best suited for him/her as an individual. Even some organisations conduct all of these for their employee welfare regularly. c). If an employee is the leader in his/her team, then he /she should put a career roadmap for his/her team. Reward and Recognise, each one of that team for their achievements. It need not be always a monetary reward but it can just be a pat on the back, or a 'congruatulatory' mail or a 'thanks' mail to that person but sent(read copied)to the whole team. If there is a chance for the customer to appreciate an individual within the employee's team, make it happen and share that to the entire team and the management. If the employee is not a leader of the team, suggest these kind of things to the team lead or the supervisor/boss. These kind of things can transform the employee that he/she belongs to the company and his/her emotional satisfaction would be very high as he/she would have realised that his/her hard efforts are fructified and recognised. A stress-free employee can produce high quality work, with superior productivity and consistent high performance. 2. Depression: This can be a bit of psychological problem. If the root cause is due to too much of stress, then understanding what caused the stress, in the first place is the key , and accordingly the solution can be given. But if its due to something else (say some issue in work environment), then this would require counselling. Some Big industry players (across all industries) do have a counselling team who can help on such cases. A tension less and a depression free employee can dedicatedly work and increase his/her productivity with increased performance. 3. Anxiety: To avoid unnecessary anxiety/excitement, an employee has to relax him(her)self - He/she should not look far ahead and take things as it comes by. He/she can calm down his/her mind by doing some relaxation exercises or activities. This can make the employee involved in the project and focus on the work and will be more productive. 4. Fear: a). An employee has to try consciously not thinking about failures. He/she would have succeded in the past on other projects or in other activities. He/she has to think how those projects/activities were done successfully and think about that feel-good factor that came out of those projects. Same way, the employee should think that the new project/activities can be successfully conquered. This will create a positive feeling (mindset) and that can improve the work(Quality), Performance, and therefore productivity of the employee and he/she would be highly engaged with his/her work. b). Everyone makes mistakes and this fact an employee has to believe this can happen to anyone in his/her organisation. Therefore his/her intention is to ensure that he/she does the basics right in whatever activities are being done by him/her and should not unduly worry about things which are not in his/her control. Most of the time, this would ensure that an employee does not fall into the trap of fear of punishment. c). The employee should do his/her best and let his/her boss do the rest. That should be the mantra of the employee. He/She should not be worried about what would happen to his/her appraisal. Rather it should be as how he/she can contribute to Organisation development and his/her own development. But still in the corporate world, the onus is also on the employee to showcase (as a quantification of what was achieved) in the right manner to his/her supervisor about what has been achieved (bring the uniqueness of that achievement- just to get supervisor attention). From the Organisation point of view, the leader of the team or management has to notice if the employee has done something unique as portrayed and accordingly provide the right ranking/rating as per Organisation policies. d). This is a factor where the employee and the organisation need to have a bit of handshake. For employees joining newly, they need to find reliable co-employess who are already with the organisation (for quite some time) to seek help in getting to know more about the working environment, Organisation culture and other such things. The Organisation from its side, can give Orientation course on its working style, culture and its policies and practices. This can provide the employees, the initial comfort space they may need. Eliminating or minimising the fear, can make an employee go at full strength. His/her ideas, innovation, involvement can dramatically change the quality of the work positively, increase his/her performance and also the productivity. He/she will be highly connected to his/her work. 5. Work-Life Balance : Often employees of many industries , get stuck up on this aspect. Its one of the crucial aspect of Mental Safety. Many Organisations in today's fast-moving world, do invite families of the employees to their Organisation celebrations such as "Founder's Day", "Family Day". In "Founder's Days", the families of the employees are allowed to see the work environment of the employees. This gives the family a chance to see the life from an employee point of view. The family members get an understanding of the professional life of an employee and get a chance to understand and appreciate the nuances involved in the job involved for that employee. Similarly, "Family Day" becomes an occasion for an employee's family to be part of an Organisation's celebrations. It becomes a get-together of employees (of an organisation) and their families. It creates a bonding between the employees's families and the Organisation (in which the employees work). These things can even take the pressure of the employees, hardened by the stress, created by the workload. Conclusion: We have seen how important is the Mental Safety of an employee in any organisation. We have seen some of the factors that can influence the mental safety. I believe, these are some key factors which can decide or shape the behaviour of the work ethics of an employee. The Onus is both on the employee who is working for an Organisation and also that respective Organisation for whom he/she is working, to ensure that the employee is having the requisite degree of control on all these influencing and any other factors (if any). There cannot be a yardstick for measuring any of these factors. But when the work quality, productivity , performance of an employee varies considerably , considering his/her experience and expertise, then he/she needs to be notified and from an Organisation perspective, it has to see what can be done to prevent that from happening further for him/her and whether it can be addressed by him/her and if not, can it address. It also has to find if there are similar such instances across the Organisation ? If so , is there any root cause identified ? If yes, can a mechanism be put in place so that this can be prevented? These are the kind of questions that an Organisation has to put in place and provide remedial measures. There are Organisations in the world, which has good Human Resource policies which ensures presence of Counselling team, requesting employees to adhere to company sponsored fitness programs, building Gymnasium complex for regular exercise and so on. Once if we have the bases covered, then probably the Mental Safety can be said as covered. Expert comment by Venugopal R on this best answer. Well explained by R Rajesh. Many of the Company-wide programs, be it ISO systems, Six Sigma or Business Excellence, have all given great benefits to organizations and businesses. However, all of these had their share of building pressure on employees, at least a section of them, which probably has not been discussed or addressed adequately. The variations amongst human minds in terms of behaviours, sensitivity and interpretation are not easy to fathom, unlike the variations in processes and products that we normally talk about. “Mental Safety issue” may be seen as frustrations, depressions, de-motivation, reduced team engagement, high resistance, scepticism, feeling of insecurity, negative attitude and so on. It is very contagious and adversely impacts the workplace. Even as we write this, corporates are bustling with efforts for employee reductions, layoffs and identification of bottom performers. It is a fact that much needs to be discussed, thought and done in this area. However, it is a good move that it has found a place in the workplace management systems as the 6th S. Let’s look forward to this move to bring about adequate consciousness and positive changes with respect to the way Mental Safety is handled.

Let us begin this topic with the definition of Analytics and then , Web Analytics. Analytics Definition: As per English dictionary definition, it is a process in which a computer system examines information using mathematical methods, so as to find useful patterns. There are quite a different amount of categories of analytics and we are going to focus on Web Analytics, in particular. Web Analytics: It is a systematic way of measuring and gathering of the web data, dissecting the data for analysis and then seggregating the data as needed, for gaining knowledge (about the web traffic and flow patterns) and for effectively increasing the usage of the web. While to know more on the basics of Web Analytics, we can always go to Wiki page on Web Analytics, let us see about the usage of web analytics in expanding the business growth and in capture of Voice of the Customer, across various industries. Voice of the Customer and Business Growth: Voice of the Customer: Voice of the customer will need a proper analysis to be done. The customer segmentation could happen as below or even different than this , though this is a typical structure. - Internal or External , - Age wise seggregation (some industries/categories like FMCG might have this. Note FMCG is Fast Moving Consumer Goods) - Geography Survey, Customer Feedback ,Face-to-Face conversations, Focussed workshops are good techniques of data collection for knowing/getting the needs of the customer.All the stated and unstated needs of the customer need to be recorded properly. By affinitization of the customer needs and then Using a Kano model technique, customer needscan be prioritized. Business Growth & Why Web Analytics: The first step before going to the usage of Web analytics is to have a strategy and a firm Objective for a successful organisation, driven with concrete SMART goals. Some key steps in having this are listed below: 1. Having a clear-cut strategy will help the customer (organisation) in deciding what it wants to achieve(objective) and what is the focus area which needs improvement (goal to achieve the objective). 2.Know the Customer(End-users)' changing needs(Specific) and the current industry trend and ensure that the Organisation's strategy is aligned in line with that. 3.What uniqueness can the organisation bring in to the customer to be called as a stand out provider ? i.e., Being tagged as 'Numero Uno' 4. Have a roadmap for achieving the goals - with the help of SMART goal approach. SMART as you know stands for 'Specific, Measurable, Achievable( read also Attainable/Actionable as called in some indutstries), Realistic, Time-bound'. 5.Drive that Visionary Roadmap to Implementation, with the help of dedicated teams. This is nothing new and every organisation in this world, probably would be doing such an exercise or such activities in a systemmatic manner, it it not ? So whats new here. Why are we even talking about this ? This is where Web analytics come into picture now. What is an Organisation's goal could be , in terms of its customer. Providing the Customer Satisfaction in terms of Cost, Delivery and Quality. Delivery could be of tangible or intangible. How that customer satisfaction can happen ? What are the expectations and needs of the customer. How can an Organisation identify the ever varying demands of its customers? What if an Organisation does not know well what is its Unique selling proposition to differentiate itself from the rest of its competitors? Well Web Analytics is a great source to capture all of these . Let us see some of the industries which uses Web Analytics with some examples. Which Industries can leverage Web Analytics ? Virtually any industry can leverage the power of web analytics. In my opinion and also based on what i have observed, there are certain industries which use web analytics more than other industries. To name, some of the industries that use web analytics, more lot as far as i have seen, are, Travel & Tourism, Retail/Ecommerce, Media(Social and Electronic), Entertainment(read Cinema, Television and Fun,Theme parks...),Information Technology(IT), IT Enabled Services etc..,. Let i traverse with you as how the organisations in few of these industries expand their business growth with the help of Web Analytics. Travel and Tourism: Organisations in this industry use Web Analytics more. Assume you have registered yourself in a travel site. In a normal environment (without Web Analytics), you will have communication with the travel site only when you book for a trip. However when Web Analytics is used, then the game changes. Once you are registered with the site, you may get a lot of personal offerings.Offerings normally are a kind of benefit that an individual might get because he/she uses the travel site (in this context) effectively, [primarily that would happen due to that individual's travelling or booking frequently- for domestic or abroad trips using that site]. A message comes from the site as that you have not travelled for a while and then you are shown that offerings from the site. How does this happen ? How do the site know that you have not travelled for sometime(assuming you travel only by booking through that site). This is where Web analytics come into play. Your personal data (such as EMail id, Name, phoneno, etc..,. ) are captured as part of your sign in info. Personal interests can also be captured subject to your knowledge. While personal data along with your browser data can be technically captured as part of user sessions or through cookies, the key thing is that your booking destinations can be analysed for finding patterns/trends in your journeys. In case , you have booked your last two trips to a pilgrim place, then the travel site organisation , can give a hint to you (through your email or provide a feed(message) to its app that you would have downloaded) by suggesting few other pilgrim places and provide a budgeted cost plan for going to that places. Similarly if you had gone say for year-end vacations to hilly places in the past 2 years, the travelling site might provide or suggest a customized viewplan of another hill station which you might have not gone. By analysing the data related to your travel, the service providers (travelling site Organisation) might be able to understand or provide a valuable insight into your needs, in case you have planned for such trips in the nearby future. Even you can find that some of these travel sites can tie up with Social Media and get a clue from the social media of the interests and needs of their customers and the general trend or seasonal trends that are being followed. For instance, people want to goto cold places, when the Sun is scorching in their place. Now let us move to Media Industry and how that is impacted. Media (Social Media and Electronic Media): Social Media: Organisations tend to exploit the power of Social Media now, more than ever before. Why ? Because Social Media has replaced the next-door neighbours as the best companion for a man. These days, A person with a smart phone, is prevalent across all spheres of life.He/she lives with that virtually everyday. He/she accesses social media stuffs like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.... He/she talks about himself/herself in these social media, which is the primary source for expressing the individuality/characteristics. As more and more information , about an individual is obtained through the media, the organisations that are tied up with the social media get to know the varying and dynamic needs of their customers and then act accordingly. Imagine you are doing a research in Quantum Physics, which you would have put as your interest or passion. You may get a sponsor link for your research because the sponsoring organisation is also looking for a researcher on that topic. This can happen if only the Web-analytics could have provided the data. Therefore, quite a no.of organisations use the Social Media effectively. This is like just a tip of the iceberg. There are umpteen no. of uses that web analytics can provide. Electronic(Online) Media: How many people in this generation read newspapers, magazines (Printed Media) ? That population size is getting reduced increasingly!! People find it convenient to read news articles or online contents on the fly, at their own time of convenience and pace. What does Web Analytics over here? Imagine you are interested in scoreboard updates of the current cricket test series between two cricket playing nations. So you frequently visit a cricket website for getting that status. Now , you have a downloaded application (related to that Cricket Status) as well. The app will ensure that you get the Cricket details that you wanted , every now and then. Imagine now you have registered yourself to a news article site(registered member). Assume that, often you are interested in Cinema topics. So whenever you login to the news site or login with a registered app, then the site can customize its screen(web page) and show some commentary or links related to your cinema topics. That is how Web Analytics can do wonders to the Media industry . Retail/ECommerce: Let us assume that you are going to buy some products through an Online Retail giant. You are a registered member of that company. After several times of your buying, the Online retailer, can record your pattern of purchasing the goods. Upon your subsequent online visit to that retail site, it can offer you discount in your regular purchases and can suggest you to buy advanced version of the products that you might have brought. This is just one example of Web analytics. We need to consider the fact that this exercise would be done for all the customers who visit the online retailing site. The speed with which this needs to be done and the magnitude (for all customers) of this exercise is what will be taken care by Web Analytics technique. Also let us take one more instance, in a Super market. Every shop would have its items(products) arranged in a way, which is easier for the shopkeeper to pick and give it to the customer/consumer. But often the categorisation of items in a super market would be important because you would expect all items from A-Z would be there in that shop and hence you expect the shopkeeper to arrange them to ensure that everything is accessible (in terms of transparency of an item and the placement of that item-in the rack in which the items are kept). But how will the shopkeeper can do this for all the items in the shop? How will he/she know which is the important item for every customer ? Which are the moving items? Well with Web-analytics, we can do this. Web Analytics based Software applications can help in analyzing the trend for each of the items . For instance, by recording the items that move out of the shop(sold) everyday, one can find out which item(s) have moved out more than which other items. The Shopkeeper can also find out which items are moving faster on the weekends. By doing this exercise, the shopkeeper can rearrange the items's placement(location of the items) within the shop, so that customers find their items quickly. Finding the needed item in a super market is a critical and most of the times, a one-dimensional customer satisfaction. If a customer is able to find it easily, then he/she is happy. Else he/she is not going to relish it, in a super crowded super market , which is what you would find it more often than not. Benefits of having Web Analytics: Service Providing or Vendor Organisation 1. Align strategically more towards the customer needs as they understand the market trends (applicable to many industries) 2. Capture the unstated and stated needs of the customer efficiently as they try analyse the customer trends/patterns before providing the service/product. 3. Provide customer satisfaction in terms of Delivery of Tangible/Intangible value (happiness in case of travelling sites, products in case of tangible deliveries) , Cost(cost minimsation/effectiveness), Quality(eg: risk free travel with high comfort, no loss of information, no defective equipments,... and so on and so forth) and therefore increase the brand image For Customers, 1. Having got the outcome as what was needed 2. Having got a satisfactory product/service - in terms of budgeted cost, quality and value from that product/service 3. A reliable provider of Service or a Vendor , who you can always go back for subsequent need Caution or Constraints of having Web Analytics 1. Primary Constraint - Customer has to ensure that the Service Providing or Vendor Organisation does not use web analytics for any unwarranted purpose. In General there may be a disclaimer from the Vendor/Service Provider that your information would be stored for such and such purposes. However no organisation is going to declare that it would use web analytics to capture your trends/patterns. Onus shifts squarely on an individual if he/she allows the cookies information about them to be stored or not. Conclusion: We have seen how Web Analytics can help in shaping the face of an organisation in a given industry. With the help of it, an organisation can desginate itself as leader of an industry. We saw some of the examples in various industries. There are even some departments in the public sectors that are using Web analytics. It can be used anywhere virtually. The onus is on the individual organisations of the respective industries to the harness the power of Web Analytics.

Before we dwelve upon explaining the inferences of these Cp, Cpk values, let us quickly revisit Cp, Cpk definition. Cp, Cpk are Process Capability Indices. Process Capability is an inherent variability of a given characteristic in a stable process. It represents process performance over a period of stable operations . A capable process is one in which the output always adheres to the customer specifications. Let us see the definition of Cp. Cp is the ratio of the specification limits (of a characteristic) to the natural process variation of a process (under a state of statistical control). In other words, Cp = Voice of the Customer/Voice of the Process = (USL-LSL)/(6*SD) where SD= Standard Deviation and denoted by 'Sigma' symbol. A Cp value of >= 1, indicates that process is technically capable. A Cp value of 2 represents that process performs at 6 sigma level. A Cp value of < 1 indicates that the process is poor. If Cp portrays the capability to meet the customer specification limits, then why do we need Cpk. The answer is that Cp does not consider how well the output is centred on the target value. Cpk addresses the proximity of the centring of a process related to the spec. limits. Cpk splits the Cp into 2 parts, Cpkl and Cpku. Cpk takes the lesser of the two values. The formulas related to this are Cpku=(USL-XBAR)/(3*SD); Cpkl=(XBAR-LSL)/(3*SD) where SD is Standard Deviation and is actually denoted by 'Sigma' symbol. Taking the lesser of the two values, the Cpk value would be Min(Cpku,Cpkl). To explain the concept of Cp, Cpk more - let us take a couple of imaginary examples mimicking real time sports. Example 1: Imagine a football team practising penalty kicks. Assuming the goal posts on both the ends to be the specification(spec) limits. The players think that putting the ball in between the posts is a goal (which it is). But the coach would like his/her wards to be highly consistent. He/she would expect his/her wards to consistently hit a target within the goal post. Imagine the coach wants the football to be hit on topmost of the centre of the goal posts (or any other part)? Why ? Because goalkeepers normally try to distract the kickers(football players) and makes a pre-meditated move. Therefore , it is imperative that players hit their practice-penalty goals consistently at the same target position as much as possible. While Cp talks about slotting of goals , Cpk talks about how much variation or drift is there in hitting the goals at topmost of the centre of the posts. When Cp/Cpk would be high : Example 2: Imagine a practice session going for a shooting competition which is bound to happen in a week. A team of 5 is trying its luck , keeping in mind the competition would be stiffer in the actual competition. The team is aiming a point of 9.8 (out of 10), which could a potential medal winning score ,as per the team. The Qualifying range for the competition is 9.3 and above. If the team is consistently shooting 9.3 and beyond 9.3 say upto 9.5 , then the Cp value is good(high). But if the team is consistently shooting near say 9.7 or even 9.8, then the Cpk is good or high. Now , let us go to the given statistics for this question: USL=24; LSL=18;Ave=21.5;Standard Deviation = 0.75. As per the given calculator, we get the values of Cp as 1.33 and Cpk as 1.11. What do we infer from this ? 1.Cp value of 1.33 indicates that the process is quite capable. 2.However, Cpk value of 1.11 conveys that the process sigma is 3.33 . Formula for calculating Sigma Level = 3 *Cpk = 3 * 1.11 =3.33 . So if the sigma level is 3.33, then it shows that there is plenty of variation and there are so much defects for a process operating just over 3 sigma.Therefore, the variation needs to be reduced. Thats the reason why we look for Cpk . Remember from CP perspective it looked like good until we found this now !! 3.Ideal value for a Cpk should be either at 1.33 or 1.66(close to 4 or 5 sigma) since there can be space for a process drift either to the left or right of the nominal value (target value). 4. Applying the formulas which we discussed above, for Cpku and Cpkl , we find the values for them as Cpku=(24-21.5)/(3*0.75)= 2.5/2.25=1.1111; Cpkl=(21.5-18)/(3*.75)=1.5555; Cpk=Min(Cpku,Cpkl)=Min(1.11,1.55) = 1.11 Conclusion: From this, we can infer that the process is less capable relative to the upper specification limit. Though the variation in the process is acceptable, in order to improve the process performance, the mean needs to be moved away from the USL or back to the middle of the specification limits.

The Balanced ScoreCard (BSC) is a performance management framework for appraising an Organisation of its capabilities based on four sections/quadrants. Those 4 sections or quadrants are Financial,Customer,Internal Business Processes , Learning and Growth, Having a Strategy is the key for the success of an Organisation. Say for instance, for Customer Satisfaction, we need to understand the pain points of the customer and address their concerns in the best possible manner. Let us see which of the quadrants of BSC , we need to address first. We will have a hypothetical case, which is though is fast becoming the order of the day in IT world. As we are in this fast-paced world, Customers need to take their products to the market at the shortest possible time. So from an IT perspective , they would like to have frequent releases of their software applications featuring their products and therefore frequent deliveries of the software, with high quality & error-free ones , would be required. Then the Customers would be really happy and satisfied. For this to happen, an organisation has to move away from some of the traditional project management methodologies(such as waterfall) and adopt methodologies like Agile, Kanban... which quite naturally provides a setting(a way) for reducing the marketing time of a product(Time to Market), in their own way. Agile methodologies, coupled with some good engineering practices such as 'DevOps', 'Continuous Integration(CI)' and 'Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment(CD)' and with the advent of Cloud Computing, exponentially make a product(S/w application - could also be web-based application) to the market(read Production), in no time. Seamlessly changes made in your development can goto production without any glitch, in no time, thanks to DevOps and CICD approaches. Now the questions that an organisation should ask itself is that how is it going to transform itself from traditional project methodologies(like waterfall) to Agile methodologies and how its employees are going to have the cultural mindset to transfer themselves from working in silos to DevOps approach (Where multiple teams would get involved). What should be done to bridge the gaps? What kind of learning do the teams require ? Then how can the team improve upon, once the basics knowledge are obtained. This is where BSC quadrants would come into picture. Learning and growth is the important quadrant to start with since you want the employees to be aware of the Agile Process and the engineering practices. Once that is done, you want to see if any business processes can be improved so that you can leverage your learning with that. If those two are done, then the next quadrant, the customer - half the battle won as you would have a sound board to launch that quadrant which can provide customers as what they want (Say Customer needs/demands met and they are satisfied) and for the final Quadrant, if the organisation is using Clouding Computing, then say, there is chance for infrastructure cost to get reduced. So, in nutshell, its very important that we shape the Learning and Growth and Internal Business Processes quadrants. Let us create the lag and lead indicators for this case for all the quadrants. Learning and Growth Quadrant: Lag Indicators : 1. The number of projects(which produces service/product-s/w application) that were 100% Agile Compliant last year (in 2017), across the Organisation Lead Indicators : Setting up awareness sessions to say that Organisation is gearing towards Agile and become Agile oriented and then ensuring the employees/staff of the organisation getting their knowlegde/skills upgraded with proper training levels. The lead indicators would be 1. The number of employees who were Scrum Master Certified. 2. The number of employees who are Agile Aware (novice). 3. The number of employees who are Agile Exposed(Beginner). 4. The number of employees who are Agile Experienced(Advanced). 5. The number of employees who are Agile Experts(Coaches who can do Agile transformation in customer environment) . Internal Business Processes Quadrant: Lag Indicators: 1. The number of projects that were automated last year(in 2017) - in terms of technology 2. The number of processes that were automated last year(in 2017) - in terms of business process using BPM (specific mentioning - with usage of any open source tools , for cost effectiveness) Lead Indicators: 1. No.of projects that will implement Unit Testing automation for Java, J2EE and . Net applications(scope for unit testing identified for those projects). 2. No. of projects that will implement Functional testing using Selenium tool . 3. No. of projects that will implement the DevOps, CICD engineering practices/approaches. Customer Quadrant: Lag Indicators: 1. Customer Satisfaction Index. a). On Time Delivery. b). Faster Time to Market. c). Defect-Free Delivery. Lead Indicators: 1. No. of On time deliveries made across portfolio with 100% compliance. 2. Minimal No.(how much) of processes(read transition state) to undergo from Development to Production. 3. No.of defect free deliveries meeting the SLA compliance of 98% defect-free s/w product. Finance Quadrant: Lag Indicator: 1. Revenue. 2. Year on Year Growth. 3. Profit. Lead Indicators: 1. Demonstrate the no. of Success Stories(Projects) done with the customers. Highlight the customer top brass, with the achievements of the Organisation. - for getting new and more businesses - for developing the Brand image - for invoking customer confidence on the organisation's capability/speciality on a related business. 2. Providing a road map on the future on the customer'line of business, thereby getting an opportunity for making continuous business with the customer. 3. Providing an end-to-end solution map (Architectural view at Enterprise level) for any prospective new business so that the Organisation can provide the IT service for all aspects of the solution . Thereby it can also have the maintenance of that IT service for that business as well. Conclusion: Thus we have seen how important the strategy of an organisation, plays an important role in shaping up its Balanced Scorecard. Remember we discussed here an hypothetical case and we took some sample lead and lag indicators. But the lag and lead indicators entirely depend on the strategy used by an Organisation, based on its Objectives and Vision. Lagging Indicators can give pointers to lead indicators as how they can be better shaped. Therefore the aforementioned lagging and leading indicators are put as samples to the given case. Whichever best suits an organisation, the indicators would vary accordingly.

In Every industry, a product/service produced/rendered by an Organisation/Service Provider is shaped either by the market trend or by the specific needs of the customer. However when it comes to the innovation in a product(or the design of a product)/service ,a question may arise as whether the innovation should necessarily come as an offshoot of the customer needs/demands or the vendor/organisation (which produces/renders the product/service) will provide its customer, an innovative way of improving the product/service. More or less, the innovation is going to be a short in the arm for the customer, irrespective of whatever way it is being done and might give the customer an edge in that relevant industry, atleast most of the times. Let us see now with some examples as how innovation happens due to customer needs & demands and how as a vendor/service provider, an organisation is providing the innovation, from its side, to its product/service and thereby help the customer achieve its objectives . Case 1a : Innovation Done as needed by customer needs and demands. Let us see some interesting examples. Let us take few sports which are being watched globally by many people - Cricket, Tennis , Football. Being a sports loving nation, i assume the readers to have quite some idea on these games- though i assure everyone that am not going to take a deep dive on these games. Now we will see how innovations on these games were done because the need was felt by the playing nations/individuals (who are the key stakeholders). Cricket: In the 1990s (during the advent of Satellite Television era), Cricket got televised a lot. As a result more spectators came to the cricket stadiums in many countries (where Cricket was played) and the TV viewership became high. Cricket became highly competitive and there was more stake for the playing nations. This is where many innovative changes, as necessitated by the needs of the cricket playing nations, were put in place. One of the very first change was the introduction of 'Third umpire'(a person who has technology support to see the match from various close angles to make the right decision) to make/pronounce hairline(too close to be decided by seeing from the naked eye) run-out decisions. This usage of technology innovation, gave the right verdict almost all the times except for the rarest of rare cases. This innovation was further taken for addressing some other aspects of the game as well. The second major innovation that happened was the ball-tracking mechanism. This was needed to decide whether a batsman/batswoman could be given out as "LBW" (a way of getting a batsman out). There is an associated innovation , called snickometer- which decided whether a batsman/batswoman had nicked the ball(assuming that the ball was caught legitimately (as per the cricketing rules) by an opponent fielder. The third innovation that the game has seen now was developed in this decade.There became an increasing scenario where the innovation made from the usage of Third Umpire technology was insuffice. Even with multiple cameras with Zoom-in features, different angles, there were very tight hairline calls to be made in case of run-outs, stumpings. Replays shown through the use of these cameras produced inconclusive evidence. This is where LED displays were fitted into the Stumps.Now this had a telling effect. With the cameras and their angles, the LEDs emitted a colour (RED), whenever the bails got dislodged from the Cricket Stumps.This ensured that the third Umpire gave the right verdict , by seeing whether the batsman was in the crease or not, at the time of the light emission. This way the third empire helped the on field umpire to provide the right decision. Ultimately Cricket becomes the winner as correct decisions are made because of these technological innovations. Now who brought this innovation and why ? The Governing body of Cricket, the International Cricket Council(ICC), did this because the players of the cricket playing nations, the cricket boards of those nations wanted these changes to be done, as they had seen/felt the pain of getting wrong results, thereby even loosing Cricket matches at times.Hence these technological innovations were done, for the benefit of those, who play the game. Therefore those people were the initiators or responsible for these innovations to happen, in the game of Cricket. Tennis: Hawk-Eye is one technology innovation which is there in the sport of Tennis for quite some time. When a person serves or when there is a rally(back and forth playing by the players standing across the tennis net) going on between two players and if the ball is declared OUt(ball going out of the established lines for playing) by the Umpire, then the player who lost the point, challenges that decision. The Hawk-eye tracks the ball, with a simulation of where the ball would have landed and if it shows inside the established lines(say baseline,tramlines-ignore these jargons!!) then the Chair Umpire, reverses his/her original decision and thereby the loser(of that point-in the first instance) gets either that point or that is replayed(depending on some other factors - which is irrelevant at this point). Now, how does this innovation has come. The Players of the game have been feeling the pinch, especially in Major tournaments(called the Grand Slams), where even single point lost in this fashion, can make a difference between victory and defeat. The players' body, and top-ranked players saw the need for an improvement and as a result of which the administrators of the game went ahead with this innovation and the result ensured an error-free(induced by human's limitation of sight-seeing of a high- speed object) tennis match. Football: Video Assistant Referral(VAR) is an innovation made in Football. It got debuted in this year's(2018) FIFA world cup. With that, referees were able to accurately decide whether the ball crossed the goal-line before a keeper or any other player could pull it back. This ensured that right scoreline was there for a given match and ensured the outcome of a match was a fair play in terms of goals-scored. No controversial goal was allowed, even inadvertently. Obviously, all the current and past players across various football playing nations have seen/felt the impact of these issues and have been longing/hoping for a better state , on thisapsect. The FIFA brought this innovation to the game , keeping in mind the impact this can have for the outcome of a game, considering the huge fan following that this game has. This has paid dividends now and the game is the winner. Thus we have seen how important and essential it is for the users/stakeholders (in this case) to portray their needs/demands so that the innovation made is done as per the needs of the users. Case 1a : Innovation Done as needed by customer needs and demands - Here am going to give a conventional example. Let us take the example of an imaginary retail customer. The customer wanted to improve her shop's reach(of selling products) to the outside world, by all means. The Service Provider(Vendor) created an enterprise web application and made it ready for use. End-Users of the web application were allowed to register their names and could buy their products of choice available. Once the products were added to their shopping cart, they made an online payment which was integrated with the shopping system. This was the first step that was in line with the customer's need of making his/her business spread across the globe. Next step of innovation was to design the application such that it catered to smart devices. The look and feel of the application remained the same irrespective of the application being accessed in a browser, smart phone devices or any hand-held devices . Now the vendor was to innovate further by introducing a custom app which could be downloaded using a mobile/smart phone. devices . From this app, an end-user saw what products have been newly launched, what were the fast-moving products (to give a feel of frequently selling products to the end-users/ buyers) and so on.. The vendor was successfully able to innovate based on the customer needs/demands, in this case. Case 2: Innovation done by the Service Provider or the Vendor Organisation, based on its Own understanding/assessment of Customer needs/demands. Do you really think , that a service provider or a vendor will be able to provide solution(s) to the needs of the customer based on its own analysis/assessment ? Yes , it could happen. I have seen, one of the media research company - doing data analytics for Media based folks-Advertising Agents, Television Serial directors, Producers, and retail shops - who are it's customers and for whom, it provides relevant data which helps it's customers getting an edge over their competitors. Another example is that Cloud Computing. Many IT customers do not know how to minimise the delivery related cost, infrastructure cost. The IT vendors provide various benefits implicitly knowing the needs of their customer by providing different cloud services to address their customer concerns, though there are aware Customers who explicitly also ask the Vendors for specific services (which is altogether another issue). Taking some more intriguing examples, the DRDO (defence organisation of INDIA) provides the necessary innovation or right kind of ammunition to it's customers, the Indian Army, the Union Government, based on its understanding of the needs of it's customers. Conclusion: In general, innovation can be effective if a vendor or service provider knows the needs/demands of it's customer. The question is without knowing the pain point of the customer, how would your innovation be useful or powerful ? If it were not that much important, why a data driven and process oriented approach like Six Sigma should talk about the voice of the customer , getting the customer needs from various techniques liked focussed workshops, Questionnaire, Face-to-Face ,... and emphasis focus on techniques like Kano Model[Prioritization of needs (of the customer)]. The Whole approach is thought to be from a customer-centric perspective. So how can we do innovation without explicitly knowing customer demands/expectations/needs ? The answer is that it can depend on the industry that we work or the amount of knowledge that the Vendor/Service provider has, in any industry sector or in a specific unit in a given industry. Imagine an organisation working on Robotics. Assuming Commercial Robots are allowed (means that Robots can be used by public - may be with some sort of regulation/compliance). Now that organisation would have innovated based on its own understanding of the needs of its potential buyers(the public). The probable buyers of that Robots would be enquiring what the Robots are capable of, before they buy the Robots. This is a case of the vendor having more knowledge about the product, than the customer(consumer). Similarly, in retail, data analytics can be made and the vendor can provide a software as which items move quickly on which day of the week , for which the vendor can have that knowledge and the vendor provides that innovation as a value add to it's customer. Therefore , in reality, you may see that in many cases, the customer has to provide his/her needs/ demands for an effective innovation by the Vendor/Service Provider. But in some cases, there could be also that the Vendor or Service Provider can provide the right innovation to multiply the business of it's customer.

'Lessons Learned' is a key artifact/document in any project. Ideally you want to store/record the lessons learnt in each stage/phase(wherever applicable) of your project, be it a development project, maintenance project, testing project, or a Six Sigma project or whatever type of project it is. Why do we have a lessons Learnt document , in the first place? In other words, what are the benefits of having a lessons learned or lessons learnt document. Benefits of Lessons Learned document: 1. It captures the anomalies/mistakes/errors that we did in our project, which suggest that we could have or should done things in a better manner and it acts as a pointer for us, that in future we should not repeat the same mistakes. 2. Lessons captured are useful to portray how things could have been handled better. Therefore it provides the launching point for improvement. 3. Capturing lessons at every phase/stage of a project ensures that any unnecessary issue/problems getting propagated to the next phase/stage can be highlighted in the subsequent phase, so that the team can attack. 4. Lessons learnt sometimes can be costly.Damage done could be effort-wise, cost-wise, risk-wise and more crucially from a service provider point of view, could have been a bad impact on the customer front. Having recording the lessons which lead to such situations is worth a million dollar!! Because it will ensure you won't face extreme reactions (from the customer) in the future - say a penalty (from the customer) or a customer dissatisfaction. 5. Lessons captured (depending on the nature of the lessons that are captured) are always going to help not only for the current project team, but also for the team that will maintain the project(once the project is implemented - assuming the project is under development, in this case). 6. Also, in addition to #5, any other new project which share similar traits(characteristics) with this project, can get an idea of how to do things based on the lessons learnt from this project. 7. Because the project teams identifies the lessons learnt and finds ways to act upon the lessons, it increases the confidence level of the team to address customer objectives/goals and thereby changes the mindset/working style of the team to some extent. Why Lessons Learned document is not given the due credit/status in Organisations ? 1.More often than not, Project teams either work under considerable time pressure to deliver their deliverables or just have enough time to deliver those deliverables. As a result, this document takes a back seat even though many teams might have an unstructured way of remembering or recording lessons. 2.The lessons learnt document will not be a deliverable (to the customer) to almost any of the projects in this world. Therefore, people would have an indifferent attitude towards recording the lessons that they learned in the project, in an organised way. Especially many a times, the project team would feel dreary at the end of a project and often they would feel reluctant to update or create a proper lessons learnt document. 3.Documenting the Lessons learnt require a bit of self-discipline. It has to come within the DNA of the team or there should be a strong process person who should guide the project team to ensure that this is done. 4.Importance of capturing the lessons learnt is not realized by many project teams. 5. Project Management Office(PMO) teams or management does not emphasize more on this document as part of project closure phase, though in theory, it is mandated by many organisations. How to ensure Lessons Learnt document is captured ? 1. Creating an awareness session (to the project team) on the importance of documenting the lessons learnt in the project. The project lead or a process mentor or a senior person in the team can do this. This can create or imbibe the culture to routinely update the lessons learnt document. 2. Many established Organisations will have learnt lessons template as part of the Organisational Process Assets (OPA). Project teams can explore existing templates and start using the template to put their own lessons learnt, as a quick mean to start this activity. 3. PMO team/management can put the rigour in place, by stringently insisting the project team to create and update the 'lessons learned' document and asking the project team to update it back to the Organisational Process Assets(OPA) - repository. 4. Having Self-disciplined teams will ensure that lessons learnt are updated properly at each phase/stage(wherever applicable) of a project. Conclusion: We can see how lessons learnt can help a project team. Depending on the kind of lessons that were learned in the project, they can be useful for the current project team or it could be even useful for the team that will maintain the project (in the case of a Dev project which goes to production) or for project team for a new project which is similar to the current project. Lessons learnt can help in minimising mistakes/errors for future stages or releases and it can also help in improving up your service/process/product. Because of the above mentioned reasons, it helps in avoiding customer dissatisfaction as it brings more maturity to our working style and therefore would give increased confidence in meeting customer goals/objectives. Therefore 'Lessons Learned' document is an absolute must for a project.

Let us discuss here, how Six Sigma and lean operates (in a brief manner) and how Lean and Six Sigma are used in conjunction with each other and what are the advantages and disadvantages in using them together. Lean focuses on waste elimination,continuous improvement and Six Sigma focuses on reducing or minimal variation and thereby focuses on improvement. Both approaches are used for improvement of processes. Let us dwelve further on these. Six Sigma is a process-oriented problem solving methodology (and even defined as a management technique) which focuses on getting minimal variation(or optimised result) of the process( which produces the product/ service) such that it results in 3.4 defects per million opportunities. The six sigma approach includes of defining the problem, measuring the current process in place, analysing the problem, improve (on the existing process/design(Create new if process cannot be improved), optimize(if needed), then establish the control on the process. This is how a six sigma project is executed. At every stage/phase of a six sigma project, there are a set of quality tools(and in some stages, statistical control tools come into play as well), that may be required to be used. There is an important equation in six sigma which is Y=f(x) where 'Y' is the Dependent Variable and 'x' is the independent variable. 'x' is a factor(input) that can shape 'Y' (outcome). Assume that there are quite a few web pages in your web application which takes 15 seconds to get loaded (assuming there is no solution found for 6 months- customer though not happy understands the practical issues and is ok to have this six sigma approach). For the customer, the response time (Y) of the web pages should be less than or equal to 3 seconds. Imagine if this is the need of the customer. There could be factors such as Database efficiency, 3rd party components, interfaces with legacy systems, etc... one of which (or few of them) when improved can fasten the response and therefore the response time can match with the customer needs. These factors are the Vital 'X' factors. Therefore, Six Sigma focuses on attacking the vital factors that will produce the necessary outcome. Lean is about waste elimination and continuous improvement of process(es). A process (which produces the product or service) that requires improvement is analysed threadbare - in terms of value added steps, non value added steps and value enabled steps. The non-value added steps of that process are eliminated. 7 Wastes is one such technique in lean which talks about waste elimination. There are many such lean techniques like 5S, Kaizen, Kanban... Kaizen apprach is used for continuous improvement activities. Let us compare and contrast some of the key aspects/characteristics Six Sigma and Lean approaches. 1. Six Sigma approach is very expensive when compared with Lean approach 2. Six sigma focuses primarily on minimal or reducing variation and thereby improvement on a process/product/service whereas Lean focuses on waste elimination,continuous improvement 3. Six Sigma is time-consuming as it will have to gather data, analyse (lot of statistics involved) and can involve lot of dedicated people when in comparison with lean approach. 4. Six Sigma has multiple stages(phases) of approvals (pre-defined toll-gate reviews) when compared with techniques of Lean approach 5. Realising the Outcome(or Return on Investment) of the Six Sigma will take long time(after quite a few months or a year or so even) when compared with using a lean approach 6. Acquiring Six Sigma knowledge might have a relatively deeper learning curve when compared with lean approaches- primarily due to the amount of tools used in each phase of Six Sigma and also the concepts surrounding various aspects of Six Sigma. 7. Six Sigma is not right approach for immediate results, whereas lean techniques can be used for immediate/quick visible results (in general). Let us see the advantages of combining Six Sigma and Lean approaches together: 1. By combining both the approaches which is called the Lean Six Sigma approach, the focus shifts to both waste elimination and also variation reduction. 2. During analyse phase of Six Sigma project, Value Stream Map technique helps in analysing the needed steps only for a process (which is under study). It identifies unnecessary steps. This, in addition to attacking the vital 'X's. This will be quite useful in cases where cycle time/processing time/execution time needs to be reduced. 3. Six Sigma tools are interspersed with lean techniques/tools across the phases of Lean Six Sigma. Therefore the six sigma team can afford to use the right or best tool/technique according to the needs. We will see the advantages of a Lean Six Sigma approach with an example. Problem Statement: The time taken to deliver the software code (by an IT organisation) to an external Quality Assurance(QA) team was more across several projects (which are running in a traditional waterfall model) and the end-delivery of these projects to the customer took considerable time due to code quality issues as QA team found more bugs and thereby the development team took time to fix the bugs . . This was happening for the past 6 months. The customer was unhappy with the situation. The mgmt decided to have a six sigma project to tackle this issue , in agreement with the customer. The objective was to fix the code with highest code quality (<2% bugs-only minor ones) and provide 100% of time-bound deliveries in 5 months of time. A Six Sigma team was formed to address this issue and they decided to attack this with a lean six sigma approach. Let us get into the crux of the issue. Elaborating onto the software development processes, developer1 wrote her code in her machine(local) and tested that code(called unit testing which was done via automation using JUnit framework). Developer1 now waited for her project lead to review. Meanwhile developer2 wrote his code in his machine(local) and did the unit testing. He also waited for the lead to review. Similarly other developers had written their parts of the code. Often , the lead was busy in other project related activities. Now these codes were awaiting the lead's review before they could be put into the Code repository from which the developed codes was built by a Continuous Integration server and put into an integrated environment, where once again the lead reviewed the integrated codes and all the codes were automatically unit tested as well (when the codes were built by the Server. Note: Build is nothing but compilation of the software code - if it is successfully done, then it would normally programmed to deploy the code in an environment where users of the software application can test it. If the build is not successful, then the errors will be notified to the relevant teams. During the build process, automation things are integrated as part of that so that they are automatically triggered.Here Unit testing automation triggered). Since the integrated code contains all the codes from all developers, for which the review happens, there was no need for a separate review to be done (by the lead) for each of the codes developed by the respective developers . Therefore that waiting done by each developer for the lead to review his/her code was not necessary and that was eliminated as a Non-Value Added step using the Value-Stream Map analysis. This helped in increasing the speed(reduced the time) to deliver the code to the external Quality Assurance (QA)team. Next now was to fix code quality issues and thereby increasing the quality of the code and adhering to the timelines to be delivered to the customer. There were no. of bugs (errors) in the code (given by the teams) to the QA team. To address this , the Six Sigma team came up few approaches after lot of analysis and evaluating multiple options and going through lot of criteria. They chose Test-Driven Development (TDD - it talks about writing test cases first and then do the coding- in a nutshell) and automation of functional testing using Selenium framework. While TDD was needed for codes that were written newly (to avoid issues in future), usage of Selenium (with the help of internal testers) resulted in developers finding functional defects(bugs) and fixed the issues before it reached to the external QA. This resulted in time savings as the external QA team found minimal or negligible bugs and therefore the time taken to deliver the code to the customer , for each of the projects were on-time and the customer was pleased with the results. The key to the success was the elimination of waste step involved in this entire process and then subsequently the improvement made on the automation for functional testing and redefining the coding way by introducing the TDD approach. Thus we can see how lean Six Sigma can be harnessed Let us see the disadvantages of combining Six Sigma and lean approaches together. 1. There are quite a number of tools that need to be analysed and learned while trying to find best fit when using lean six sigma approach. Multiple tools need to be known 2. Lean techniques are gaining popularity now in non-manufacturing/automobile industries but still not every industry is fully harnessing it yet. Learning curve will be there for people who has been involved in traditional six sigma approach Consider the example that was discussed above on improving the delivery and quality of the IT projects. The Six Sigma project was delivered on using a Lean Six Sigma approach. But the project lead(BB) and also the team was not too much aware of the nuances of many of the lean techniques as lean technique was not still getting popularised in their IT organisation. Often they struggled to find the right techniques at the initial stages of the project. This gave less confidence to the stakeholders/project sponsors who were hoping to see a good positive result from this Six Sigma project. The project however turned out well after that initial stuttering. Nevertheless the bottom line was that there was some kind of learning curve for that team. Conclusion: We have seen both how lean and Six Sigma works at a high level. Also we have seen how Lean Six Sigma can help in streamlining a process. While using a Lean Six Sigma approach, there are pros and cons, the positives in this approach outweigh the negatives in using that approach.

Definition of P-value It is the probability of getting the observed values if the null hypothesis is actually true. It can also be written in this way. Let us see an example . Suppose there is a magician who has a coin in her hand.Then let us say that Null hypothesis (Ho) : a proper coin (which can show 'Heads' and 'Tails' regularly, when flipped) Alternate Hypothesis (Ha): a magical coin which can show only 'Heads'. Now let us see the observed values each time when the coin is flipped. Let us denote Observed Value as OV , Probability as P. When the coin is tossed for multiple times, assume that below are the cumulative probability results : a).OV1 = H; P1=1/2=0.50 b).OV2=H;P2=0.25 c).OV3=H;P3 = 0.12. d).OV4=H;P4=0.06 e).OV5=H;P5=0.03 ..... As we traverse through this further, we find that this coin is not normal!!. We come up with a conclusion (with the above information as strong evidence) that this is a magical coin and therefore reject the null hypothesis. Common Misunderstandings with respect to 'P' values. 1. 'P' value compared with 0.05. Often P value is compared with a value of 0.05, which is a pre-defined value given for alpha- which determines the statistical significant value for the given hypothesis.Always we put the equation if P<= 0.05, then we say the alternate hypothesis (Ha) is true. or P > 0.05 indicates that Null hypothesis is true(fail to reject null hypothesis). The point is 0.05 is not a pre-defined value for all cases. It can vary and it depends on how much significance level you want for that study (hypothesis case) to be. Therefore to say, P > 0.05 will ensure the null hypothesis to be true is incorrect. It should be ideally said as P > the chosen 'alpha' value should result in the 'null hypothesis' being deemed true. Eg: Let us see with an example as how this alpha value can vary . Null hypothesis(Ho): The person is innocent Alternate Hypothesis(Ha): The person is guilt. Imagine which would be the biggest crime ? Freeing a guilty person or jailing an innocent. You want to ensure to the maximum hilt, that an innocent person should not be jailed and that percentage of making that mistake should be extremely low(which is what type 1 error is all about- rejecting null hypothesis when it is actually true). Therefore, in this study, we want to lower the alpha value so that there is a negligible chance of an innocent person getting jailed. So in this case, ideally you want your alpha value to be something like 0.01 or less than that . This is the reason why the jury (in a civil court) asks for strong evidences and the fact that it should convince the judges(because they got strong evidences(or circumstantial evidences) to provide the right verdict. Note: In Indian law, it is slightly different. A person can be charged on suspicion which is altogether a different issue and the person or his/her has to defend his/her innocence. But most of the countries follow a rule where your are innocent until proven guilty. The takeaway point here is that the p-value should not be statically compared with 0.05 (which is a pre-defined level of significance value used in general) . The significance value (alpha) can vary. It depends on the consequences that type1 error and type2 error can produce. In general , if there is a greater impact/consequence on getting type1 error, then alpha value should be minimal (lower than may be 0.05 , in many such cases). 2.Showing implications of the 'P' value It can indicate that there is a difference (when P is low and is < alpha) but it does not portray the practical implications or impact that it has. 3. Low P-value and rejecting of Null hypothesis. When P-value is low and is less than the alpha value, say P < 0.05(assuming this alpha value), then it means a statistical evidence to reject the null hypothesis is shown. It however does not mean that this will prove the alternate hypothesis . Conclusion: It is easy to get confused or misunderstood that p-value is all about stating either null hypothesis is right or wrong. It helps us in understanding the statistical inference that we get from a study. Also the alpha value and also sample size needs to be decided before the data collection is done. Alpha value is to be decided on the nature of the study and it depends on the consequences that the type 1 and type 2 errors can make.

Measuring variation in Six Sigma can be done in many ways. Let us discuss about some of them (relevant to this context) here , as what are they and why they are needed, with some examples. Standard Deviation Definition: This is the most accurate way of quantifying variation. It is an indicator of the degree of variation in a set of measurements or a process calculated by measuring the average spread of the data around the mean. This is a nice definition provided by Brue Howes, in his book for Six Sigma Green Belt. Range Definition: This is easy for calculation as this is just about the spread of values and you calculate the difference between the highest and lowest value (to find the range value). Inter Quartile Range(IQR): This portrays the values which lie in the middle 50% of your data . In other words, it portrays the difference between 75th percentile(Q3) and the 25th Percentile(Q1). IQR=Q3-Q1. IQR works on the principle by dividing data set into Quartiles (Q1,Q2,Q3) .This uses a box plot as a graphing tool summarising with 5 points that portrays the centring, spread and distribution of of a set of continuous data. The plot typically has a box, whiskers, Outliers. The 5 points that it shows are - maximum value, minimum value, median, Q3(75th percentile) and Q1(25th percentile). Whiskers are the lines drawn from the end of the box(on either side) to the maximum and minimum values respectively. Comparison of Standard Deviation, IQR, Range as which is better. Is Standard Deviation better than IQR and Range ? Let us discuss as which is better than the other. Standard Deviation : Generally, data distributions are of Normal distribution(Bell Shaped). Eg: Finding the average height of men and women in a college, finding the average marks in a classroom. But there may be cases where the data distribution can be skewed. Eg: when you want to measure current (power) supplied (in watts) in a power fluctuation happening location and you have that data distribution, or the errors induced in a broadband service provider and so on .... So for skewed data and also for addressing outliers, Standard deviation is not robust. Inter Quartile Range: This is more robust than Standard Deviation for addressing outliers and also for efficiently addressing ordinal data,non-normal distribution data. Because we are able to calculate the highest and lowest value with the help of the IQR value(Q3 minus Q1), we are able to find the outliers with relative ease. With respect to Skewdness, by comparing the quartiles values with median, we are able to decipher whether data is skewed or not. Range: Range may not fair better in comparison with Standard Deviation. However, there are cases where Range is needed to be shown. Eg:1: In Health sector (Hospitals), if the visiting Doctor needs the BP range(say as 80-110, 70-100,... ) of his patients. Eg2: Providing Grade/Ranking Class in mark system. Distinction Class- Above 85%, First Class - 60-80%, Second Class: 50-60%; Third class-40-50%. This may not be in practice, these days across the Globe, but still similar grading is prevalent in some parts of the world. Conclusion: Standard Deviation, IQR, Range are ways of measuring variation. While Standard Deviation is better to use for normally distributed data, IQR is robust enough for working on skewed data and also for ordinal data and also very useful for addressing outliers. Also, Range can be effectively made used of in health sectors which are quite useful and other sectors as well.

What is RPN ? Risk Priority Number , known as RPN, in abbreviated form, is a product of the values laid out by three factors viz., Severity, Occurence and Detection. Why RPN is needed and how is it used ? RPN prioritizes the risks, that are specified through the FMEA technique. In a typical project scenario while using the FMEA technique, where RPN is the deciding factor in addressing the risks , a risk with a higher RPN value is placed above the risk with a lower RPN in the Risk Register of a project. The Risk with the highest RPN value is the most sought after risk to be addressed and the risk with the lowest RPN value is the least sought after risk for addressing. Advantage of having RPN is that we are able to quantify the risks (with a numerical value which is easier to portray to any interested stakeholder) . Having said that there are some constraints/challenges in the usage of RPN, that need to be taken into account, which we shall discuss now. What are the challenges/Limitations in RPN In my view, there are quite a few challenges that i would like to highlight. 1. Arriving at RPN (value) requires a bit of experience in usage of FMEA technique. Having an incorrect RPN list may result in picking a lesser risk first than a much more important risk.In quite a few industries, SMEs might be there to define the RPN values. To elaborate more on this : Rating scale for the three factors Severity, Occurence and Detection would be from 1 to 10. But the specified value for each rating(1-10) can vary from Organisation to Organisation.Using RPN, requires bit of experience. So a lesser experienced person(in terms of FMEA technique usage) in a team, may not provide the right RPN simply because he/she might misinterpret or cannot take into consideration the impact/probablity of a risk and therefore can choose the right severity or Occurrence or detection factors. Putting a wrong or indifferent RPN value can make the risks incorrectly prioritised. Therefore some experience is required in FMEA technique for a person to effectively prioritize the risks. 2. RPN will require recalibration over a period of time. Hence its a moving value as risk prioritization would invariably keep changing based on the severity, occurence , detection factors and also the ability of the team/organisation (involved/affected in/by the risks) to address those relevant risks. Therefore constant monitoring of the RPN value is needed. To elaborate more on this : For instance, in the beginning/initial phase of a IT testing project, there may be quite a number of risks, such as a non availability of separate testing environments for System Integration Testing (say , for the testers of service providing company) and User Advanced Testing(Customer testing) but that as the project progresses that risk might have been addressed/mitigated or a timeline would have been known for that to be resolved. Or there could be a particular feature/functionality which cannot be done by using a specific technology or there could a niche-skill for which a resource might not be available at a given point of time. These sort of issues could be addressed by replacement technologies/making use of a specialized human resource (for the niche skill) for a particular time and thereby mitigate that risk. In such cases, the RPN value gets recalculated as the addressing/mitigating of the risks modify the values of the severity or occurrence factors. 3. Calculating RPN value is time-consuming and slightly complex. Why ? To elaborate more on this : Apart from the fact that this requires an experienced person who is well-versed in using FMEA technique, its also needs to be calculated multiple times (frequency of which depends on factors such as risks getting addressed, efficient addressing of risks, and so on...) . Its always an ongoing process. In general , the structure would be that RPN is calculated first , during the "AS-IS" state (when it is calculated before we act upon the RISK associated with our activities - project or wherever you apply the Risk Mgmt through FMEA) and next, when it is calculated after we act upon the RISK. As mentioned in #2, because this is a moving value, its imperative that you need to know the RPN values for both "AS IS" (Existing one when you are yet to address the risk) and the "To-Be" one which ideally would be the state when existing risks are addressed. This RPN calculation activity would keep happening and due diligence need to be given for this critical activity. In a typical six sigma project, the Measure phase would have the "AS IS" state (RPN value) and in Analyse/Improve phase, the RPN value might vary after actions are being established/put in place. Conclusion : We saw the need for RPN in FMEA technique and we also saw the challenges/limitations that it provides. Using RPN requires a bit of expertise and prior knowledge to get the right prioritization of your risks. RPN can also challenge a person's thought process on cases, where the RPN for two or more risks have identical (equal) RPN value. In such cases, we need to have threadbare analysis of those risks (with the same RPN value) and see which should be picked first. The 3 factors- Severity, Occurrence (Frequency) and Detection factors will come into play. With a proper experience cum expertise, and with right set of actions, such risks and all other risks should be addressed effectively and efficiently. RPN would be an effective tool if the right combination of team and expertise is available within the teams, in an organisation.

The process capability and hence the sigma level of an improved process will be at a greater level, as soon the improvement is done. Because every process will have a natural degradation, the process capability and hence the sigma level of that process will lower down, over period of a time. Motorola figured this out quite early and made a shift allowance of 1.5 sigma . Long Term variation = Short Term variation -1.5 Sigma. Very simple example for a process degradation : If a road is being laid out on National Highways, for one/two month(s), there may not be a soft spot or potholes or damaged spots. But by 4-6 months, the road may be severely damaged or even inaccessible. This is due to multiple causes such as Env.conditions , heavy traffic, more heavy vehicles operating Another example is Software Code deployed in production. First one or two months or during the warranty period (Short-term) there would not be much issues or minimal issues.But post that (long term), the issues could creep more as we may not have SMEs available, new team might work on the supporting the application,...

There are quite a few manufacturing companies which even mandate atleast 2 six sigma projects(DMAIC/DMADV) to be completed as a prerequisite to become eligible for becoming a six sigma Black professional internal to, their organisation. The objective is to ensure that through such projects the black belt professional can have varied experience and can get a chance to explore more tools and techniques and also a chance to exhibit his/her skills and help the project team . Hence its mandated by organisations that black belt professionals do the DMAIC or DMADV projects.

Yes. In my opinion, full-fledged DMAIC or DMADV project is an essential criterion for the hiring of a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt professional in an improvement manager job role. Such a project would ensure that the black belt is retaining/refresh his/her knowledge through constant usage of tools and techniques.

Efficient : It means doing something of quality with minimum wasted effort or expense, and in the process achieving the best possible outcome. Effective: Having the intended or needed result successfully. Example for case 1: Efficient process but not an effective one: In an IT support project, whenever a bug/defect needs to be tested, the ideal way is to provide the fix(Code) , test it in local environment and then deploy to production environment (Efficient way). For lower severity defects, this may work. But because the downtime for severity 1 defects would be very less, developers/support analysts would not have time luxury to do this and hence this efficient process may not be of help to them, as the critical feature/functionality needs to be restored quickly. Hence even if this is an efficient process, for Severity 1 & 2, this process may not be effective as doing this way may take some time which may be cross the SLA for severity 1 & 2 to be missed. Therefore this may not become an effective process. Though as a workaround , the organisation can make use of Experienced or SMEs (of the applications) to address these Severity 1 and Severity 2 bugs/defects who would bring their expertise to offset this problem by providing the fix and then deploy it directly in the production environment. Example for case 2: Effective process but not an efficient one: Consider an IT support (maintenance) project. Two constant values need to be included in the software code for doing a processing (Calculation), by the support analyst. Now the analyst 'hard' codes these values into certain set of files (where this is needed). Hard coding (can be called as Magic Number in this context) means that numeric values are inserted into the code instead of using through a variable which can be declared as a CONSTANT, which is the efficient way. In case, due to business logic, the constant values get changed , then all the hard coded values need to get changed in each file and manual updates need to happen. So there is a chance that manual error or missing of the hard coded value in a particular file might happen. Declaring the constant value through a CONSTANT variable might avoid these errors, which is the most efficient way. Therefore while we can achieve what we want with the hard coded values (to satisfy the business needs) which can fetch the right results(effectiveness), it is not the efficient way of doing that processing as aforementioned.

Operational Excellence Professionals In General , these professionals work as part of supporting team to the management's needs and do not belong to any functional department in an organisation. Management uses them where improvements needs to be done on cost , quality, scope etc.,... This will ensure that customer gets maximum profit. What happens when cost-cutting happens 1. Normally these professionals are Master BB/BB who are rich in experience and who might be in higher grade/designation in an organisation and hence would cost more to the organisation. 2. Unlike other employees, these professionals will not be part of any team but are themselves part of a team whic would support management needs. During recession period, therefore , management might reduce the team size. 3. As these professionals are not part of any project team, they may not be able to generate any revenue directly from the customer, though they are the primary ones who will ensure that a project saves money due to improvements shown in its team. This can happen quite frequently in software industries. 4. As these professionals focus too much on operational excellence, they may loose the focus on their Technical or functional knowledge over a period of time and may not be able to help teams more effectively addressing their issues. Such professionals may be identified. 5. Management might look into SeniorJunior ratio and act upon or might like to have only limited amount of persons in each grade. Conclusion: This is why we see as why there is reduction in full time LSS resources when there is cost cutting

Hi Vastupal Vashisth, Bit amused with this statement. Bursting into laughter on seeing this. Would not be in a position to debate this much if i dont know about what am talking!! Am not even talking about ZD changing from situation to situation. A defect will be defined by the respective team/process owner . Obviously there is no two opinion. 85% efficiency - designed by you as service provider ? - i said that as voice of the process. If its the maximum limit (which i said as limitation) then customer would see which system can provide better value. When we talk about the maximum capability on a system with limitation, its about the customer acknowledging the limitation and how we arrive at a defect free system. Thats what i was referring to in a different way. W.r.t my 95 % defects free example, i was quoting a different point to portray that even beyond that if we achieve also , still we would be deemed missing zero defects. No customer would like to have a defective product/service(i stressed on this in my earlier chat).Now let me say where these scenarios can come to quell your doubts: First of all this is a target range (SLA) customers think can suit them because, 1. Probably a pilot version of the software is rolled out to limited users and the customers want to see how the product looks like and they put focus on how the application behaves and defect is put on the back-burner. 2. New Product (innovation) being created which is not in the market and as there is no baseline to make a comparison , the target set internally by mgmt is to this level - Allowance of mistakes upto 5% 3. This could be a target of the customers in User Advanced Testing (UAT) environment before the software goes LIVE. 4. When we say defects, it not need be showstopper, it can be "cosmetic" changes which the customer may be ok to that.It could be look and feel , alignment issue ,etc.,.. This should answer your query i suppose. In my earlier comments, i requested you to visit those internet URLs to show how zero defect is being articulated there to buttress(suppport) my views and nothing else. Not sure why you are trying to pull others to support for this. Probably you got my intent wrong and hence this looks odd.

Few things i want to mention. Reiterating what i told earlier . First of all the term Zero-defect is a motivational technique of management to do process improvement and in the process, minimise variation and try to achieve first time right. My point of contention is that we cannot achieve 'zero' defects in reality. Second thing is that, zero defect cannot vary from situation to situation as you specify. In that case, we are setting the SLA or target range which is the capability of the process that we operate. So even before we try to achieve the 100%, we say that we cannot achieve zero defects!! Why are we focusing on 85% efficiency ? Does it mean that its a limitation on the system , or is it the maximum capability of the process designed? If its the latter, then straight away we say zero defects cannot be achieved. If its the former, then technically speaking we cannot achieve zero defect, but we can find whether we are able to achieve that 85%. But we need to tell why that limitation is there. Suppose if customer is providing a specification as 95% , then if we are able to achieve that , then in that case also , we cannot say zero defects achieved. For instance, we have a new customer who is expecting 95% defect-free delivery of a software application, whereas the service provider provides a 98% defect-free software. The customer would still gleefully accept it though zero defect cannot be still achieved. A key point am trying to make is , if the voice of the process is only capable enough to 85% (in this case), then we can conclude that zero defects is straight-away not achievable. Hope this answers your queries. Fyi. I quoted the objective of Zero defect - when i mentioned about the "desires" - its not my desire but the desires of the management that wanted the process improvement through this zero concept, as seen in those URLs.

Hi Vastupal Vashisth, I have never mentioned about anything about Process improvements being declared as management myth. Am Talking about the usage of the term "Zero Defect" . If all methodologies such as Six Sigma, lean techniques, and other methodologies talk about minimising variation, where is the need for this term to be highlighted and again say that this will help in reducing or minimising variation. This is what i refer here as management myth. This is a packaging technique to sell the idea so as to reach out to the employees of an oganisation. Am not saying this is a wrong way. It can provide the impetus to the team to do the process improvement initiatives, which is why management wants to have this , in my opinion. But does not mean that this will get converted into Zero defects ultimately. Hope this helps your questions/queries shooted By the way, Pls reread the URLs - they talk about the minimisation of defects and they do not dare to say about zero effects as the ultimate focus. It only talks about the desire to reach there(Zero defect). Ofcourse , everyone wants that way only. Who would want a defective outcome.

All, i have one doubt on this slogan. Why do retail products especially grocery items (in most cases) have this line in their cover - "Products/goods sold once cannot be taken back" . Does it mean that they anticipate some defects and therefore, tell this in advance before the customer comes back to them. Anyways this line is against the Consumer Protection Act of India (CPI). But this is what my thought on the defects aspect !! Remember am not worried about from whom this msg is coming - the manufacturer or retail wholesaler or whoever it is. But what sort of confidence that it would give to the customer. Is that a sort of disclaimer told surreptitiously?

1. W.r.t Cars, in general, there are regulatory compliance rules (fit for use cases) for the car makers in a given geographical region. So if the car design does not comply to this, post the manufacturing and delivery (say in , hundreds of cars) then they are defective ones . I was actualy referring to some cases in the past, especially korean make cars which had fire problems. So certainly not talking about wear and tyre which is a different issue. Leaving this, even safety bag not opening on time in many cars is also a defective case. 2. W.r.t Electrical work, good comparison of house vs organisation.Good point indeed. In my opinion, Cheaper quality alone/lack of right manpower cannot be the culprit though they can play a major role . However even if we put a proper quality materials with right set of people, you would probably end up with less or very minimal mistakes and the therefore, the system will not be fool proof. In an organisation, maintenance issues will be there. How many times we would have seen, short-circuiting happening and how electrical work gets impacted when it is raining . For instance, why do EB department switches off the power, when there is torrential rain or wind ? Do they not have a fool proof system. For Wind, we can say it as special causes .Can we say that for rain (as a special cause)? We have Rainy seasons. At times even for short rains also, power goes off. So why is it. The fear for the worst and is not inclined to take risk assessment on the existing system. 3. You are right that people need to raise concerns, which means you are agreeing to the fact that ATM is no more zero defect as its being conveyed in this forum :-). Valid point - that bank might think its 100% free, if they are not aware of that. There has been concerns raised in the past by many customers and some had even gone to consumer courts to file cases against the banks (Deficiency of service category). But also the onus is on the bank to see how its systems behave and whether the ATM achieves its purpose or not. Now let us also see about the power fluctuations that happen during ATM withdrawal or other money transactional operations. Most important thing that an ATM should do when power goes off is to ensure that its customer's transaction state remains the same as what was before he/she started to do the transaction, during which time the power actually went off. This is the key aspect of ACID (rollback the transaction made if it was mnade in the system). It does not matter to the ATM, whether it is a fault in it or outside it (but which impacts it). It need to ensure that the customer money(transaction) is intact. That is an ATM's key functionality.

Hi Vastupal Vashisth, My point is who does not want a zero defect- Do anyone (customer)would like to have a defective item? Why we stress on Zero defect, when thats the norm or expecation from a customer , in every spehere of life? Because we cannot do 100% right anything (human issue primarily!!) So comes the Zero defect concept . Zero Defect (ZD) does not mean we achieve zero defects through that, but is a focussed attempt to improve your process to ensure that our service or product is less defective(minimising defects). Thats why i call it as a management myth. Just look at the definitions and the views on ZD on each of these below URLs as well on what they tell about ZD and you will get a good view of things. They augument my views. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Defects https://www.simplilearn.com/concept-of-zero-defects-quality-management-article https://www.isixsigma.com/new-to-six-sigma/sigma-level/zero-defects-what-does-it-achieve-what-does-it-mean/

Hi Kavitha, 1. You might be aware - how many branded cars - failed because of flawed design - we can count on ...issues on air bags, catching fires while driving .... all these sort of news ... 'N' number of issues we can bring on here ... 2. W.r.t electrical work- good point. Most of the focus would be given on the shocks which is understandable. The question is that it is not fool proof as you would have seen in quite a few houses. Also if we talk about the error proofing in term of switches, not sure if you correlate this with things like auto-tripping when short-circuit happens. Due to short-circuit, fires can happen. Short-circuit is not an uncommon phenomenon. We can talk a lot about other Electricity issues especially rain happens and it leaks in houses!! From another angle, i would put my statement on this. I understand that you probably quoted this as an example , which is fine for which i provided my response . In my opinion, Electrical work being done in a single house is like an operation. Because of manual involvement and monotonous work, the chance of error making is more and is bound to happen. We are tying to say zero defects in terms of providing a service through a process here. Please consider this case, for an apartment which has say 100 houses. Now wiring needs to be given for all the houses of the apartment. Can this be defect free ? In that case and in my opinion, the chances are extremely slim , considering the challenges that i aforementioned and the issues getting multiplied and therefore, the Electrician would not be able to provide a 100% defect free service. 3. When we talk about the ATM - we talk about only Money withdrawal (predominantly) - and talk about its accuracy and say its defect free !! Agreed - because that is very critical. Few important things we need to know a). So the capability level for this aspect is set at a high level . [The same applies as well for the security aspect also - always asking your PIN] b). # a indicates that it is operating at higher sigma level - the failure rates may be extremely low. So still does not rule out the error possibility c). Additionally let us see some potential defective areas in ATM i). Because we use only withdrawals(most of the people at most of the times, some also do cash deposits , available in some ATMs), we are not bothered/focussed about some of the other functionalities that ATM does. For instance, how many people would have made complaints to bank that while withdrawing money in ATM (and when power goes off) , they would not receive money on hand (from ATM) , but they would get an alert msg in their mobile that their money got debited. This is due to a failure in ACID property which is key to the synchronization between the ATM Server and the database. Ideally rollback of the transaction should have happened when power goes off [Atomicity,Consistency,Isolation and Durability - ACID]. This has happened a lot across India in various banks' ATMS. ii). Even recently, when Aadhar card was added as part of ATM , instead of 12 fields of Aadhar, only 11 were there in some ATMs of few renowned banks. The point am making here is that as we human beings just go and use to deposit or withdraw money, for which the capability level is very high. So we are not able to fathom out its error level. May be experts or we doing a Monkey testing , which is done by doing random inputs as part of testing, can give us more insight into this . We should not rather do this Monkey testing on our own.