chris.simon

Two points I would like to highlight in Mr Hussain's thought 1) Classification of doubtful activities as NVA- Classification of any activity is subjective. However, its good not to have any doubtful activities (pun intended) as it only shows an undecided state. Classification of NVA and VA only narrows down our search for optimization. That brings me to the 2nd point which is 2) Classification as VA does not have room for improvement- on this I have a different opinion. Process Improvements should be considered on other aspects of stability, consistency and capacity of the process- when big Y does not meet customer specs- establishment of Cp & Ck may help. Process improvements will be driven by changing & controlling identified small (x)s. Therefore, rejecting VA as no room for improvement may not be a good idea. I apolozise if this deviates from the discussion on classification of Mgmt process as NVA or VA, but i chose to write in because it might impact our thought process on process improvements based on NVA/VA classifications

One process i would definitely consider as NVA is testing or validation process. Do we call it management process- well i leave it to you guys to decide. Will the customer pay for it? - he may and i consider it as a mere transfer of cost and not a value addition. While it is definitely the responsibilty of any vendor to deliver a high quality output that is acceptable to the customer, how he does it is not what the customer should be worrying about. So the real value addition to what the customer gets is when the product can satify requirements without being tested Fancy thinking, but i would love a process where its just right all the time and the customer has the confidence is such process- till the time we can acheive that, i guess testing will be a necessary evil

There has to be further categorization of necessary evils (NVA) and unnecessary evils (NVA). NVAs continue to be automated, basically the first category- a good example is reporting. However, not everything can be automated. If there is a process, there will be a way of improving its efficiency. While we should cap all management practices as NVAs (going by the definition of it- unless we want to redefine it), we need to further look at what is a necessary evil and what is not and try to remove unnecessary evils & increase efficiency of processes for necessary Non Value Adds