Baby Step Technique (BST)

Have you seen a baby when he starts walking at his initial stage? The baby firmly puts one step further and wait until his first step made a solid landing in the ground. Unless and until, he is sure that his first step is placed and planted properly in the ground, he started moving his second step for further walk. This way he is ensuring that his first step should not be uprooted when he is moving his second step. The baby always worked in this way and covers the initial distance in a long span of time. He is not getting success at every attempt that he is doing. But he understands that efforts may fail, but one should not fail to make efforts.

Who told this little angel to behave like this? Who told him about the risks of putting steps? How he is ensuring that his first step landed safe in the ground? What is the timeframe for him to decide his second step movement?

Well, the questions are many, but the answer is simple, “God is great”.

I always appreciate this awesome technique and would like to name it as “BST – Baby Step Technique”.

What I learn from the textbooks is just for my resume, I believe more in informal learning, I learn more from the newspapers. I read books and articles about testing and quality. I question and critique everything aggressively. I write articles on my blog site regularly about my previous and current testing and quality experiences and encounters. I read books and articles that are NOT about testing and quality. And I notice babies also.

Now, let’s come out from this baby world and fit this BST in our Software Industry.

Throughout my carrier so far, I always saw that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. There are many who wants to make a difference but don’t know where to start. BST is the best example to start. Baby Steps Technique (BST) works in a similar way in IT as it works for a baby.

In our industry, we always messed up with different issues / concerns / doubts. But if you do not want to create a loaded and messy environment within your group, BST is for you only. In BST, one should split his/her tasks in small pieces of chunks and try to fix and close it before you are going to move in another task. "Establish time boxes" and "Finish partly done work" are two child techniques of BST. Instead of big bang approach, one should take small, incremental steps that maximize discovery.

Establish time boxes means that one should decide the completion time of each and every activity (irrespective of small and big one). Defining a completion date creates a time box for you and you will become conscious about the deadlines.

Finish partly done work. One should not keep the status of any action item as pending. Try to work in binary mode. Either one or zero. Making the status of any task as pending for more than a week is not recommended. BST can be failure for these guys who have a regular practice of doing so.

I am working on these two (or would say working with these two) from the last three years. From manager’s point of view, assigning time to complete, help team to complete timely and resolve obstacles quickly are the three basic activities that should be performed to make BST a successful technique.

BST always asks a question from its followers - Are you doing even one percent of what you think must be done?

I do agree that one of the easiest things to do in life is to come up with solutions, but one of the hardest is to actually implement them. But BST is a technique which can be implanted on large scale as well as small scale, with a baby steps.

Breaking the tasks into smaller one will always make your activities good, fast and efficient. And this is all BST is based on.

-- Sanat Sharma

Are you customer friendly?

Every day we're saying, 'How can we keep our customers happy?' 'How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will. Dealing with customers plays a major role in any organizations success or failure. Customers always never interested in our specification documents; they are interested in the answer to one simple question:

“Did the product do what I expected it to do?”

Quality in a product or service is not what the suppliers put in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. And the dilemma is Customer satisfaction cannot be measured, it can only be monitored. Ignoring the customer satisfaction can lead to unawareness. Sometimes a light you see at the end of a tunnel is actually an oncoming train. This is how ignorance can lead to unawareness.

Any organization (or I would say a successful organization) should have a trust relationship with their customers. Trust should be closely monitored because trust is invisible but the symptoms of its absence are not. Your most unhappy customers should be your greatest source of learning.

Now this is interesting. Just now, a thought came into my mind. I am trying to list down some expectations that I want from the product / service provider when I am playing a role of a customer. When I am a customer, I want that my talks, views and ideas should be listened attentively, taken seriously with basic courtesies and dedicated attention. I want a competent and efficient service / product with all the anticipation of my needs and all the explanations in my terms.

I want from the other side of the desk that I should be informed with all the options that they have and not to be passed around. Other than that, I want a friendliness, honesty and professional service with a follow through and empathy.

Recently, I went to buy something, big house hold item, in one of the biggest shopping mall of my area and all the things that I mentioned above was not done up to my expectations. Although the shopping store was too good, big and from a reputed market leader in the household products, but still I was not convinced and satisfied with the way I was handled. I immediately drop the idea. Not of purchasing the item, but to purchase the item from the same shop. After that, I went to another shop with a comparatively small setup with the previous one. I bought the product from their. That means, most of the expectations that I have from the providers, have been fulfilled.

See, how I am reacting when I am playing a role of the customer. I immediately switched to another shop when my expectations were not fulfilled. This means that one should be customer friendly to sustain the market. The continuous entry of new competitors is exploding choice of the customer. Competitors are making enormous investments for long term market shares.

Here I am trying to pen down a checklist that one should follow to maximize the customer satisfaction level.

1. Getting to know who is to be served and also what exactly to offer.
2. Find out what exactly a customer is looking for.
3. Let the customer know about what you can offer today rather than telling them what you will offer them at a later stage.
4. Get people who can deliver and meet deadlines.
5. Create prototypes.
6. Find the easiest approach for customer transition.
7. Customize your product offering.
8. Allow the customer to get the best possible price and reduce his costs.
9. Provide the best possible security to customer information.
10. Use the right kind of networking hardware and creating the proper system architecture to link disparate functions.
11. Use the right kind of software or combination of software for proper enterprise level linkages and integrations.
12. Develop a centralized customer information database available at all touch points and assisting in personalized marketing to the customer.
13. Proper knowledge management and integrating the same with the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution.
14. Educate employees and customers alike.
15. Viewing the CRM solution in the context of normal business activity rather than a complex front end.

I always insist on a statement, which is my favorite,

“Customer satisfaction is quality”

Most of the companies are working on this single liner about quality. These companies are allowing the customer to dictate specifications and quality standards. All the marketing efforts are directed at meeting customer needs, not market share. Marketers are tracking customer needs continuously and responding to them instantly. Corporate strategies are aiming at delivering greater customer values than rivals. All planning, process, and people are reconfigured around the customer.

As I said before, there is a huge competitiveness in the market. All the big market players are identifying the new competencies and growing to server the customer better. Costs are cutting down to deliver greater value at lower prices. TQM (Total Quality Management) plays a major role to raise the product quality, which the companies are using. Product cycle time are reducing to reduce time-to-market and boost responsiveness. Companies are developing their brands to generate long-term, not short term margins.

-- Sanat Sharma

Quality Circle

“A Quality Circle is a volunteer group composed of employees who meet to discuss workplace improvement, and make presentations to management with their ideas, especially relating to quality of output in order to improve the performance of the organization, and motivate and enrich the work of employees. The ideal size of a quality circle should be from eight to ten members.”

Well, the definition really looks good and impressive. Let’s go through another definition.

A small group of employees doing similar or related work who meet regularly to identify, analyze, and solve product-quality and production problems and to improve general operations. The circle is a relatively autonomous unit (ideally about ten workers), usually led by a supervisor or a senior worker and organized as a work unit."

-- Joel E. Ross and William C. Ross

After Second World War, Japan was the first country who started working on a very serious node on Quality. Quality circles were among the first Japanese management practices, which plays a major role in the success of most of the Japanese companies like Toyota. I have covered the success of Japan and meaning of Quality in some of my previous blogs.

When visiting Japan in the 1970s, American managers noticed groups of workers meeting to address the quality problems. The American managers recognized this as a practice that could easily be copied and returned home to institute it in their own companies. Quality circles (QCs) took off in the United States as a Japanese management mania peaked. The movement boomed in early 1980s as most large companies introduced this practice in United States.

But the bloom was soon off the rose, however, as firms fond themselves devoting a lot of time and attention to QCs and receiving relatively little in return. There were a number of reasons for the lack of results. Employees were only encouraged to work on quality problems during their meetings (usually about an hour a week) and spent the rest of their week just “doing their job”. Supervisors were often not involved in the program and were indifferent, if not downright hostile, to it. Perhaps the biggest problem was that QCs were “just a program”, cut off from and often opposed to the way the organization usually worked. Managers preached about the importance of quality work during their QC events, but when crunch time came, their attitude was, in the words of one QC member,” If it doesn’t smoke, ship it!” that means management’s goal was to get the product out the door as soon as possible. Not surprisingly, companies started to disband their QC programs, which were soon dismissed as just another passing fad. In the context of current interest in total quality, many managers look back on QCs as essentially a false start on the road to quality. It is interesting in this light to note that many Japanese companies still operate QCs and that they are seen as a critical part of the total quality control (TQC) effort in these companies.

According to the Union of Japanese Scientist and Engineers, 5.5 million workers take part in 750,000 circles. Managers as well as frontline employees are involved, and the circles are considered as normal part of working life, rather than a program. In fact, QCs often work to achieve the objectives set in the Kaizen process, (will define it further) which puts them in the mainstream of TQC activity. Some organizations provide monetary incentives for suggestions provided by circles, and employees in some firms make dozens of suggestions per year. It appears that the mistake made in the United States introduction of quality circles was not in introducing them, but in not taking them seriously.

Now coming back to Kaizen.

Kaizen (pronounced ki-zen) strategy has been called “the single most important concept in Japanese management – the key to Japanese competitive success”. It is the cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of small improvements that creates dramatic change in performance. In the Kaizen approach, as practiced in Japan, financial investment is minimal; everyone participates in the process; and improvements results from the know-how the experience of workers.

According to Japanese manufacturing expert, Shigeo Shingo

“Since improvement demands new procedures, a certain amount of difficulty will be encountered. Initially, new methods will be difficult. Old procedures, however, are easy just because they are familiar. As long as it is unfamiliar, even an improved procedure will be more difficult and will take more time than the old procedure. Thus no improvement shows its true worth right away. 99 percent of all improvement plans would vanish without a trace if they were to be abandoned after only a brief trial.”

Managers need systematic approach to drive continuous improvement programs. Some organizations follow some standard and popular approaches, while other develops unique approaches to meet their own needs and cultures.

A seven steps technique for accelerated continuous improvement.

1. Focus and pinpoint. Focus is about getting everyone on the same page with regard to goals and Pinpoint is about specifying in measurable terms what is expected.
2. Communicate. Communication should be done company-wide by publicizing key result areas, the vision, and the mission statements so that employees can answer the questions: what is being improved? Why is it important to the customer, to the company and to me? What has the management team committed to do to help? And what specifically company asking me to do? (I have covered the Vision. Mission and Policies in my last blog. Have you gone through it?)
3. Translate and link. Teams should translate the company-wide objectives into their own language and environment.
4. Create a management action plan. Management should create a plan with specific actions to reach a goal, including metrics to measure success. Each team member should asked to know what tasks need to be done, why they are important, and what the team role is in getting them done.
5. Improve process. Use the techniques like Fish bone, Pareto, QCs, Six Sigma. Management should know the difference between the experience and expertise.
6. Measure progress and provide feedback. Feedback should be visual, frequent, simple and specific. The baseline performance should be shown for comparison. The past, current period, and goals should be posted.
7. Reinforce behaviors and celebrate results. Learning leads to positive results by encouraging teams to celebrations to answer the questions: what did you do? Why is it important for the customer, the company, and the team? How did the team accomplish this achievement?

Products are better and cheaper to produce when everyone, at every stage in development, is responsible for the quality of their work. Actually, Quality is like buying oats. If you want nice, fresh, clean oats, then you must pay a fair price. However, if you can be satisfied with oats that have already been through the horse --- That comes a little cheaper!

Every time, I am saying that Quality is everybody’s job,’ and that’s true. But it must start with management. Management’s job is to lead people toward a goal. And Quality is the only goal that matters because Quality is planned, designed and built in – not inspected in. Quality is never improved unless it is a part of your personality.

-- Sanat Sharma

Vision, Mission and Policies (VMP)

After a short vacation of travelling, roaming, learning, speaking, listening, and reading, it's back to the blogosphere.

In India, a few days back, one of the most talked about car of the world, the Tata Nano, has changed her house from one Indian state (West Bengal) to other state (Gujrat). It was a major switch for Tata as they faced lot of controversies in West Bengal. I believe West Bengal is not aware of what they have lost. But I really appreciate the efforts done by almost all the industrial states of India to house the Tata Nano in their respective states. But finally, it was Gujrat, who got this lucky chance. Actually, it is not by luck. It was a great effort by the Gujrat government; as a result, Nano is in their bucket. It is due to this reason only that Gujrat is said to be the strongest state of India. Both politically and financially.

But the question here is not about the “Home town” of Tata Nano. The question is that how Ratan Tata, the owner of Tata, one of the biggest business houses in India, thought about this car, which is supposed to be the cheapest car in the world. Actually, here come the three factors based on which any business line can work and establish and Tata is not an exception.

First is vision. It was the first face to face meeting between Ratan Tata and the media about the Nano. He said that once he was going to somewhere in India and he has seen a family of four (2 adults + 2 children) driving in a two wheeler. It was a very risky drive as four of them were loaded dangerously in that vehicle. And on top of it, it was raining outside. All the four passengers were on a very unsafe drive. Instantly, a thought came up to his mind and he decided to make a cheap car for lower middle class in India, just for serving the people, in the name of security, safety and social service. The amazing point is that he decided the price also of that car at the same moment. And that was INR 1 Lakh. Now that was the vision.

Second is mission. When he conveyed his dream car to the top management of Tata motors, it was a challenging task for all of the employees to work and make a car within the price band of what he had thought of. But Ratan Tata convinced each of them and a mission was established for each and every employee who has to work for Nano.

Third are policies. Nano team worked for more than 4 years and after that they were in the condition to present a car in the market with the same price tag that has been decided 4 years back. This was due to policies only. In that 4 years of time span, the Indian economy took a lot of bumps in the market. And the worst situation, that Nano faced, was of the location change from one state to other. And that too is when there were only 3 months left to make that car available on road for public. But the best policies and ultimate quality management kept the price tag of INR 1 Lakh only. Although there was a delay of 8 months after the Nano’s location change, but I am sure this will be taken care of by the Tata.

That is the reason, when Tata Nano came face to face first time with the public; there was a huge response in the hall where it was kept. The best part that I liked at that time was the driving of Ratan Tata. He himself came to hall showing his driving skills with Tata Nano. That was the first car shown to the public and his first line after getting out of the car to the public was “A promise is a promise”.

Same VMP (Vision, Mission and Policies) is true for one more business plan from another business giant of India, the Reliance. Dhirubhai Ambani, the owner of Reliance Industries, vision was to make a telephone call on the rate of a postcard. His vision was that each and every Indian should have a mobile phone with a very cheap call rate, that too on a price of a postcard. The vision was clearly understood by his team, a mission was made and implementing best policies and quality management, this is going to happen in India within a year.

My kudos to the visionary men of India, like Ratan Tata and Dhirubhai Ambani.

-- Sanat Sharma