How to deliver?

I had an opportunity to be an advisor to my friend in making selection of the his brand new car.

So visited a car show room with prior appointment, sat down in the cozy place to talk about cars. I was wondering why we are not been taken around to show some cars to make a choice, instead we started starring at big screen .

At the start we had presentation on the technology , features and pricing model. Next step was to select the interior, colour of the car etc. Finally we saw the computer generated model of the car. with more changes we settled on the specs and started discussion on the Price tag , delivery date etc.

By now, you must have realised that the car salesman has captured our requirements in details , which are fed in to the configuration management tool , there by feed into the production system and so on. The user specs are now frozen will not be changed unless the request is made for a change .

Configuration management plays vital role in the product delivery in any scenario .

Quality review and and audits will depend upon the configuration management to identify the correct level of the product versions for the quality review or the final delivery. Smart vendors use some part of the configuration management tool to capture the customer requirement as mentioned above .

Borland's Star team or Dimention or Source safe are most popular configuration management tools used in the industry.

http://www.configurationkit.com/
http://www.borland.com/us/products/starteam/index.html

Kaizen, Lean or any other method you follow in manufacturing industry or in the software industry product delivery is heavy dependant on the configuration management to ensure correct product delivery.

Tools of the trade

So far in the series of blogs, I have covered most of the aspect of the zero defect management. Not sure whether you realised or not but So far topics covered are

• Defining the user requirement
• Analysing the user requirements
• Importance of the knowledge management

This blog. I will cover tools of the trade. But before I proceed ,I would like clarify that these blogs were written considering that you have basic information on the Zero defect management. My blogs are not written using the very technical language just to make the key points very clear. This is old methodology used in many holy books.

So what are the methods used for managing the process leading to zero defect to get more detail information , please visit this link on the tools of the trade.

http://www.lmu.ac.uk/lis/imgtserv/tools/tools.htm

This link is to very good education institution website hence I assume that the information is reliable and dependable. Please take time to visit this place.

I would like to stress on one thing is that Zero defect management is continual process and not one time delivery. Yes! for a given requirement specs it will be one time process but for the organisation which would like to be in business for long will have to engage in the continual process of the improving it's product quality and services. And there methodology like Kaizen comes handy.

I can go on writing on this subject endlessly but Chao for now and thanks for visiting this blog which has encourage me to write . Appreciate your comments..

You should know what you want , Mr. Customer

Digital televisions are making wave now , so visited the shop.

Greeted by a smiling sales person so told him " looking for a digital television. possibly 32 inches" as soon as he heard my requirement , he took us to the section of the plasmas. Looking at the rice tags I asked him why digital TVs are so expensive. Then he took us to the LCD TVS which were better on the price tags but still not fitting in my budget. So curiously asked him

" any more choices? ",

so he took us to the conventional looking TVs with ability to receive digital transmission.

Realising our confusion due to lack of knowledge of new breed of TVs there by not sure what we want , he left us with the booklet full of basic information on digital TVs.

The action of the salesman demonstrates that get your requirements right or at least decide on the parameters you want operate within, then buy your TV set .
I am sure more clarity of the requirement will help salesman in making best offer.

Zero defect delivery is only supplier's responsibility and not of the user/customer.

This statement need revisiting to demystify the misconception because the Zero defect policy implementation start with User requirement statement. What does this means?

User requirement statement or an acceptance criteria should be more specific and should not leave any ambiguity or room for imagination. In short requirement statement should be a clear to understand and should result in the only one interpretation. Change of the requirement or moving the goal post or even feel of the change of the requirement will impact the entire process of assuring the Zero defect delivery.

So before getting into the fascinating game of picking on each other every one should behave like a statesman understand , identify and accept the reason of the deviation , if this happens then there is great possibility of the success of the Zero defect delivery.

So ensure that the User requirement is well understood , accepted and subject to change management.

Let us get down to business

Enough of the philosophy... let us get to real business.

User acceptance criteria some time called product specifications is the staring point of the quality control process.

After analysis of the user acceptance criteria configuration management components are defined to manage version control to ensure that quality passed product is delivered. Depend on the production process the requirements are broken down to ensure that all basic elements are meeting required quality criteria which will eventually contribute to the end product committed to the customer.

By accepting to deliver the defined product the supplier commits to follow a zero defect policy.

The zero defect policy manageed by various industry standard techniques. These techniques put great demand on the version control and defect management tools . Without trained quality management professionals this process is incomplete.

One process which is important is the requirement analysis and so far did not see any tool to manage is the verification of the requirement analysis with product specification. This is intense process driven and managed by people and it is the weakest link in the complete process of the product delivery.

It has been observed that these meetings many time become political battle grounds and also offers good insight in to the academic mind set of the business minded professionals. Academic cleverness is demonstrated by interpretation of the word or may of the sentence. This also some time gives a experience of the mine field(of course it is political ) if the route is not planned carefully then expected profit may disappear in the thin air.

Now the weak link in the management of Zero defect is known so what is thought share it.

Frame of reference

I had an opportunity to witness a portrait session. One object and five painters. Session lasted for almost 4 hours. All painters where out for cup of tea . With a breath of fresh air discussion begun on the their work. Meanwhile their teacher was examining the work and making notes.

Every one was called in and the notes were read out with the work. I was surprise to that the same object can be seen and perceived in the different way at the same time. Work produced was clear proof of it.

Teacher , then started comparing his work with student's work and to my surprise , one more perception was evident.

For me , many of the portraits were best piece of work but for the teacher all student's need to practice more to achieve perfection ,at the same time he was considering his work as a model. Naturally it was better than others.

After I compared teacher's work with poster by a professional photographer of the same subject it was way different.

So where the defect is ,

in expectation?
in perception ?
or in the frame of reference?

Technically teacher has all valid reasons to make that comments but for the me what pleases more is the best.

So do let me know if you workout how to achieve ZERO DEFECT here.

Roles and Responsibilites

After so many years in the industry I have learned a lot from an organisations, particularly in the area of roles and responsibilities. It starts with job adverts, if you look at it carefully the jobs adverts particularly at the entry level of the organisation can be defined to the finest level of details with one bullet point at the end which will create a hole in the finite boundary of the responsibilities. At senior level the copy writer and HR managers draft the roles of senior managers, these definitions of the role will be vague and left to interpretations.

Further going into the offer letters , many organisations define working hours to comply with the law of the land and the other hand it expects to do whatever it takes to complete the job. If you read between the lines these two statements are contradicting to each other.

We all accept this as fact of the life and with the sense of no choice.

By this time you may be wondering why this is under the heading "Zero defect". Perhaps you have sensed it if you have read it as a lawyer that the defects are introduced to create a room for "unknown" by the organisation. Rightly or wrongly this is the practice and this is how we start to live in the organisation , get cultured to be part of the "team" formed by professionals accepting defects to bring organisational advantages. With all this , how I am suppose to follow and preach "Zero Defect" policy .

But it confuses me more when one of us start preaching about "Zero Defect" with an example of Japanese success etc.
.............

Any way all these terms are relative and bear different meanings in the ones frame of reference.

Zero defect - is this a new concept?

You are spot on ! this statement is made to make some one feel that he is thinking in the right direction.

We all have learned to expect thing around us to be perfect to our expectation. Our parents expected us to be perfect and always successful in all walks of life. Our expectation has taken us too far to the extent that many of us have replaced the word Defect with Perfect.

On the other hand , I get to read many times that people are surprised , confused and even get depressed to the extend that they start defending the argument that nothing can be perfect or defect free in this world.

The most common defect, I get bugged with is that at work lot of money is spent on the knowledge management systems without allowing any employee to spare a time for making contribution to it. Many time I have picked up projects half way through without even having requirement document singed off and on the other hand organisation is boasting of having perfect PM methodology in place. In project closure review, I have witnessed that lot of energy is put in to the defending the initial state of the project instead of the identifying the defects in the process of implementation the "perfect PM methodology" .

On casual review of the situations in the past, I fail to identify any process issues but the people issues , such as politics , egos are on the top of the list and the "crises" arising out many barriers created by human packs.

In summary every one wants "Zero defect" policy for someone else's delivery and would like to pose a question that are we afraid of something here ?