R Rajesh

The facts that we got to know from the problem statement:
Organizational Goal 1
Timely delivery
Organizational Goal 2
Reduced inefficiencies
 
There needs to be a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that needs to help us in addressing our coordination challenges of unclear priorities, delayed feedback, miscommunication. We also need to keep in mind the fact that we need to tie it link to the organization goals.
Let us define the KPI as follows
KPI
A KPI is a value that is measured for achieving a specific objective and how effectively it is being done (over a period of time), be it an individual, team , organization.  
 KPI
Description
Collaboration Effectiveness Index
It is a custom indicator that measures the collaboration effectiveness of the cross-functional team
 
To make the KPI to be measured with respect to each of the challenges let us measure each of the challenges in the form of some metrics. Let us define them as well
Metrics
Metrics Definition
Metrics Frequency
Measuring Unit
(Number/
Percentage)
Remarks
Percentage of ambiguous priorities
(while discussing milestone related activities)
It is the ratio of count of priorities that are not clear by the total count of
Daily/
On Need basis
Percentage
Why the measuring Frequency values are like this?
These metrics may not be necessarily relevant for every day but as it runs in a tight schedule (3 months), the system should be in a position to know how the team is fairing in each metric at any given point of time as each day has an overall impact on the project. Hence the measuring frequency should be ‘Daily’.
 
‘On Need Basis’ is just to ensure that some times you may not have data for these metrics on a given day. To cater to that, that value is provided
Percentage of missed feedback
(while discussing milestone related activities)
It is the ratio of count of opportunities that were missed to have feedback by the total count of possible feedback opportunity
Daily/
On Need basis
Percentage
Number of miscommunication happened
(while discussing milestone related activities)
It is the ratio of count of miscommunications that happened by the total count of communications happened
Daily/
On Need basis
Percentage
 
 
 
Metrics Calculation:
Metrics
Formula
Percentage of ambiguous priorities (% AP)
(Number of ambiguous priorities/ Total number of priorities) *100
Percentage of missed feedback (%MF)
(Number of missed opportunities to have feedback /Total number of possible feedback opportunity) *100
Percentage of miscommunications happened (% MCH)
(Number of miscommunications happened / Total number of miscommunications) *100
 
 
KPI Calculation
Collaboration Effectiveness Index (CEI) = 1 - (%AP + %MF + %MCH)                                  
How does the KPI work
The KPI uses an index score with a baseline value of 1 (equivalent to 100%).  It means that when a project starts with ‘CEI’ value as 1 , the other parameters (AP, MF, MCH) will be ‘0’. But as the other parameters get changed during the project execution, then the CEI index value changes and could naturally go down and even in negative (which is not a great sign). The objective is to ensure move towards the baseline score of 1 which means there is improvement shown in the other parameters.
To make the concept clear let us put some numbers on the metrics and see how this impacts the KPI and see what inferences we can have
Assume you have the following scenarios:
Scenario 1:
Total Count
Count
Formula Calculation
Priorities: 10
Ambiguous Priorities: 5
% AP = 5/10 * 100 = 50% (.5)
Possible Feedback Opportunity: 20
Missed Feedback Opportunity :  5
% MF = 15/20 * 100 = 75% (.75)
Communications happened:30
Miscommunications happened: 6
%MCH = 6/30 * 100 = 20% (.2)

CEI = 1 – (0.5 + 0.75 + 0.2) = 1 – 1.45 = - 0.45
 
   
 
 
Scenario 2:
Total Count
Count
Formula Calculation
Priorities: 10
Ambiguous Priorities: 2
% AP = 2/10 * 100 = 20% (.2)
Possible Feedback Opportunity: 10
Missed Feedback Opportunity :  3
% MF = 3/10 * 100 = 30% (.3)
Communications happened:20
Miscommunications happened: 10
%MCH = 10/20 * 100 = 50% (.5)

CEI = 1 – (0.2 + 0.3 + 0.5) = 1 – 1 = 0
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
Scenario 3:
Total Count
Count
Formula Calculation
Priorities: 12
Ambiguous Priorities: 1
% AP = 1/12 * 100 = 8% (.08)
Possible Feedback Opportunity: 14
Missed Feedback Opportunity :  2
% MF = 2/14 * 100 = 14% (.14)
Communications happened:22
Miscommunications happened: 2
%MCH = 2/22 * 100 = 9% (.09)

CEI = 1 – (0.08 + 0.14 + 0.09) = 1 – 0.31 = 0.69
 
   
 
 
Inferences that we can arrive from the CEI score from these 3 scenarios
1.       In Scenario 1, the negative score (-0.45) of CEI indicates the fact that these challenges negatively impact the KPI which in turn impacts the organization goals (we will see how it does)
2.       In Scenario 2, even though the CEI score is zero and is not negative, it still shows that there are areas of improvement. Unless CEI score is 1, there will be always an opportunity for improvement to be done for any of these challenges
3.       In Scenario 3, a positive CEI score (0.69) depicts that the challenges stated in the problem statement are minimal/limited but needs to be addressed
How does the KPI impact the organizational goals:
Organizational Goal 1: Timely delivery
In a cross-functional team, multiple skilled people work together. Therefore, there needs to be lot of coordination amongst the team members. 
a.       Unclear/Ambiguous Priority:  If there are unclear priorities it can delay the work execution or hamper the work progress.
 
b.       Feedback Opportunity Missed: Similarly, if there is a feedback, that needs to be obtained/provided, let’s say for a task that is being done, then that needs to be obtained on time. Else, crucial information may be missed out and this can potentially turn into a rework effort in the form of a defect, or a new requirement (depending upon the type of feedback received)
 
c.        Miscommunication happening:  Imagine there is a change in approach for a deployment task/work (to production) that is originally planned for next week. Due to unforeseen circumstances, that is planned in the current week (on weekday). The communication has gone to the project lead who has communicated erroneously that it would be done on weekend.  This is just a hypothetical scenario. But if this happens, this would catch the team unawares and make everyone feel awkward and there could be even escalations and customer dissatisfaction and most importantly can right shift your deadline, in this case.
All these challenges are a bottleneck to this goal because it impacts the flow of work/task to be done and hence it can delay your delivery. Addressing these challenges with the help of the KPI, therefore will ensure that you meet the organizational goal, which will ensure that we meet the project deadline
 
 
 
 
Organizational Goal 2: Reduced inefficiencies
In a cross-functional team, multiple skilled people work together. Therefore, there could be several handoffs or waiting time involved if there is not a proper collaboration especially when there are dependent tasks or work
a.       Unclear/Ambiguous Priority:  If there are unclear priorities it takes lot of time (waste) in getting a clear-cut agenda/priority. Eg: A business analyst does not convey his priority properly resulting in more discussions with the developers and testers , within the cross-functional team.   
 
b.       Feedback Opportunity Missed:  When a feedback is missed out on a particular work or task, the feedback could be either missed out completely or the feedback could be received later , resulting in rework or probable defect later or a newer opportunity (which can come at the tail end of the project).  This is a wasted time which should be avoided in the first place
 
c.        Miscommunication happening:  Let us say a software developer and a tester are discussing on their work. The work involves development of a a login page for a website.  The Business analyst has a 1-1 meeting with the developer, then she has a 1.1 meeting with the tester, both the meetings related to the login page development. The problem starts when the tester tests the developed login page. The tester says that the name field is not curtailed (can enter a sentence long name). The developer says that Business Analyst told him to do a typical standard way of doing and hence he followed only the usage of Alphabets only to be written and not the length. To counter this, the tester says the Business Analyst told him to follow test standards which is to curb the length of the name and also ensure names follow Alphabets only.
 
This was a clear sign of miscommunication that could have been avoided if Business Analyst had set up a meeting with both tester and developer for a shared understanding.   
As you can see here, these challenges impact this goal as they bring more waiting time/wastes in the form of rework, defects, additional/long discussions, etc... These are inefficiencies that needs to be reduced so as to meet the project deadline. This KPI ensures that these challenges are addressed and thereby addressing this goal
Conclusion:
We saw how the KPI of Collaborative Effectiveness Index (CEI) is being impacted by the existing challenges within the team. We also saw with the 3 scenarios as how those CEI scores have an Impact and what inferences we get from each of the different CEI scores.  Also we got a view of how the KPI can ultimately impact the Organizational goals of Timely delivery and reduced inefficiencies. 
Let us try to ensure what can make us to have better team collaboration
Key Take aways/Actionable Insights to strengthen team work:
1.       Ensure a daily huddle is there amongst the Cross-Functional team members to
a.       understand day-to-day priority
b.       discuss outstanding queries that can quickly become a dependency & future bottleneck
c.        Ensure feedback is shared, wherever deemed to be fit
d.       Highlight the day-to-challenges faced by you or as a team and take decisions accordingly
 
2.       Have a standard communication channel (such as Google Chat, Ms Teams,…) that is used
a.       To pass key communications/notifications (when it is known post the daily huddle time)
b.       Better to prefer in-person communication for more effectiveness (only if the team is co-located)
 
3.       Show Transparency of work/task progressed
a.       Display the progress of the task/work in a Wall or a digital board/sticky notes or through any means
b.       Highlight the work/tasks that have dependencies with other members in a distinct manner (keeping it creative can make everyone interested to look at it & get the visibility it requires)
c.        A dashboard view of all the work/tasks at a team level -with current status, priority levels can make everyone aware of the current overall progress of the project
d.       Having a defined metrics for the work/task, may additionally help the team – such as number of completed tasks, number of defects closed within SLA….
IMHO, these are key factors which can help the team.
Also let us discuss an interesting aspect which can tell the significance of team collaboration.
 
The formula for calculating the number of communications that can happen for a team of size ‘n’ is
= (n * (n-1) )/2
 
When team members work in silos, what will happen is there would be too many siloed conversations. For instance, for a team of 3 members, the communication will be (3 * 2) /2 = 3 which means Person A will talk to Person B , Person A will talk to Person C and Person B will talk to Person B (3 communications)
If a team size is 8, then the number of communications to happen in that team will be = (8 * 7)/2 =28.  
But when the team size marginally increases to 10 (from 😎 the communications to be made is quite high, which is (10 * 9)/2 =45. 
This is where a daily huddle, a proper communication channel can help in to address these communication hassles.
Team Collaboration will be a major challenge if we do not have a proper mechanism in place and it will get only complicated if the team size grows which will be the case (mostly) if a project is ramping up or if the project is in RED, for some reasons and when there is lot of pending work to do which will require more people to complete
Therefore, we should focus upon the actionable insights that can help in stronger collaboration amongst the team members that can ensure smooth functioning of the project, resulting in completing the project on time.
 

Wikipedia states that 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' is a book that was written by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and it highlights two ways of thought. System 1 is about being fast, instinctive and emotional. System 2 is slower more deliberative and also more logical. The book points out the triggers related to each type of thoughts and how they complement each other
 
Let me draw my own matrix 😊 (its akin to Eisenhower matrix but except that it is not) which depicts some real-time scenarios based on observations and some experiences. (Pls refer to the screenshot or attached document - for a much clearer view)

 
As a Business Leader, how to balance System 1 & System 2 thinking:
Do a self-retrospection on how to improve oneself(he/she) as a leader while handling situation and understand the short comings(the skills that is being lacked based on the recent situations were handled)  
System 1 thinking is something that happens/occurs naturally (with minimal conscious effort). Skills related to this type of thinking may be most of the times, subconsciously(unknowingly) acquired by the individual through observations/looking around people with positive influence,  or in rare case, with some specific practice    
System 2 thinking requires in general, self effort. This can be accrued by constant learning. Self introspection and feedback from others can expedite learning as well  
A leader may not be aware of the two type of thoughts but having an understanding of the Emotional Intelligent and Emotional Quotient, knowing his/her behavioural strengths, ability to comprehend a situation and take actions accordingly will decide the shape of the decisions being taken  
Let us assume, a leader may not be aware of what kind of person he/she is or perhaps he/she does not know how to handle some key moments and wants to improve few areas (lets say on both System 1 and System 2 thinking).. One way is to know could be by leveraging some authenticated/popular Personality Trait tests like Myers-Briggs Personality test.. which can help to know more about an individual based on that person's response to situational questions. While there is scepticism about these type of Personality tests, but an underlying belief is that still, the tests can throw some light on the behavioural aspect of a person.  
 
Conclusion:
As we see here, System 1 thinking and System2 thinking are both needed at various stages for a person's life - be it personal or professional (we focussed on the business aspect though over here). 
 
System 1 thinking often gets endorsed by System 2 thinking especially if the intuitive feelings/reactions turn into beliefs and subsequently when actioned upon.  These examples portray the points where System 1 thinking alone may not be sufficient and it has to be complemented with more System 2 thinking skills as well . There are also scenarios where having System 1 thinking skills/capabilities are advantageous.
 
There are so much scenarios that you need both the type of thoughts for you to succeed overall.  There is no right or wrong if one person is having more System 1 thinking and having less System 2 thinking skills and another person having it vice-versa.  It depends on which one you have more, as a human being and accordingly how you handle it at the end of the day and how you balance it out (as can be seen in the previous section)
 
Therefore, in the present world, where everything is uncertain, we need to have both the type of thinking skills. 
 
 
 

Let us understand first few things. 
 
Michael Polanyi, the philosopher states that human beings tend to depend on their tacit knowledge. Polanyi's paradox (named after him) says that "We can know more than we can tell".  
 
A good Wiki's definition of Tacit(implicit) knowledge is that it is a knowledge which is difficult to extract or articulate and is more difficult to express/convey to others through writing or conveying orally, as it talks about a person's skills, thoughts/ideas, wisdom/experiences which he/she possesses but that may not be explicitly portrayed/documented and can be difficult to express. People with tacit knowledge may not be aware of the fact that they possess considerable knowledge and may not be aware as how much that is useful to others
 
How this tacit knowledge can be leveraged?
This conscious understanding (of the tacit knowledge) can help organisations and human beings to have a mindset change towards the usage of AI and seek for areas(focus areas) where human interactions can complement with usage of AI to make it more meaningful and beneficial to all the stakeholders. The idea is to leverage the power of AI and human strength for a better outcome in relevant areas.
 
Areas where human skills remain indispensable
1. Indigenous, Intuitive, Innovative 
 
Eg: While playing Carrom board [Black and White Game], i try to focus on putting my own coin in the pocket . When i used to play with my relatives (who are previous generational players) , few of them used to put their coins in the pockets and also at the same time, try to base my coin [which is to put my (coloured) coins towards the baseline on my side (especially which will be difficult for me -if there is "Thumbing rule")]. This skill is specific and can be indigenous, intuitive for them. 
 
Just like as you have Super Computers like DeepBlue for Chess, we have Carrom Robots, Carrom Simulators for playing carrom normally. While probably the carrom robots can steady upon the patterns/trends seen in the earlier games, picking this tacit knowledge may not be possible, for the AI. 
[Note: You may need to know bit of Carrom board game to understand this context]
 
2. Empathy & Emotional Intelligence:
 Work areas that require human emotions to be tapped in - such as leadership roles, personal coaching, agile coaching, Enterprise Agile coach , mentoring and so on
   
Eg: While coaching/mentoring a person (coachee/mentee) it is not easy to capture the body-language gestures and a corresponding meaning that it can brought about to the person.. AI cannot effectively create a similar impact on Coaching  
   
3. Complex scenarios:
When a scenario involves multi-disciplined skills or when there is lot of chaos or uncertainty. Also where there is a scarcity in terms of clear datasets  
 
Eg: Analysis of MRI scans by Experts..   . This may involve multiple skills . The Experts provide their comments/analysis based on years of experience.. Its difficult to have that captured through AI

4. Areas that requires finer skills: A combination of skills like Intuitive, Contextual adaptability... 
Eg: Self-driving cars in Themed Safari Trips, in National highways.  Human beings might know the subtle changes that they may observe while doing the driving instead of an AI operated car. 
 
5. When Data gathering is too cumbersome or not enough:  Cumbersome could mean that source of the data pulled from multiple sources and this requires threadbare analysis of each and every source and insight has to be achieved.  
 
Strategies can individuals and organizations adopt to thrive alongside AI 
Individuals: Some key factors are
1. Focus on Skills: Focus on some of the skills like innovative, creative skills
2. EI and EQ: Understand about Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Quotient. 
3. Understand AI: Understand more about usage of AI and see how it can be leveraged
4. Continuous Learning: Keep your learning of AI and related tools as continuous and stay updated, to reap 
   the benefits  
 
Organisation 
1. AI as support Agent: Use AI as a supporting agent and not a deciding authority for any business decisions
2. Identify areas of AI support: Have a clear strategy where(in which area) AI and human beings can seamlessly collaborate  
3. Provide AI Training: Staffs can be upskilled in specifics of AI. 

Conclusion:
Polanyi’s Paradox highlights the shortcomings that AI can have and also how human interaction with AI as a partner, can provide superior outcomes in terms of productivity, better experiences, opportunities.   

  

Reason for ignoring Measure of dispersion
1. The first and foremost reason I could think of is because of our natural awareness of mean and median (taught as part of your elementary mathematics in school days) and coupled with the fact that it is easy to calculate both mean and median
2. Awareness on Standard deviation and Range is relatively low for people in general (even though they might have learnt in their high school education) and these terms are usually known for people who are associated with any statistical related work or who show passion in statistical concepts or so. An additional pointer for a statistically aware person is that Standard Deviation can be lesser sensitive to outliers when compared with mean, Range is highly sensitive to outliers. 
 
3. People are just focused on the representative value around which the data clusters and does not bother about the variability involved in that (lack of awareness is the key as they are not aware of how important that variability factor is).
 
 
Impact in decision making:
Ignoring the measure of dispersion can result in not understanding
 1). the variability or the actual spread of the data 
 2). the outliers that exist in the given dataset
Example 1:
Let us try to see these impact with an example. We are considering here about how the data looks for a cricket bowler for just a small sample of 20 test matches (pls refer to the attached excel sheet). We want to see how the bowler's performance is over this period of 20 test matches.. As you can see the bowler's performance is good in the beginning of his/her career and then in the middle period, it is not looking good .. But in the latest matches that the bowler has played, it shows the bowler has taken good no. of wickets..
 
So barring the first and last few matches, the bowler has not performed well as shown by the mean which says for every match, the bowler is taking 4 wickets. So with mean , it is sensitive to outliers. If you look to the median, it shows the value as 2 which means it is not taking those few first and last matches where the bowler has taken more wickets...   
 
Now if we look at the holistic view of the bowler's performance in all the matches played, there is a lot of inconsistency (variability) in the middle phase for the bowler that is not captured by mean but Standard deviation shows the value as 3.77.  Even as this does not seem to be a significant difference when compared with the value of 4 (for mean) in this case, this gets drastically changed when the bowler performs well in some of the middle phase matches [changing values, say in few rows (from any of the rows - 9 to 20) in column D&E in the excel sheet can see a drastic change in the difference between mean and Standard Deviation values]. 

As we see here, mean is much sensitive to outliers and does not portray the true picture. Standrd deviation is relatively lesser sensitive to outliers and shows the variability.
 
Example 2: If we are to find the month in which the peak & least sales of cars were sold for a car dealer (for a particular brand of car), using the Range can help us get the data easily. By ignoring this measure of dispersion(which is highly sensitive to outliers), we will loose the ability to get this data in an easy manner 


 

Definition of 'Excellence' :   As per Oxford dictionary the meaning is "Quality of being very good"
 
Definition of Paradox:
 A Cambridge dictionary meaning of that is "Seeming impossible or difficult to understand because of containing two opposite facts or characteristics. 
 
What is about this "Paradox of Excellence":
“The Paradox of Excellence”, is a book written by David Mosby and Michael Weissman.
 
The general norm is that when an organization provides a superior performance/service to its customers, there is supposed to be a high customer loyalty and an increased brand value. But the reality often is different: The superior performance/service of the organization is taken for granted and undervalued by the marketplace. This makes the organization cold-faced many a times and can make their reputation damaged and can bring down their business to a loss as well  
 
Adverse Effects (due to the 'Paradox of Excellence' phenomenon) on the excellence journey of an Organization:
 
1. Customer (over)Expectation not met: 
Human beings go by beliefs. If an organization is providing consistently a good performance/service, people will go with that belief and expect that to be the same always, irrespective of the situation. Does it sound odd ? No. Think of Kano Model where "Delighters" category goes to Basic(Must have) expectation,  over a period of time. For instance, you are being served a juice every 2 hrs on a flight from Chennai to San-Francisco journey, say on two occasions. Next time when you board the same flight operator, and go from Chennai to Dubai (which is probably say approx. 1/4th of the travel time to Chennai-San-Francisco distance) you would still expect multiple juices to be given to you!! That is because of the high expectation you had, as prior experience with the flight operator. There could be such experiences other passengers might have with that same flight operator. Not every time organizations can necessarily meet the customer expectations  
 
2. Reputation Loss/Brand Image impacted:
Understanding customer expectation is the key. If that is not understand then organization will have its brand/reputation impacted. An organization may not be even aware of the expectation that its customers have on it. That can be much more damaging. 
 
3. Loss of Customer Confidence/Customer Dissatisfaction:
Delaying to meet the customer expectation or not understanding that, can result in customer dissatisfaction and customer getting frustrated and loosing confidence and shying away from the organization's services/products 
 
4. Potential Employee Disengagement:  
When employees are not engaged properly, there can be a slow but steady decline of performance/service degradation.  

Remedial Measures:
1. Retrospect:
 Do a retrospection as where the gap is and see if there is any trend if there are multiple feedbacks. Try to understand the nature of the problem and include right 
stakeholders to discuss on the issues observed. Come out with relevant action item(s) and implement them as per priority with a SMART approach
 
2. Employee Engagement: 
A key stakeholder in any organization is people (the workforce) who can shape or make a product!! If employees can be satisfied, then every change is possible!! 
Happiness index of the employees is therefore a key metric for the success of an organization.  Therefore getting the employee feedback/ideas/challenges.. can help 
in overcoming challenges.
     
3. Continuous Improvement:
Finding ways to improve the existing product/processes that have helped in achieving the customer satisfaction(during the past). Experiment with some ideas, inspect if that works and adapt your system/process accordingly.  
 
Example: While telecasting Cricket, the technology got improved day-by-day and year-by-year. As more and more cameras got placed at various vantage points on the ground, the expectation amongst the fans(the 'customers' for the game) grew up for the technology to show right-decisions to help the standing umpires. There was a challenge when close run-outs and faint edges came into picture, which those cameras could not pick, in several cases. So the Cricket governing body (ICC) latched on to a new technology - Decision Referral System(DRS),that helped the third umpire to provide a more closer look and improved the right decisions on close runouts and faint edges. The expectation only increased from the customers(fans). Still few other challenges remained. Getting prompt LBW and how about hair-line decision of runouts.  So, the ball tracking technology came to decide whether a batter is out or not. Then for hair-line runouts, as soon as a bail lifts from the stumps, the LED light would display. So these technologies ensured that right decisions always given to the maximum hilt. This is what the fans wanted!! With continuous improvement, the ICC has been able to address their customers' expectations and therefore sustain its performance/service.  
 
4. Customer Feedback:
 1. Getting feedback from customer after a service is done is always a good option to understand customer pain points, emotions, mindset
 2. For Key customers, focused interviews, face-to-face meet.. can be better
 
Having the customer feedback can provide great insights for the betterment of the service/performance provided by the organization, to its customers 
 
5. Knowing USP:
An organization has to see how it can further leverage its Unique Selling Proposition(USP). Accordingly it has to harness its strength. It also should try to see how to expand its business on that area to see if that can put a positive spin on addressing customer expectation.  
 
Conclusion:
As a Six Sigma BB consultant, this can be a perfect situation to help an organization facing this sort of challenges. Understand the issues. Decide upon if the problem is perennial (if the organization is suffering for quite some time). If this current process/setup cannot be improved upon, then go for DMADV/DMADOV, Else DMAIC. As we seen, it is essential to understand the implicit and explicit expectations of the customers and address them at the earliest possible time to avoid the ignominy of not meeting customer expectation

Reference: https://scottpublicrelations.com/the-paradox-of-excellence-high-performance-low-respect/

I strongly believe there are exceptions to the belief that "Process Improvements do not result in a change in Specification limit".
 
Let me explain this, with a couple of examples:
 
Imagine a software team developing a product. The team is doing unit testing manually. Soon, the team decides to have automation testing and proceeds with that. This is certainly a Process Improvement that is happening because this will have - a reduced manual effort from the developer, quick identification of issues, easy repetitiveness of testing(all scenarios and with different set of data), improved development cycle time,etc.... As soon as there is an automation testing(Process Improvement) involved, the customer may talk about 'Code Coverage'. The customer might say that 'Code Coverage' should be  80-85% which is your customer specification limits for your 'Code Coverage'. As your automation process gets more mature, the customer might be forced to change it  a more rigorous Specification limit say to >=95% (lower limit). Therefore it is possible that doing the Process Improvement can result in changing the  Specification limits.

Another Example with a different flavour that i want to highlight:
 
Consider 'Definition of Done'(abbreviated as DOD) in a Scrum environment. DOD is akin to being a quality checklist. When a product backlog item (a simple explanation - that can capture a product requirement)
is to be considered as 'Complete', it has to meet the DOD [For eg, in a software product development, the DOD may have steps that can be like say coding, peer-reviewing, unit testing, system and integration testing, pre-prod testing and deployment...]  While the DOD is owned either by the Scrum team or by the organization that develops the product(service providers), the customer who also may be part of the Scrum Team(say a Product Owner) can have a say in the DOD. Now the steps in the DOD are like the Specification limits.
 
Imagine(a hypothetical scenario) Now that you have a Continuous Integration process, which is usually capable of automating your process till your Code is put in the Quality Assurance(QA) environment(if there is one such environment or any environment where all kinds of testing can happen) where functional testers would be able to test your code and afterwards the code will be manually deployed to say a pre-production environment and tested and then it is manually deployed to Production. Assume the customer says that the Specification limit for deploying all product backlog items(chosen In a Sprint) is 3-5 days (1 week Sprint).  
 
Now after some time, the team gets matured process-wise and technolgy-wise and implements DevOps pipeline and exhibits CI-CD Process Improvement. They first do the Continuos Delivery part in the CD Section. Now the automation gets extended from QA environment till the pre-production environment. This is a Process Improvement from manual to automatic. Now the customer revises the Specification limit and set the limits to <=3 days.
 
Now again the team works on the second part of CD section - Continuous Deployment. This will ensure the deployment from pre-production to Production automatic. The customer now again changes the Specification limits to <=1 day. 
 
Thus it becomes possible to change the Specification limits due to process Improvement 
 
Conclusion:
We have seen with couple of examples that how it's also possible that making Process Improvements can result in a change of Specification limits.

A 9 Windows tool or technique is defined as a method for exploring issues and their potential impacts by examining the past, present, and future of a System and its Sub and Super systems. It is portrayed in the form of a 3*3 matrix and act as an idea creation tool.

How does it work:
As we saw in the definition, this explores the issues in the system and its associated Super or sub systems. So what each one means:
 
a. System  - The problem or the system in consideration
b. Super System - The entity to which the system might be logically or physically
    connected to or can be correlated to
c. Sub System - The constituents(components) of the system or things that could be part of (or associated with) the problem
 
Purpose of the tool:
This is akin to what we do in real life. Often we would be doing a self-retrospection after someone gave , say, a very good seminar on a particular topic. We might think "how i wish had done that well last week.This week it was ok and am confident of doing good in the future"... Same way what if something could have been done differently for an issue to get it addressed in the past and in the present and how to address that in the future..  This is what this tool will help you in achieving that
 
Examples:
Let us some examples attached here
 
Example1:  Nine Windows Matrix:
 
Problem:   Over the years, increased Cricket Bat dimensions (size) has given an undue advantage to batsmen
 
Space/Time
Past
Present
Future
Super System
Group(s) that decided the Cricket rules -Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC)
Group(s) that influences the Cricket rules- Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and the group that implements it - International Cricket Council(ICC)
Group(s) that influences the Cricket rules - Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and International Cricket Council (ICC) – ICC Chief Executives committee , ICC Cricket Committee and Associates (Nations) representative committee
System
Cricket Bat’s impact in           pre-80’s era . Batsmen by and large played with wood bats except for few
Cricket Bat’s impact in Current Era since 1980s. Lot of batsmen used heavy bats than the stipulated guidelines
Batsmen have to follow stringent guidelines as laid out by the Cricket rules
Sub System
Equipment –Wood usually (Willow wood, Kashmiri wood,…)  but there was no specific restrictions (on the type of equipment to be used) till 1979
Bat Length - <=38 inches
 
Bat Width <=4.25 inches
Equipment – Willow wood usually and it should be made only in wood
 
Bat Length - Can be bit higher than the usually designated length
Bat Width - Can be bit higher than the usually designated length
Bat Thickness - Can be bit higher than the usual thickness
Equipment – Should be made only in wood
 
 
Bat Length - <=38 inches
 
Bat Width <=4.25 inches
 
Bat Thickness <= 2.68 inches
 
Bat Edge <= 1.6 inch
 
Example2:  Nine Windows Matrix:
 
Problem: For office goers in big cities, precious time is lost due to Traffic snarls, on a daily basis
 
Nine Windows Matrix:
 
Space/Time
Past
Present
Future
Super System
Limited Transportation
Congested Transportation
Robust Transportation
System
Less Vehicle population resulted in less traffic snarls
Every day going to office takes time through own or company provided transport,  due to heavy Traffic
Seamless drive to office with minimal or no hassles.
Sub System
Less Vehicles
 
 
Public Transport
 
 
No special economic zones
 
More Private Vehicles
 
 
Rapid Urbanisation without adequate supporting infrastructure
 
Clustered Special economic zones
Encourage more public transport with good connectivity across places
 
Provide good and sound infrastructure.
 
Have Special Economic Zones in different parts of the city to de-congest traffic’
 
Encourage hi-fi  innovative designs like Flying Car (make the infrastructure available for that)
 
 
 
 
Benefits:
1.  Transparency of the problem
As we dissect the problem/issue across the systems and at various times using this exercise, we get a distinct representation of how a problem looks/looked like at any given point and what makes/made it to happen.
 
2. Inspection of the problem (RCA)
As we get to know the issue on hand at the past, present and future, we try to see as why it happened, happens and think of how that (issue) can be prevented in the future. By getting to know the RCA or why the issue happened in the past or still happening in the present, we try to explore as what should be done to prevent it in the future. This exercise provides a systematic approach to resolve an issue which can be quite complex in nature and which is adaptive in nature(that which can vary over time)
 
3.Addressing (Attacking) the problem
At each phase of time, we are putting the facts as what we had done, what we are doing and what will / should be we doing.. Based on the kind of solution that we are having at each phase of time(past, present,future), the solution for the subsequent phase gets shaped. The details of each phase might serve as a good input to the subsequent phase and can help (often it can act as a launching pad though not always necessarily) the solution providers to attack the problem with more vigour in the subsequent time phase
 
4. Continuous Improvement
The result of #3 often means that you are improving your systems (with the implementation of those solutions) which is continuous. Thus, doing this exercise will more often than not, be, resulting in a continuous improvement of sorts.
 
Conclusion:
This is a wonderful tool/technique for idea generation and is often used in TRIZ, which itself is a powerful technique for problem solving.  The technique uses a 3*3 matrix with the kind of systems involved in one axis and the time factor (past, present and future) in another axis and the objective is to see how an issue was/is/will be addressed. How these systems behave over a period of time is portrayed in this exercise, giving a good representation of that evolution
 
References: https://asq.org/quality-resources/nine-windows .
Nine Windows Matrix.doc

Wiki Definition: A Pick chart is a Lean Six Sigma tool, developed by Lockheed Martin, for organizing process improvement ideas and categorizing them 
 
Pick chart is a 2*2 matrix in which the vertical axis talks about the complexity/difficulty and horizontal axis talks about cost benefits.
 
Easy
Payoff Low
Payoff Hard
Possible
Implement
Hard
Kill
Challenge
 
What does each of the Quadrant means?
Possible – Low payoff, easy to do Implement – High pay off, easy to do Kill – Low payoff, hard to do Challenge – High payoff, hard to do How is it useful:
Pick chart is pretty useful when there are many process improvement or problem solving ideas and we want to categorize them as per the 4 aforementioned quadrants. This will give an insight to the mgmt of an organisation where each idea is vis-à-vis its ROI and how much impact it can have on the organisation’s customer(s).
Let us see what each of these quadrants means to an idea 
 
Possible:    An Idea placed in this quadrant means that it (idea) will take less time to complete, either due to less complexity or less difficulty level, and implementation of the idea would result in a lesser ROI.
Implement:    An Idea placed in this quadrant, means that it (idea) will take less time to complete, either due to less complexity or less difficulty level, and implementation of the idea would result in a greater ROI.
Kill:   An Idea placed in this quadrant means that it (idea) will take more time to complete, either due to more complexity or more difficulty level, and implementation of the idea would result in a lesser ROI
Challenge:    An Idea placed in this quadrant means that it (idea) will take more time to complete, either due to more complexity or more difficulty level, and implementation of the idea would result in a greater ROI.
Let us see examples for each of these quadrants. 
 
Examples:
Let me provide examples from software industry.
Possible: Imagine an excel sheet is used for PMO activities. Now a person with a VBA(a microsoft application language that can be used for MS products such as excel and actually good for writing macros) knowledge, writes a few lines of code and automates programatically some of the complex things in that excel in a short span of time. This speeds up the work for the PMO team and gives the customer a fool proof mechanism to look at the cost sheet and saves some time for all the stakeholders. Nothing more than that
 
Implement:  Imagine development team tinkers with an existing licensed automation testing or a custom automation framework to an open sourced automation framework which is relatively easier to do (than creating automation environment from scratch) and provides the customer a cost effective, end customer satisfying solution.
Kill: Imagine development team does refactoring of an existing code which can help the support (maintenance) team to easily maintain the code in the future but does not provide any great tangible benefits/hard savings for the customer
Challenge:
Imagine a typical agile development team improves its unit testing, functional testing from being manual to automated testing.  This will expedite the testing time of the application and can issues can be quickly found and addressed. This will result in more tangible benefits for the customer
Conclusion:
The examples given are just hypothetical to drive home the point as what each quadrant could have as ideas.  (Same) Examples given above can go into different quadrants depending upon several parameters.  Thus you can see how PICK charts help in categorizing the process improvement ideas.
 
                            

Let us see some definitions for Scrum and Kanban from the official site of Scrum guide and few other good sites for Kanban
 
Scrum: It is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. 
 
Kanban: Kanban (whose meaning is signboard or billboard in Japanese) originally was used as a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT) used to improve manufacturing efficiency by limiting supplies and resources to what was needed for the immediate task.
 
As Kanban usage is spread across industries, it has become ubiquitous. 
 
From an agile perspective, Kanban is a continuous workflow management method designed to help in visualizing the process and the actual work passing through that process
 
ScrumBan :
Wiki definition: Scrumban is an Agile management methodology describing hybrids of Scrum and Kanban and was originally designed as a way to transition from Scrum to
Kanban. 
 
Before we go into details of the why we need ScrumBan, let us see some fundamental characteristics of Scrum and Kanban and where they are stand with each other and how combining their characteristics (ScrumBan) could be beneficial
 
Salient features of Scrum:
1. Scrum is based on Empiricism which relies on Transparency, Inspection and adaptation
2. Scrum uses inspect and adapt techniques to find if any deviation is there from the required levels of expectation. If there is a deviation, then the relevant team needs to adapt to doing the course correction
3. Scrum is a prescriptive framework. It tells what to do and does not tell the 'how' part and leaves the implementation to its users   
4. Scrum is a process framework that has some well defined rules and time-boxed events and few roles. The Container event   called 'Sprint' is also time-boxed. 
5. Scrum is transparent and as a result it ensures work completion by having a definition for that (using 'Definition of Done'- a key aspect)
 
Salient features of Kanban:
1. Visualization of the workflow 
2. WIP Limit - which will limit the team to work only items which are in progress and thereby avoid overburdening
3. Workflow management - By having a smooth workflow and ensuring minimal average cycle 
4. Continuous Process improvement -  Review the effectiveness of the defined Processes and update them wherever required    
5. Continuous Feedback and collaboration mechanism - Have a proper feedback system (like daily scrum call or scrum of scrum call) to provide the knowledge gained in the system and with respect to collaboration, share the views with everyone.   
 
Scrum                                                                     
Kanban
Every Sprint will have a specific goal
Here primary goal is to achieve continuous flow
There are pre-defined clear cut roles (Development Team, Scrum Master and Product Owner)
There are no such clear cut roles
It runs on Empiricism
It dwells on Visual workflow and WIP limit
Velocity is a key metric
Cycle Time is a key metric
WIP Limit is not a mandatory
It operates on WIP Limit
 
Why do we need ScrumBan or what are the benefits of ScrumBan:
Let us now see as how ScrumBan could benefit large Agile teams .
 
Scrum being a prescriptive framework does not provide/tell any answers to some of the problems that a team which practices Scrum might face.

Eg: In the case of an IT team, the team might have issue with a junior developer who lacks technical knowledge and he is not productive and this is hampering the team's overall delivery. Imagine the team is wondering how to resolve that . In such a case if the project is being run in Extremme programming(another Agile way of doing a project) then it would have team members of the project to do pair programming and do automation as part of its manifesto. But Scrum is lenient and does not emphasize anything like that. 
 
Remember the fact that as scrum does not tell about the 'how' part, we have the liberty to use anything without breaking the rules that govern the scrum framework. This is where a  technique like Kanban can be used inside the Scrum framework to leverage its process improvement benefits. So let us see as how using the hybrid version, ScrumBan - the combination of Scrum and Kanban, we can get the benefits
 
Benefits:
1. Using Scrum aspect will ensure that system is capable of addressing robust changes , where changes(requirements) are captured in with a proper priority plan
2. Using Scrum events which helps in inspecting and adapting the work, the progress of the work items can be measured and the status of each item can be identified as per that . That will identify the potential bottlenecks . This could point to the workflow movement in the Kanban board and can inform the probable risks / impediments to the customer management  
3. Using Scrum Retrospective event in conjunction with Kanban effectively ensures that not only process for workflow improvement but also for process for tools, people, technology can be improved   
4. Using Kanban's WIP limit can result in taking limited amount of work items (usually in the form of user stories for a typical IT Scrum project :-) ) and ensuring that you are on achieving to complete your items without overburdening yourselves and complete it on the time-boxed duration. WIP limit gives an opportunity to stay focussed as a team to complete the items that we pick (as a team) and then proceed to the subsequent items and then complete the iteration. It ensures that the planned goal/objective for that iteration(Sprint) is achieved.    
 
5. For day-to day operations/maintenance activities, WIP limit in conjunction with Daily Scrum call can be quite effective[as daily scrum will be useful to see work progress and reassess the situation every 24 hours and WIP limit will set the work item limitation for working on that day]

Conclusion:
Agile as a way of project management has evolved a lot since its origin. The fact is that it has incorporated lot of lean principles into its scheme of things which is good news for all of its practitioners. ScrumBan is one such technique. This is not the only one though . SAFe is one framework which is being used at Enterprise level by large organisations.
 
SAFe provides a clean structure having at Team level, Program level and Portfolio level and is highly lean oriented in its approach. So i personally feel that based on an organisation's size and its feasibility to operate in a given technique (in every sense) and its passion, knowledge and willingness to change itself to the technique, these techniques are being practised upon by those organisations.   
 
References:
https://kanbanize.com/blog/kanban-vs-scrum-infographic/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrumban
https://www.guru99.com/scrum-vs-kanban.html
https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html(For Scrum Definition)

Before we take a look at the potential causes for the failures and look at the ways/best practices to avoid these failures, let us take a look at what Agile and Sprint means.
 
Agile: It is a way of doing an iterative and incremental approach to deliver a project (product/service).  Agile projects needs a cultural mindset change and has certain set of principles to be followed as prescribed by Agilemanifesto.org
 
While there are many implementation techniques for doing in an agile way, one of the most popular techniques is Scrum, which is a framework and is used for developing, delivering and sustaining complex products. 
 
As per the Scrum Org (parental body of Scrum framework) definition, the heart of Scrum framework is the Sprint which is a time period of one-month or less(can be 1 or 2 or 3 weeks as well) during which a "Done" , usable and a potentially releasable product increment is created.
 
Now let me try to answer why and how failures could have happened for these organisations from my perspective.
 
Why Failures happen in Agile Sprint based projects?
Before we take a look at this, we need to understand the fact that the world is moving away from the traditional models such as waterfall to the Agile world because traditional methodologies had much higher percentage of failures. As per the Chaos report of 2011 by Standish Group  proclaims that Agile Projects are 3 times successful with respect to software development when compared with delivering through traditional methods (as referred in Scrum - A pocket guide book by Gunther Verheyen). 
 
Having said that , now even as we make use of Agile for any sort of work (and not only for IT related), the fact that 16% of the projects which run in a popular technique - Agile Sprint(read Scrum) fail is a serious sign that something fundamentally could be wrong somewhere in my view, as an Agile Practitioner.
 
Two cases which i want to highlight:
Case 1:
For organisations, which move newly(transformation) to Agile, the issues come around how they adapt quickly to Agile mindset and practices. Failure happens when the team lingers on the traditional approach(Command and Control mode and not following servant-leader approach and not doing collaborative work and not having self-organised approach) despite putting the Agile processes in place.
 
Case 2:
Organisations which are supposedly mature in Agile Transformation(because they are into Agile for some years and executed many Agile projects) can have different set of problems. They may have some complex projects which might involve multiple vendors and coordination and cooperation required amongst the different teams for a product has to be precise
 
In general Organisations (applicable to case 1 and case 2) are averse to Risk-taking , in terms of failure, then there is more chance that their projects will fail.  Agile Scrum works on Empiricism. You get to know more about the product as you progress. Therefore the mantra is Fail Fast if at all you are going to fail. This is why many organisations try to have lesser length for a Sprint (1-2 weeks rather than having the maximum 1 month period, so that you minimize your risk of not making the right product to a shortest possible period. Thats the whole concept of the timebox. Unlike the traditional model in which you finally find that the project is not meeting the customer needs, Agile projects get to know the feedback from the stakeholders at a very early stage and get a continuous feedback.  Sometimes even in case 2 organisations, this will not happen properly due to multiple reasons , which is again a recipe for disaster.
 
Classification of Failures:
With respect to the Failures (in the attached document),  the top two quadrants, 'Agile Maturity' and 'People' can happen in Case1 organisations and 3rd quadrant 'Agile Scrum Maturity and Scrum Process Compliance' can happen both in Case 1 and Case 2 organisations. The 4th quadrant 'Product Vision and Volatile Market' can happen in Case 2 organisations.
 
How to prevent such Failures in Agile Sprint based projects?
Most of the Failures would be addressed straight-away if organisations understand and practice Agile and Scrum as they are meant to be. For each of the failure classification, corresponding best practices are also mentioned below. 
 
Here are probable reasons (in my purview) for failure and some of the best practices (in my opinion) to overcome such failures.  
 
1. Agile Maturity
 
Agile transformation could not have happened                properly (for organisations moving newly to
       Agile) :
       
Eg:  Proper vision would not have been put in
       place (as how to adopt Agile transformation
       across the organisation)
 
Agile will expose the existing dysfunctions in the        organisation/within teams in the organisation. So
       that could have been the reasons for failure 
   
   Eg: Inattention to Results, Avoidance of  
       Accountability, Lack of Commitment, Fear of
       Conflict, Absence of Trust
    
Organisations wait endlessly to make the actual change to Agile. They would plan for Agile movement but neither they would be in waterfall nor in Agile and end up in between  
Eg: They would have Dev Teams and QA teams working in Silo but calling the project as "Agile"
 
Agile Maturity Best Practices
 
For organisations moving newly to Agile
Have a proper vision . Identify the need for the change , reflect upon your current organisational state (where you are) and what are the Key Progress Indicators (KPI) which can track the progress that you make in this journey. Ensure proper coaching happens to Key Stakeholders/leadership team on Agile nuances and mindset needed for that From leadership team till the last cadre in the position hierarchy this information should pass on Alleviate the concerns/fears and perceptions that people might have due to moving of Agile and its philosophy  
Once the perception about Agile philosophy changes (for good) then dysfunctions will be minimized to a very negligible/minimal level
 
Teams would be truly cross functional which means they would be self-reliant and do their work without dependent on anyone.
 
2. People:
 
People(key persons/leadership level) might have been reluctant to change to Agile way of working(applicable to Organisation transforming to Agile).  Agile requires shift in mindset from the tradition "Industrial" paradigm (Command and Control mode) to 'Servant-Leader' mode.  Reasons are many ·       People could have felt that their position power and influence was marginalised
·       They would have thought that adapting to a newer way of working was difficult to imbibe into their working DNA
·       They would have thought that Agile can expose their shortcomings and hence felt  therefore that their personal reputation  could get damaged which could hurt their ego.
 
Management/Leadership team probably did not do enough groundwork to convince the organisation members on the need for Agile(applicable to Organisation transforming to Agile).  Effectiveness of a solution is determined by the Solution Quality and its acceptance. The acceptance factor(by the organisation employees) therefore might not have been there !!  
Best Practices for People Management
 
When Management team/Senior Leadership team is convinced and embraces the agile value and stresses the importance of Agile, then Agile Acceptance can happen When Leadership stresses the importance of Agile with statistical data or with proper justification or if there is an incentive (in terms of opportunity for employees while moving to Agile), then employees take upon Agile diligently  
3. Agile Scrum Maturity and Scrum Process compliance
 
Project Teams might not  have followed Scrum rules, principles  properly (ScrumBut)  Eg: Scrum Events might not have been properly  adhered.
They are key to Inspecting the work done and provides a chance for teams to correct things(Adaptation)
 
'Definition of Done'(DoD) might not have been strong enough to provide a strong product in a short period of time duration(1 week -1 month timeline). DoD defines the completion of "DONE" which indicates that an item picked for that particular Sprint is completed.           
Teams within the organisations, might not be either able to scale up to the dynamic scope changing  nature of the work within the sprints frequently  or might have seen some sprints cancelled due to the goal becoming obsolete which can demoralize them (the teams).  
Agile Scrum Maturity and Scrum Process compliance - Best Practices
 
If Project Teams are educated on Scrum importance by Scrum Master then it helps the whole scrum team
 
4. Product Vision and Volatile Market
 
Product owner might not have got his/her priorities right  while ordering the product backlog items. Reasons could be           ·       Stakeholder Engagement  might have been poor
·       Probably Prioritization was not given importance.
·       Too many stakeholders might have tried to influence their needs
·       Product Owner might not have been assertive and was not in a position to influence and shape the destiny of the product.
 
The product was not probably good enough to survive in the market as the Industry(to which the product belongs) is itself volatile and/or highly competitive.  
Product Vision and Volatile Market -Best Practices
Product owner should have constant interaction with stakeholder.  
Conclusion:
Agile is not just a methodology to be practised, but requires a mindset change. Scrum is a framework which has certain rules and boundaries that need to be respected. There are certain principles of Agile (developed by quite a few intellectuals) which needs to diligently followed and a set of Scrum values complementing these principles and set of Scrum guidelines that need to be applied on the project.
 
Doing these will ensure that organisation teams can have the ability to respond to ever changing needs of their customers. Failures when expectations are not met.
 
Gunther Verheyen , a popular Agile Scrum practitioner in his reputed book (aforementioned) says that Agile has 5 characteristics: People driven, Facilitation, Iterative-Incremental, Measuring success, Change.
 
In a typical Agile, People are respected for their creativity , intelligence and self-organising capabilities. Collaboration happens amongst them. Teams are facilitated by servant -leadership. Products are created piece-by-piece and agile processes are defined . Project progress and success is measured in terms of working product by frequently inspecting it and the actual value it can provide to the people  who will use it.
 
Even when requirements and implementations are predicted upfront, they would be susceptible to change due to volatile nature of the market and may be due to high competition as well.
 
So when organisations follow these Agile characteristics as part of their working DNA, the failure rates for them is going to be very minimal and their success rate would be high.

Normally when an issue happen in an IT Infrastructure, an assessment is made to see the kind of impact it can have for the business and ultimately to the customer. Accordingly fix for the issue will be put in by the respective teams.
 
So even though there can be multiple issues that might happen and for which there may be root causes which are distinct or isolated, each of the issue needs to be tackled in terms of its severity or priority level(decided on the basis of the business impact and the resultant effect on the key customers that the business has).
 
Some organisations address the tickets (called as Incidents in IT Infrastructure projects) in terms of Priority and some organisations, in Severity.
 
Sample Classification of  Priority tickets denoted by P1,P2,P3,P4 where P1 and P2 are critical/High respectively and P3-Medium and P4-Low or
 
Sample Classification of Severity tickets denoted by Sev1, Sev2, Sev3 and Sev4 ; where Sev1-Critical; Sev2-High, Sev 3-Medium ; Sev4- Low
 
Now if the issue is of a critical/high nature then we need to put a quick fix. Often the fix would be a workaround. Permanent fix might be later. But if the issue is of a lower nature(priority or severity) then those incidents (issues) are pushed to 'Problem Records' which is used for providing Permanent fixes.  This is because the Service Level Agreement(SLA) for Resolution time for  Sev1/Sev2 or P1/P2 is very short(in minutes to few hours) and for Sev3/Sev4 or P3/P4 , it can be mostly(in a single day to few days or so). 
 
Therefore, it is the severity/priority of the issue that decides the best way to handle the given issue. Accordingly it is decided to have the issue either to be incident managed and needs to be addressed immediately with some sort of fix, or it can be marked as a problem record and moved to 'Problem Management ' category, for a permanent fix.
 
However there are few things that can be done:
1. Maintain a Known Error Database (KEDB). This is an industry standard. Since we talk about issues with isolated root causes, it becomes difficult to track things as we don't have a standard cause to provide a fix. 
 
So what happens when an issue happens again for the 2nd time say after a month (from the 1st time when it occurred). Imagine, the person(say a Subject Matter Expert) who provided the fix is not available on that day (when the issue happens or reoccurs), for whatever reasons(assume he/she is resigned). Whoever is working on the issue may have to go through the issue all over again. It would unnecessarily take time to fix the issue.  The knowledge therefore would have been lost. 
 
Imagine if we have multiple issues with different root causes and how difficult it would be to address each one. For such scenarios, KEDB can be used - which is primarily serves as a log of issues with solutions captured(it can be workaround or permanent fix). It can be a customized tool, excel sheet or any other file.
 
2. When there are multiple issues and if an issue is repetitively occurring, whether it is high or low priority(severity) issue, then the issue can be tagged as a 'Problem Record' as part of Problem Management. 
 
3. While many teams goto Problem Management based, on getting repetitive issues , which is reactive Problem Management , some wise teams - look for patterns and trends in their project/applications and based on that do a proactive problem management (by basically finding out potential problems) and have problem records created and proactively do a permanent fix avoiding in the process , potential problems (which can avoid even disasters).
 
There are tools like Kepner Tregoe method which can help Problem Management. 
 
Conclusion:
IT Infrastructure projects will have different type of issues with different priority/severity level. Each may have different or distinct root causes. But as we saw, based on the severity/priority of the issue, the issue is dealt with.  It is always a good practice to have a KEDB to ensure that workaround solutions or solutions for permanent fix is available. 
 
For instance, an error in a page can happen and which may be a critical or high issue, but for which the workaround solution might be say restarting a server(just a crude example but using here to drive home the point). So this can be mentioned in KEDB for that issue
 
Also there could be cases where issues can be created as Problem records so as to provide permanent fixes. In such cases, for recurring issues, records are created reactively (issues have happened as incidents - be it critical/high or medium/low) and proactively also records can be created. The more proactive potential issues we find and provide upfront fixes, better would be stability of the applications in production, better customer satisfaction and minimal adverse impact for the business. 
 

In my opinion, there are quite a few reasons as why DMAIC is not favoured by some of the leaders.
1. (Perceived) Time taken by the DMAIC project to showcase the right results to the relevant key stakeholders (whow may be keen to
see the outcome of the project), as they expect. Imagine that you are doing a black belt project which can take a minimum of 6 months - 1 year. Now with a DMAIC in place, you have some amount of work to do. You need to compare of measurement of AS-IS and TO-BE process. The comparison might be exhaustive and data collection can be time taking as well.  As DMAIC involves improvement of an existing process, completing the six sigma DMAIC project with the desired result can be a real nightmare for the leader who is in charge/accountable for the project.
2. Potential Complexity involved in data collection as more quantitative data and statistical tools are involved 
3. In the opinion of the leaders, there may not be a practical significance (outcome) despite a statistical significance by doing the six sigma DMAIC project.
4. As lot of data to be collected to compare the AS-IS and TO-BE systems, and also the fact that the measurement system is also intensive and complex and is time consuming, getting a dedicated(read motivated) team might be difficult  (in the opinion of the Six sigma leaders). Hence the leaders might feel DMAIC projects not worth trying under the circumstances.
 
Conclusion:
As we had seen above there could be a number of reasons because of which leaders do not go for DMAIC. There could be some rare cases where Six Sigma leaders(say, of a Service Providing organisation) might be directly involved with customer business growth.
 
The customers might want the Six Sigma leader to be focusing more on their products(better product designing) rather than any of their process which in their opinion (and actually) is well placed. In that case, neither the six sigma leader nor the service providing organisation has got any chance. They nend to act as per the customers. So in this case DMAIC will go out of the way.
 

A wiki defition of Simpson's paradox, also known as yule-effect states that, it is a phenomenon in statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.
 
How this happens?
We always try to see relationship between the dependent (Y) and independent (X) variables. But there could be also a factor- called the confounding variable which can influence both your X and Y which we might not have considered while taking decisions. This plays a hand on the reversal of the trend!!  
 
Let us see some examples
 
Example:1 Imagine a hypothetical case. 
Elections
 
Ruling Party % won
 
Opposition Party % won
 
Candidate for Local Councillor  Election
50%
45%
Candidate for City Mayor Election
50%
40%
Candidate for State Assembly Elections
40%
60%

In a state(or province), two elections happens in some of the major cities - first councillor elections happen for the place/area, you live within a city, followed by mayor election for your city (due to unforeseen circumstances). Now sometime later, state assembly election comes. Even as in the first two elections, the members of the ruling party wins, the crucial assembly elections the ruling party loses!!  
 
While there is a correlation between a party and the candidate who represents the party , for each of the election, there  could be other confounding factors such as people's perception of the party, in matters close to their heart or liking or any other lurking factors whose effects would have been failed to be studied or noticed.
 
I also noticed some sites like https://www.britannica.com/topic/Simpsons-paradox, and also wikipedia for this topic , for further understanding and good examples.
 
Conclusion:
It is very important to identify confounding factors which can impact the causal relationships. Failure to do so, can create the Simpson's paradox. This could even confuse the decision makers to take a firm decision. The positive side of this is that it will highlight that there is something more to be explored to!! 

There are many reasons as why Green Belt Professionals do not use Hypothesis Testing despite they getting trained on it:
1. Time constraint due to Management needs: One of the foremost reason (in my opinion) is time. Companies (especially Corporates!!) do have their own agenda - in completing a number of Six Sigma Green Belt(GB) projects (or even Black Belt projects) within a stipulated time period(normally half-a year or a year)- For instance, in the case of an IT company, it can happen at every vertical (Say Banking, Finance, Health,Manufacturing...) - this depends on a company's needs!! This goal can probably be set by top leadership and/or a combination of market needs(from Company's strategic thinking or goal alignment perspective) and Key stakeholders/top mgmt.  So every Continuous Improvement(CI) activity/project might have a curtailed time period and therefore this hypothesis testing might be overlooked.
 
2. Time constraint (induced due to size and complexity of the Data Collected): Time is a precious commodity. Normally, any CI project like PDCA, Six Sigma could take atleast 3-4  months of time and only with the help of a dedicated Sponsor or a process leadership team or a motivated set of individuals , a CI project such as a six sigma project(be it GB or BB) can be achieved.Now Assume (For simplicity sake, taken a crude and yet powerful(?!) example)that we are collecting data for efficiency(in terms of timely availability at the destination and prompt start from the bus depot-both measurable things) of bus transportation within a state or province. I need to have at least 3-4 months of data to see a pattern of how bad (that's why you go for an improvement project. Is it not?) it is. Assuming now you have collected the data (do you ever thought data collection is an easy job always ? :-) ) Now as we move on to hypothesis testing, the complexity and size of the data collected becomes a big challenge. Multiple factors can come into play especially if the scope is for multiple bus transportation units(Different vendors operating different category of buses across multiple locations) in that said state or province. So the GB team may not have sufficient time to properly analyse and utilise the data collected given the time bound nature of Six Sigma phases. Therefore Hypothesis testing might not be preferred.  
 
3. 'Cost' Factor: Any continuous improvement activity requires few things: Motivated Individual, Idea(to improve), Time and Cost. Often you get the first two (in that order), but the next two(Time and Cost) are vital things which determine if the idea can be implemented over a stipulated period of time. 'Time' and 'Cost' should go hand-in-hand to have an improvement activity. Having time alone and not having 'cost' is a problem. Hypothesis testing can turn-out to be a costly affair especially when analysis is made on complex and huge data and if there is not a proper guidance from a Black Belt or Master Black Belt (say, in case of a GB/BB project respectively), or if there is no subject matter expert(functional domain) associated for helping the GB team on providing the finer points on the analysis of the data collected.Therefore the GB team may consider in relinquishing this(hypothesis testing) exercise.
 
I feel the aforementioned factors, are key reasons for Hypothesis testing not being used effectively.  A special case scenario is also there.
 
Fear Factor (Due to lack of Hands-On Experience): However well a person is trained on Hypothesis testing(for that matter any activity!!), unless the person gets a personal(hands-on) experience , he or she will not feel how and what it is to do a hypothesis testing. The fear factor(for some people it is difficult to overcome the inhibition) can cause a team to deny the use of hypothesis testing. Though this can be a rarity case(but i have seen people with such inhibitions because hypothesis is a demanding technique and which requires deeper understanding and usage and training knowledge is not suffice and practical knowledge also slightly steep and only by experience you get accustomed to that).
 
Conclusion: Hypothesis testing is a very key activity in a continuous improvement exercise. Reason is that , you can statistically prove your point(read notion) or argument(Statement). It can statistically tell how significant or insignificant the factors that you took for your hypothesis is justifying the outcome.In other words, With hypothesis testing, we can actually see how much the statistical significance is being converted .into practical significance and how much it benefits the business. Therefore it brings so much value to the table. Its therefore, wiser to use hypothesis testing more so especially if the professionals are more trained in it.

Let me start with my assumption of what it takes to qualify as a Project in Project Management realm , a Project and a Process in Business Improvement or Six Sigma world.
 
Project in Project Management Realm: In a one-liner , we can say a project will have an objective with a definite start date and a definite end date.
 
Eg:1 Converting a meter-gauge rail(track) to a broad-gauge rail can be a project, for Railway engineers.
Eg:2 Creating a software product can be a project, for an IT team.
Eg:3 Constructing a shopping mall could be a project, for a builder
 
Project in Business Improvement of Six Sigma context: A project will have a goal with a definite start and end dates. That will be accompanied by a strong business case explaining an explicit reason as why this project is needed in the first place and it will highlight the end dates for the various phases that a project might have.   
 
Process: In generic terms , we can say that it is a set of instructions/sequence of steps to achieve a particular activity/complete an event. Essentially , every process would have certain parameters which act upon as inputs and then there could be a set of actions or a sequence flow which would be necessary so that there is a tangible outcome which serves our need. That outcome becomes the output which will/can be consumed by other actors(could be another process /events/users/activities..)
Eg:1 Setting up Continuous Integration(CI) is a key process as part of Continuous Delivery and Deployment(for delivering your IT delivery rapidly).
CI includes multiple steps :
1. Check-out the latest code from the Code Repository (say GIT) and put that into local workspace(Developer's workstation).
2. Do your code changes on the local machine and unit test it thoroughly
3. Post a peer review (and after fixing comments, if any - unit test it again)
4. If everything ok, get the latest code from Code Repository,
5. If no difference found in the version of the code, then push the code to the code repository with proper comments  
5. Automatically Build should be triggered (When a change is pushed).
6. If build succeeds, then ensure that your change is successfully working in the Integration box.
Now as we see multiple steps are there. The sequence is important to get a successful testing of your functionality which is the outcome from this process.
     
Eg:2 Code Review is a process - Steps involved: 1. Review the code. 2. Check if the code adheres to coding standards and guidelines. 3. Whererever the stds/guideline not followed, provide proper feedback comments. 4. Ensure the developer fixes the comments.5.Ensure functional misses are not there. 6.Ensure same mistakes are not repeated. 7. Ensure all comments are fixed.  
 
Now let us first compare and contrast a project in Project Management(PM) realm and a project in Business Improvement(BI)/Six Sigma  world.

 

We have compared and contrasted project in PM realm and in BI/Six Sigma realm. Let us now contrast a project and a Process in BI/Six Sigma context.
 
 

 
Let me explain these difference with an example. Imagine an improvement project. An IT team's delivery quality is poor. They are getting multiple escalations and they are unable to meet their SLA of <5% defects in a critical application. This is happening for the past 6 months. Now team is doing an improvement project. It is trying to zero in the problem. It needs to fix the issue in 4 months time. Goal is to have <5% defects by 17th June 2019.
 Now it starts to check its flow from where it has to correct itself. It reviews the AS-IS process. It finds (after doing Value Add activity process) that it needs to improve upon Design Patterns(for Coding), Code Review, Automatate Unit and Functional Testing.  These are processes which have their own steps which need to be done so that quality of the deliverable meets the defined SLA as per the goal statement. Now without the processes, the project goal cannot be achieved. At the same time, the processes can be independently achieved but if not tagged to a project, the chance of systematically finding the deficiencies in a process or a need for a new process(if old process is too bad to be modified) would be missed out.
 
Conclusion: From the differences that we saw now, it is clear that process and project in a business improvement/six sigma world or different entities. Having said that there is always a bit of these two words conveniently interchanged especially in Business Process Outsourcing(BPO) industries. Many teams use process to represent what could be possibly called as a project. For instance, those teams might call HR Payroll system as a process, whereas an IT team might call that as a project. One reason it could be because of the fact that BPO bretherens could construe each of the steps in the system happening in a sequential flow.  But in general, by and large as the definition says and based on the differences that i articulated above, my conclusion is process and project are two different entities.

From what i have seen or observed , general human tendency is to do Correlation and Comparison of things. People correlate one thing to another thing and compare things(objects, persons (read attributes/characteristics)...).
 
Why they do this ?
Because the human beings are trained and taught to do so since time immemorial. Man is a social animal with plenty of knowledge!! Human tendency is to go from a 'known' entity to an 'unknown' entity, in many cases. So the comparison starts from there.
 
What are we trying to say by "Apple to Orange" comparison.
It does mean that we are trying to compare two different things(in reality it could be about some objects or about some human beings). In the case of human beings, the comparison could be about their characteristics , in a personal context; skill set, experience-level, soft- skills, etc... in a professional context.
 
So why is this important ?
Because as a human brain is naturally aligned to compare people , it does not see what/whom needs to be compared with what/whom. This is the generic behaviour which needs to be consciously be changed by every individual to stay balanced. Apple to Orange comparisons , therefore would happen in reality in several cases, though the comparison often would be unfair.

Let us see some examples where 'Apple to Orange' Comparison becomes necessary  
1. In an IT organisation, an experienced employee(10+ year exp.), resigned from his job. As his job was a billable position, the service providing company found a lesser experienced(1 year) professional to replace the experienced professional. The customer knew the experience of the replaced staff. But a week later, the customer is not happy with the performance of the new staff stating the team that new staff needs to be upto speed and expects the quality as he got from the experienced person. Here clear 'Apple to Orange' Comparison has happened. Both the experienced employee(resigned) and the new employee have knowledge in that technology(Advanced Java) but the knowledge gap is wide. But for the customer, this is immaterial. He needed the same quality as it was earlier. The onus will be on the service provide to bridge the gap but the point is this comparison is made because the customer is expecting the same quality.
 
2.In an appraisal process in an IT company, all the team members(TM) were appraised. TM1, TM2, TM3 were all experienced in that order - with 10,7,5 years of experience respectively. TM4,TM5,TM6,TM7- were experienced with 4,2,1,1 years respectively. TM5,TM6, TM7 felt that it was unfair to compare them with senior TMs (TM1, TM2). They felt that they were feeling the pressure. Even though the project mgmt team had done some criteria for each experience, still the lesser experienced TMs felt that appraising them with the seniors would not help their appraisal. This is often the case we would come across many teams in many industries.
 
3. While doing software estimation:
    a). Say you have a start up company and you have got few development projects. Suddenly you get an enhancement cum maintenance project. Since you do not have an estimation template for an Enhancement , you rely on your estimation template for Development . You compare that (only to see if you get any initial idea) and try to tailor to suit your enhancement project requirements. In reality this could  be a failure.
b). Say you have an estimation model for Java/J2EE technology . Now you are getting a mainframe project and you do not have an estimation model for it. Now you   decide to take a leaf out of your Java/j2EE estimation model and take that as basis for your mainframe estimation.
 
In both the cases, we are making an Apple to Orange comparison ,as we are left with no choice but go from 'known to unknown' entity (to begin with).
 
4. How many times we would have seen the fact that to find the Greatest of All Time (GOAT) in a sport, we compare people who played the sport in different eras? Imagine how that sport would have been played in each era. Then how will you find GOAT ? Of course. various factors might be considered by the agencies (companies/relevant parties) which decide on the GOAT. Sometimes multiple Agencies who pronounce the result on GOAT, choose different players as the GOAT (they do not concur), because they may choose different factors.  So to find the GOAT , we are making an Apple to Orange comparison and we try to minimise this indifferent comparison by bringing in various factors. Otherwise how can you say , who is the greatest cricketing batsman of all time, greatest tennis player of all time, greatest golfer of all time ?  How difficult or easy to compare a tennis player who played lawn tennis in a wooden racquet, with a tennis player who played his tennis in synthetic hard court with a graphite racquet?   
 
Is there any technique to carry out such a comparison?
Honestly am not sure if there is any technique. I could think of few things however which can give some quick guidance , in my opinion.

1. Organisational Process Assets (OPA) - Previous projects could have done like this and could have updated the organisation's repository - Documents could be like logs, Excel sheets, Lessons Learnt etc.,. Those artifacts can have data on the comparable entities and the associated data that was required for each of the comparable entity and the decisions made on the comparison.

2. SharePoint, Online database - Where Information or factors deciding the comparison can be captured; data about comparable entities

Conclusion:
Comparing things is a human mindset and has become a prerogative. Nothing can stop a person from comparing things . In a business context, this comparison takes importance because of cut-throat competition across the globe in every industry.Therefore , Apple-to-Orange Comparison , even though it may seem not correct, it is becoming increasing essential part of our day-to-day life.  
 
 

Nothing in this world can be perfect or 100% correct. However and whatever we do, there may be always a chance of improvement.The moment, a person feels that he/she has done enough, he/she stops to grow especially, in his/her professional career/ work. Every person has to do a self-reflection on how he/she did his/her current work. This self-reflection is what Hansei is all about.
 
Why it is a central idea in Japanese Mgmt:
By doing a self-reflection, a person is aware of his/her strengths and weakness (area of improvement). He/she can
polish that missing attributes from his/her reportoire. If that person's work quality or results or work ethic is falling short of expectation, then the person ensures he does an apology to the rest of his/her colleagues/management. This is a prevailing cultural behaviour of the Japanese.This is essentially captured by Hansei. Hence this self-reflection mechanism plays a critical role.
 
How does Hansei relate with Kaizen:
As i stated earlier in my first paragraph, if nothing can be 100% perfect, then there is still scope for Improvement. Did not we hear this regularly,  that a particular company operates at 'X' Sigma, another company operates at 'y' sigma. Why ? because every company wants to push itself to get the maximum results. Ideally they would want the individuals as well as team to do continuous improvements, which is what Kaizen will do. Once a kaizen is done, the team (which did the kaizen) would reflect upon what went well and what can be improved. The team will make a honest assesment of what it did and how it could have been done better - with an individual and team assessment. This is where Hansei comes into picture.

Let me give an example how Kaizen and Hansei can be correlated and why Hansei is essential:
 
In an IT organisation, one portfolio for a customer relationship(engagement with a specific customer organisation), was operating under a Managed Service model in an Agile environment, and one of the project teams improved itself from doing manual testing (unit and functional) to automated unit testing using JUnit(Unit Testing) and Selenium as a Kaizen initiative. The team was happy on the achievement, but when it did a retrospection at the end of one Sprint later than when it was implemented, to see how the automation works , it felt the test cases covered were not effectively implented. The focus on 100% test coverage and the requisite quality was missing. This made the team to again working on improving the process - in this case about writing quality test cases - . So the team decided to moved to Behaviour Driven Development approach. So after doing the self-relfection, the team decided to do an improvement activity(Kaizen).   
   
Conclusion:   
Self-awareness is a must for any person to grow, personally and professionally. Here we are focussing on the professional front. No one (for that matter any team) can be 100% right. Telling in lighter terms to portray this aspect alone, if you are an avid fan of the game of Cricket, you can notice the fact that the legendary Sir Donald Bradman had an average of 99.96% (he could not score 4 runs in his final innings to get the coveted 100%). Whatever you are going to do as an individual/as a team, there is always going to be scope for improvement. Improvement cannot occur unless you realize what you did, how you did and what could be done better. This self reflection with a degree of humbleness, and eagerness to improve things, will make an indvidual grow as a human being in his/her professional career and a trust-worthy leader. 

In Japanese, it is called "Across Every where". What does it mean in this context ? Sharing best practices horizontally across an organisation. It also talks about the learning of failures across organisation. The objective is to share the learnings/continuous improvement ideas. For instance, staffs in one department might be asked to see and observe the improvements made in another department.
 
Let us see some examples from various sectors:
IT Sector:
In an IT organisation,  one project team used a Continuous Integration server and displayed reports on Code Coverage and Coding Standards compliance, on a giant monitor. It was transparent for the entire team and management. Developers were quick to spot their mistakes and made corrections. This improved the quality of the system with minimal defects resulting in a satisfied customer. This was highlighted as a major success in that project's portfolio and the Group Leader of the particular customer unit/relationship (where the project belongs to) , requested other teams to see and observe the changes made so that it could be replicated across the rest of the customer unit/relationship. The Other teams observed the changes and replicated this successfully.
 
Manufacturing Sector:
In a manufacturing company, a team(let us call it T1)  did a Six Sigma DMAIC project to reduce cycle time for the processing of its product. Another team from different department saw the success stories of T1 through a circulated success story presentation and met T1 manager and SMEs, in person, to understand more about the improvements made in T1's processes.
 
Retail Sector: A major Retailer had three outlets in a big city. Outlet in one location (Location A) was having its products sold routinely and growing in size everyday and the other two outlets (in different locations) were not doing business that well. Managers of Location A decided to share the know-how about improving the business with the managers of the other 2 outlets.The managers in these 2 outlets were also keen to know how location A outlet is doing well. With Effective feedback and suggestions (as a survey), obtained from social media, mobile phones, customers's interests/tastes were captured by the outlet (in location A). 
 
What damage can be done due to lack of yokoten in an Organisation?
In my opinion, following could be some of the key points:

1. Innovative Ideas/improvements will cease to flow through the organisation.
2. Lessons learnt from failures will not be passed across the organisation.
3. Process cycle time reduction, Productivity Efficiency, Quality Efficiency may not be achieved across the organisation as  per its expected standards, thereby resulting in either not meeting customer standards or not able to achieve the  benchmark standards(if the organisation is especially a leader in a given sector).
4. Potential loss of business due to unsatisfied customers, in some cases.    
 
Let us see how lack of Yokoten is restricting Continuous Improvement in many companies:
1. A retailer had few outlets in a city. One outlet had always so much crowd and it had all kinds of products. But still waiting time for paying the products was quick. The queuing system to Point of Sale(POS) was quick with multiple layers and classified/ categorised in terms of senior citizens/ Rest.Parents with Toddlers were given preferential treatment. These kind of queuing did wonders to the delivery speed in that outlet.  But unfortunately the other outlets did not follow suit of this as mgmt failed to stress this importance to the other outlets as they could not bring the shift in cultural mindset among the staffs of the outlets as they had been operating in a different way.   
 
2. In an IT company, an Agile Scrum team had developed a software product using Test Driven Development (TDD) (In TDD, Test cases are written first, before code is developed. This ensures every unit of functionality is addressed.  Normal approach is to code first and then test.There is a chance that we may miss some functionalities to be unit tested in this approach. So TDD is better than this approach,  in this aspect.). The team also did Unit Testing automation. The team was able to successfully deliver a quality product, of incremental value[every agile sprint , you are bound to deliver some stories(requirements) - which keeps updating your product features/functionalities]. But this team was working on a Non-disclosure agreement based project. So the team had its own reservations in sharing the know-how on the processes done. The team should have been worried about the data and not on the processes which are industry standards. But that was not the case.  The team members themselves had done this for the first time. Therefore, they could not share how they did the processes without the actual data. The portfolio leads were skeptic about the sharing of processes (inspite of having people who can showcase to the other teams). This deprived some teams who projects got transformed to Agile, as their customers were moving towards Agile.  Those teams wanted badly to see how TDD and Automation (Unit Testing) were done. But the opportunity did not happen.  

Conclusion:
Bringing positive change is a cultural mindset. Effectiveness of solution is product(read combination) of Quality of the solution and Acceptance of the solution. Its the acceptance factor that decides the fate of the solution(in this context innovations/improvement ideas/learning the lessons as what not to be done). Whichever companies(employees in those companies) refute to get changed/adhere to the solution provided/suggested (within their companies) fail to grow as an organisation. This will be the case for any industry. As i stated above in one of the earlier paragraphs, you can see what effect(damage), lack of yokoten can bring to Organisation. Therefore, i  feel, that yokoten should be part and parcel of an organisation's culture.  

Let us see key roles involved in a typical Six sigma project .
  - Team Member(s) (who belongs to the Six Sigma Project)
  - Six Sigma Green Belt(GB)
  - Six Sigma Black Belt(BB)
  - Champion (Some companies might not have this may be- this person will be involved in Tollgate reviews(along with Black belt), removes barriers for the team . Some  organisations have champions as sponsors)
  - Six Sigma Project Sponsor
 
I have arranged the roles purposefully from a bottom up approach.
 
Note :
There is another role - Six Sigma Master Black Belt (MBB). However it is not relevant to any specific project, but all six sigma projects will come under this umbrella.
 
Let us dissect for which of those aforementioned roles, a person can ask the WIFM question and why .
 
1. Champions/Sponsors:
  Six Sigma costs energy, time and effort. People playing these roles would expect either a tangible benefit such as ROI outweighing this cost or an intangible benefit
of customer satisfaction doing a six sigma project, which potentially results in getting a new business opportunity, in the nearby future.
 
2. Black Belt(BB):
   BB are defined roles in that, persons playing this role are expected to do certain activities and they are bound to abide by that. Unless they feel that there is a strong reason for not executing a six sigma project which they can justify, they are supposed to execute. Therefore, in my opinion, BB shall not indulge in asking WIFM

3. Green Belt:
   In my opinion, a Green Belt certified person should not ask WIFM. Because he is already aware (or supposed to be) of the impact Six Sigma can make when pursued in the right way as it should be. He/she may not be fully aware of the tools/techniques in Six Sigma much like the BB. That can be his/her only shortcomings. The GB has to understand the fact, that this role may not be 100% of his/her work. Six Sigma activity will be an additional work , apart from his/her regular project work. This extra effort spent in six sigma is compensated by the fact that the GB learns additional tools/techniques with constant interaction with the BB , which can be used in some of his/her day-to-day project activities.
 
4. Team Member:
   I feel a person playing this role, has the absolute legitimate right to ask the WIFM question. Because he/she will need to know the factors which can motivate him/her to work and put that extra effort. Without knowing about something, who would be interested to touch anything ?  The team member is the one who will gather the data for measurement and he/she will do have to some other basic activities. Gathering data is a cumbersome and tedious activity in general. It can be boring at times. There has to be quite a few awareness sessions to the team members which talks about the importance of Six Sigma and what benefits it can give to the team and organisation and crucially to the customer(internal or external). It is the benefit to the team , that team members would be interested in. Not everyone be interested to go with a career ambition towards Six Sigma. How will we motivate those team members? If we are able to do that, then you get succeed in your objective, with respect to the work assigned to the team members. Remember the fact this is primarily a volunteer role , unlike say a BB role (which is a designated role).
    
Conclusion:
My take is that Persons playing either one of the two roles - Sponsor, Team member have the legitimate need or requipment to ask WIFM question though the need or reasonfor them to ask that question may differ. Person playing the sponsor role will ask because of what benefits the six sigma project can bring to the organisation. Person playing the team member can ask that question to know what kind of growth it can bring to him- whether career growth, promotional benefits, monetary reward, visibility etc.,.
   

Internet of Things (IoT): It is a network of physical devices which communicate data amongst themselves, through the help of enablers such as Sensors, software programs etc.,. The sensors could use say WI-FI, RFID, etc.,. to communicate the data.

Advantages of IoT:
1. Organisations get big(huge) volume of data (as part of data analysis) for processing , in a very short span of time.
2. Faster Response, since data is obtained and then corresponding relevant actions can be taken quickly, irrespective of   the industry usage.
3. Cost Reduction or Optimised Savings for an Organization while doing a business, as information is reached quickly and relevant action is done before or on time.
4. Satisfied Customers(end-user who receives the service).
    i). Gets timely information from the IoT system/device and as a result receives timely service/product.
  ii). Saves time/effort, cost, energy depending upon the type of IoT service he/she gets.
iii). Improves Operational Performance.
5. Data Communication can happen between man to machine and machine to machine seamlessly sharing useful information.
6. Its not specific to any industry. Can be used in any industry.
7. Can saves a person's life with critical information on health using IoT wearable devices and therefore acts as a potential Life-Saver.
8. Can detect potential delay in specific routes, when used in Transportation Management.
9. Any device obliged(adhering to) to the standards of Internet of things platform (designed by the manufacturing Organisation who wants to have its products/service to be tapped/consumed) , can get connected to any other devices having the same standard. This makes that the intended activities/operations can be done/achieved irrespective of the device that we use. It could be via a smart phone, wearable device, laptop, some electronic device and so on.....
10. Can greatly help in shaping/changing the Economic condition of an Organisation, even a Country.  
I have listed above, a basic set of common advantages that you normally associate with IoT.  However, Virtually , in every sector, there are many advantages using IOT. 

Examples:
Let us see few examples of IoT across few areas/sectors/Industries.
 
Transportation/Traffic Management: Imagine you are in a city which has a narrow road landscape. City administration has made several roads as One-way and there is lot of traffic jams in these roads. Now with an IoT enabled transport management system, the City Administrators, can guide the public through various points(may be to dedicated traffic mgmt teams or in vantage positions across the city or any end-users of the IOT system). This is just a basic example. IoT can be harnessed very efficiently in this sector.  There are many private transport management companies which uses IoT for their day-to-day activities and improving both their businesses and customer satisfaction. Transportation/Traffic management can happen anywhere in Road, Rail, Sea, or Air, depending on where IoT is implemented.  
 
Household(Home) Appliances: Imagine you are able to turn off your lights in your home, using your mobile. This could be one of the common and simplest usage of IoT. This way Smart Homes are created.
 
Health Management: Wearable devices ensure that your health conditions to be monitored. Imagine the power of this. Assume that a person(patient) has got a high Blood Pressure and is hospitalized recently. Now he/she has been told by the Doctor that he/she has to be monitored daily atleast for a week before being discharged. The Patient now will have to be there in that hospital and some attender might also be there from his/her family. So this one week forced stay can make the patient and his/her family with undue pressure. Having a wearable device ( a IoT based device) can solve these kind of issues. With the device, monitoring can be done as the patient wears it. That would ensure that he/she can wear the device (move out from hospital, in the process) and do his/her routine affairs. The device would keep om providing constant data about the health condition of the patient.
 
Smart Cities: Imagine a network of IoT systems constructed for various utilities and departments such as Electricity, Energy, transport, Waste Management, Water Management etc.,. Will the city itself not becoming a Smart City ? A Clean, pollution-free, less-energy consuming, structured transportation - oriented, Pure water based, Uninterrupted power supply based City would be a reality.   
 
Key Point to be taken care:
With such a improved system/technology innovation , as IoT is, security becomes a critical aspect. IoT implementers need to be careful and diligently plan on securing the customer's data and make that safe. Data safety, Personal safety is a must in such a super technology innovation system.  
 
Conclusion: IoT is increasingly becoming the style of life. With the advent of IoT, Smart homes and Smart Cities have become a reality. Urban Development Planning gets improved /sophisticated. In general, Infrastructure is structured and improvised. IoT redefines the Energy sector. Transportation Management gets managed effectively and efficiently. Health Management is radically changed!! Weather Management suddenly has more ability to get accurate prediction and warnings about forthcoming dangers/issues!! Agriculture department which is very critical to a country's progress can be leveraged with right amount of data which can help farmers. Coupled with Big Data and Cloud Computing, IoT leverages its power in exponential form. A proper secured, well-thought out IoT implementation  can do wonders to any industry. As we can seen, IoT can change the lives of people, change the face of a nation!!  

A typical English dictionary meaning:
 Urgent - requires immediate action or attention.
 Importance - Having high/great significance or value.
 
Now let us take the problem statement where a person is looking onto Urgent tasks all the times and he/she is unable to focus on the important ones. Let me provide my ideas/views as how the person can deal with Urgent and Important ones, based on my experience.
Taking the Bull by the Horns:
When something is deemed as Urgent or important, you need to know how much Urgent it is and how important it is, especially when there are multiple tasks/activities?
 
Are that Urgent activities/tasks need to be done in minutes, hours, days ?  How important are those activities/tasks? Very important or Less important. If you have these information, it makes easy to prioritize things. Prioritization is the key aspect here, more so if you are dealing with multiple urgent and important activities/tasks.
 
Let me split Urgent activities/tasks into two categories as 'Very Urgent' and 'Urgent'. Very Urgent activities could be,  say ,it should be done in seconds/minutes. Urgent activities could be say can be done in few hours/ in 1 or 2 day's time (some cases in a week's time, may be). This is an arbitrary classification for example purpose. In reality, this may vary from team to team. Similarly let us classify Important activities as 'Very Important' and 'Important'. Now, having a matrix of which of these Urgent and Important activities to be taken, will give the right prioritization. The matrix can be as follows

Based on the matrix, activities/tasks that fall in these respective quadrants, can be prioritised accordingly. The next question will be how to decide which activities/tasks can come into each of these categories.  [Note: Having some sort of such a matrix helps you to provide more clarity and ease of use]. The stakeholders need to provide the classification of Urgent and Important activities/tasks. Now there comes the next issue ? What if there are several
activities/tasks which are in Quadrant 1(Very Urgent,Very Important). How will you prioritize all such activities/tasks? May be if the stakeholders are collocated, you can pull all folks to a meeting room quickly and get this sorted. In case, if all the stakeholders are in different places, schedule a quick call (may be send a mail invite and then share the bridge details) and get this sorted. If stakeholders are at different time zones, then accordingly schedule the call (if the activities/tasks give you that much freedom of time !!). But there is also another critical way of doing this exercise. You need to know 2 things: Which Stakeholder is powerful(read influential) in the customer's organisation (If stakeholders are also from your Organisation - you need to know that as well) and which of the stakeholder has high interest in these/activities/tasks(activities/tasks which may be relevant to him/her). Once you have that information, whichever stakeholder has high influence and high interest, accordingly you need to perform your activities/tasks, as per that order of combination of the two aforementioned factors(from high to low). Let us see that Stakeholder matrix.

As we have seen above, you can define the quadrants on your own way. Content in Quadrant 2 can be in Quadrant 3 as well, for instance. Objective is that you need to take into fact that in reality, a stakeholder with high interest (on your project activities/tasks) and more influence (on the organisation be it customer or service provider/vendor) will have more say and more so if it is from customer end. Such a stakeholder involved activities/tasks will take higher precedence for getting addressed. Ultimately subsequent activities/tasks would need to get addressed. In that case, depending on your organisational situations, activities/tasks related to Quadrant 2 or Quadrant 3 might happen.
 
Let us see some examples for 'Urgent' and ' Important' ones using the matrix that was defined earlier for Urgent and Important activities/tasks.

Before seeing some examples, let us not forget the fact that the definition or the classification for 'Urgent' and 'Important' activities can be or would be given by only by the stakeholders relevant to those activities/tasks. Our interpretation of those activities/tasks could be different from the stakeholders's, but it does not matter. Only the Stakeholder definitions /classifications need to be taken care.    
 
Ex1: Healthcare Industry
Let me categorize the activities/tasks, as per the 4-quadrant matrix.
Very Urgent and Very Important Activity : Doctor to do a life-saving operation on a patient - This becomes very important because its about saving of a life and it requires immediate attention. In general anything related to Security and Safety of anything will normally come under Very Urgent and Very Important.
Very Urgent and Important Activity : Specialist Doctors need to get updates on multiple patients's status who underwent operations on a given date.   
Urgent and Very Important Activity: Post the operation, after the patient had stayed in ICU, ensuring the patient has the requisite amenities in his/her allocated/dedicated room.
Urgent and Important Activity:  Specialist Doctor who did the operation need to be informed of patient conditions by Duty Doctors, once patient is shifted to a private room (for observation purpose- to see effect of post operation) .
Note : All these classification of Urgent and Important activities/tasks, can vary from individual to Individual or from Organisation to Organisation. They are defined by the relevant stakeholders.
 
Ex2: IT industry
Very Urgent and Very Important Activity: Production Support - Critical Incident(Severity 1) closure.
Very Urgent and Important Activity: Delivery of a key functionality for a key/critical end-user.
Urgent and Very Important Activity: All System Integration Testing(SIT) and User Advanced Testing (UAT) defects to be closed within a week.   
Urgent and Important Activity: Adherence to Coding Standing standards.
Conclusion:  In an ever demanding world, where there is plenty of scope for business to grow exponentially, there will be many urgent and important activities, that need to be done on a routine basis. With methodlogies like Agile and with advanced technologies, these challenges are admirably met, most of the times. But these do not come without any challenges/constraints. The workforce of an Organisation do have lot of activities/tasks and quite some of them could be urgent and important ones. Most of the times, the workforce team is calibrated to the rigours of such activities/tasks. That could be part and parcel of the team's work nature. Hence some teams may not feel the heat. But there could be scenarios where the team(s) or individuals might run into new projects/new set of activities/tasks that has many urgent and/or Important requirements to be dealt with.  How to deal with such scenarios? This is where you need to have Stakeholder inputs based on the matrix what we saw for Stakeholder and then have the priorities set. If you have only one Stakeholder, then you can get it from that Stakeholder. There are very good prioritization techniques such as Kano Model, MoSCoW model (for Agile specific projects) . For instance, Kano Model clearly articulates in terms of absolute necessity (Must Be) as the first priority. So put your Very Urgent and Very Important activities/instances on that front. Your sole objective is to make as what should be addressed first if there are multiple urgent and important tasks. For that whichever technique(or combination of techniques) is going to help, you can choose . But the above techniques are proven ones. In terms of specifically finding the Important ones, you can ask the stakeholder about the values (maybe in terms of ROI), a particular activity/task can bring in. Remember the customer/stakeholder might also be interested in having a MVP(minimum viable product), at the earliest. Therefore, with this kind of approach to Urgent and Important activities/tasks, the person can prioritise his/her activities/tasks.

Operational Definition: It helps in providing a clear-cut detailed definition of a metric. It provides a systematic way of transforming a conceptual definition to a kind of measurable one.

When can Operational Definition be defined ?
Before you collect your data ? Why ? Otherwise in reality, you may not be able to ascertain whether the collected data is right or wrong and therefore you cannot take a decision.
 
What will happen if there is no Operational Definition ? Why is it important ?
If there is no Operational definition for a metric or a characteristic which you need to know, you may not know how it should be used/addressed. In that case, an organisation can get erroneous or indifferent results. There would be no standardization of its usage/addressing.

Benefits of Using an Operational Definition(for a metric/characteristic):
1. There will be a standardized way of usage across the organisation.
2. It will be easy to explain about the metric/characteristic, to new joinees as it is standardized.
3. Since, how to do and what to do part is known, making errors or doing incorrect ways of things will be avoided.
4. A Qualitative product will be achieved because of #3.   

Let us see quite a few examples on Operational Definition.
Before we go on with some serious example, let me try to make with a simpler and easy example. Let us take the sport of Cricket(Please bear with me if you are not a keen follower of cricket). Now our matter of interest is "No-Ball" which is not a legal delivery, in Cricket. So you want to know the Operational definition of a 'No Ball'. That will tell when can a ball delivered be declared as No Ball and under what circumstances. Two teams were playing cricket in a popular, local tournament, played with international cricketing rules . Team A was batting and Team B was bowling. Team A was chasing a stiff target. The Umpires were checking consistently for 'Overstepping the bowling crease' no ball and 'waist-high' no balls. But the Umpires were not focussing on the number of fielders to be placed inside the 30-yard circle during the 'powerplay' period, when there is a 'fielder' restriction. This cost the Team A dearly and it lost the match very closely. This could not have been the case, had the batting team(Team A), knew the Operational definition of a 'No Ball'[effectively which will say how 'No Ball' can happen, which is actually not a legal delivery(an error case)]. So the 3rd way of a 'No-Ball' happening was missed out as the team did not have a clue about. Here for 'Overstepping', 'Waist-high' and 'Fielder Restriction Missing on powerplay period' can be seen by naked eye as a measurement way. Where there is an element of doubt, ball tracking mechanism can be used for the first 2 and 3rd Umpire replay can be used for the 3rd One. What is the decision to be taken for if each one of these is happening. For 'Overstepping' case, there would be an extra run and a 'Freehit' given. Similarly, for 'Fielder Restriction Missing' No-Ball case also a similar approach would be used. Because this was not known to the team, Team A suffered. Extend this approach to the Industries, we can really see how important this Operational definition is .
 
Let us move to a real world example.
In an IT maintenance project (support project which went to production),  a team was trying to measure the backlog management index(BMI).A BMI is nothing but the percentage of, dividing the  total no. of tickets (read issues/incidents) that got closed in a given month, by the total no.of tickets(issues) that had arrived in that given month.
 
i.e BMI= (Total no. of closed issues in a given month/Total no. of issues arrived in that given month) * 100.
 
The measuring characteristic here was the status of the incident ('Incident Status'). The tool where this was measured was 'Remedy'. There are many such Project related issue management tool(s) . Here the data was taken between the start date and end date of the given month(used every month of a year). All issues that were marked as closed in the tool, as of any date in the given month was considered for this measurement. All issues which had arrived in that given month, was taken for calculation for this measurement. The measurement unit was a dimensionless number.
What did this BMI imply ? If BMI was greater than 100, then backlog was reduced (issues on production got reduced) , else if BMI was less than 100, then backlog was increased. This is a proven operational definition existing for a long time, in the industry. But this was not used in that portfolio as this was the first time that the team ran into a maintenance project. In the initial period, there was a confusion about how this would be defined or interpreted. It was misinterpreted by people who newly joined the team. Why ?Because there was no operational definition for BMI (because it is an industry standard and the need for a portfolio-level definition was therefore missed out). The confusion was due to the fact that new joinees thought that they should take the 'closed' status of incidents/issues only for the incidents(issues) that got opened in the given month. Ideally all incidents that got 'closed' on a given month should have been taken. So without a formal operational definition, put in place, the data collected were skewed. This portrayed a BMI which was showing lot of backlog ,when actually it was not the case. Then when the root cause was identified, then the team put a proper operational definition and ensured that the data collected was correct and the results were there to see and customers saw more than 100% BMI, for most of the months in that calendar year.  
 
In one of my friends' hotel where i had dined, i found the hotel staffs collecting Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). One of the staffs asked me about how the food was ? I told food was tastier but the quality needs bit of improvement. He was bit perplexed as he could not fathom out what i mean by this. I explained that the quality of the food that i took was not upto the mark and that some of the curries and the corresponding ingredients were not baked propery.  But in general, food was tastier to the mouth!! When i found what could be the reason for him not understanding these things, i found that a proper documentation/practice of CSI is not followed and customer satisfaction has become a kind of a routine question and has been asked based on the experience of the staff. A Clear-cut operational definition of CSI was mising. Per owner of the hotel, the CSI tried to capture by that hotel was on 5 aspects - Ambience, Quality of the Food, Taste of the Food, Cost Effectiveness, Customer Care. For each of these aspects, there were certain ways of doing and measuring them. But that was not documented. All of these aspects/attributes can be meassured as Bad/Average/Good/Very Good/Excellent or a range from 1-5 (with 5 being the highest and 1 as lowest rating). They can be measured using a software app using Mobile or hand-held device or manually (depending on that hotel's capability) or any other way. Therefore with a proper operational definition, staffs can be at ease to take CSI across their customers in a consistent way.
 
Conclusion:
Having an Operational definition is very critical to the way how we see a metric or a characeteristic which we want to make use of. Without knowing how it will work, if we start collecting data, then the result can be unexpected or throw errors, that you do not want. We had seen the importance of 'Operational Definition'. Just to portray the importance of this , am correlating an important aspect in Agile Scrum called 'Definition of Done'. This talks about when a user story or a requirement is said to be 'completed' or 'Done'. The 'Definition of Done' ensures that a requirement is completed and that it can be pushed to production(ready for moving to production). 
The definition for this 'Definition of Done' is left to the discretion of the project team which is working on that requirement. Along with the product owner, the development team would define this. A typical 'Definition of Done' for an IT project which is Agile Scrum based could be : a User story should have - Code Completion, Unit Testing completion, Integration Testing completion, System Testing completion, No Severity 1 and Severity2 errors . Now the point here is that this 'Definition of Done' says about what constitutes a requirement's completion. But it does not necessarily tell how these things to be done. This is where 'Operational Definition' differs. It tells the 'how' part as well. Imagine what benefits would a team get if the 'Operational Definition' is defined for the metric(s) that it uses. This is why 'Operational Definition' is so important.
 

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. 
 

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.