21 Sutras of leadership - book notes

 

Kirkpatrick four levels of finding coaching outcomes

Visual Representation of a High Level Plan

Creative Process - Points to Remember

Notes from Ideas Book - Phase 5 Enacting Ideas

Notes from "Ideas book"

Fifth and last phase is "Enacting Ideas", Below are few inputs on preparation

Notes from Ideas book - Phase 4 Judging the ideas

Notes from "Ideas book"

Fourth phase is "Judging the Ideas", Below are few inputs on preparation

Notes from Ideas Book - Phase 3 Developing and Understanding Ideas

Notes from "Ideas book"

Third phase is "Developing and Understanding", Below are few inputs on preparation

Notes from Ideas book - Phase 2 Generating Ideas

Notes from "Ideas book"

Second phase is "Generating Ideas", Below are few inputs on preparation

Notes from Ideas Book - Phase 1 Preparing for Idea generation

Notes from "Ideas book"

First phase is "Preparing for Idea Generation", Below are few inputs on preparation

SLA Prediction Model

Service Level Agreements (SLA) with the customer is common in most of the service operations. SLA’s might vary depending on the business need and many a times the Non Compliance to SLA’s might lead to huge penalties as well as customer dissatisfaction.

This topic provides an approach for predicting the SLA compliance in advance and helps in effectively managing the SLA to avoid noncompliance as well as penalties. This is just an approach the model can be adjusted based on the business rules, past trends, SLA compliance parameters etc.

Scenario: The team resolves the incident tickets received from the customer/automated tools. The project has a committed SLA with the customer on the “Time to Resolve the Issue”. And this Time to Resolve SLA is different for different severity of the tickets. Each issue reported is associated with a knowledge article that is been referred by the analyst to resolve the issue.

Model Approach:

·        Understand the SLA commitments

o   Time To Resolve – Time it took to resolve the issue reported from the issue received i.e., Time To Resolve = Issue resolved time – Issue reported time

o   SLA for Time Resolve

§  Severity 3 – 240 Minutes

·        Assess the parameters that might affect the SLA

o   Parameters that might impact the Time To Resolve includes

§  Severity

§  Issue type

§  Shift

§  Week Day/ Week End

§  KB Article

·        Analyze the issue categories

o   By Problem type

o   By KB article

·        Gather the data for the past 3-6 months (Depending on the volume and issues coverage)

o   Below is the  sample data captured for the Time To Resolve SLA

·        Understand the Time To Resolve distribution with respect to the above parameters as highlighted in second bullet

o   Time To Resolve

§  Distribution with respect to

·        Confirm the parameters that are impacting the Time To Resolve

o   Time To Resolve

§  Above table as observed there is a significant variation in the distribution from Morning shift to Night shift

§  Confirmed parameters include

·        Issue Type

·        Shift

·        Baseline the Time To Resolve distribution with respect to the above parameters

o   Time To Resolve – Baselines

·        Develop the Model to be referred/used for predicting the SLA compliance. This can be customized based on the business need

Consulting – Introduction to ITIL

Introduction:

•        Information Technology Infrastructure Library

•        Global standard that has been in use for over 20 years

•        Collection of best practices to optimize the services

•        Started in 80s

•        v2 came along in 2000-2002

–       Still Large and complex (8 Books)

–       Talks about what you should do

•        v3 in 2007

–       Much simplified and rationalized  (5 books)

–       Much clearer guidance & easier

–       Aligned with ISO20000

Consulting – Process Maturity Model of Service Operations

Six Sigma - Project Charter

Project Charter is the first deliverable in the entire six sigma project journey and is part of the Define phase. This contains the information about the problem/ opportunity to the objective and timelines. There are many templates available in the industry on the project charter. Whatever is the template below contents are necessary to be part of the project charter.

Main components of the “project charter” includes

·        Problem Statement – context of the process to which the problem/opportunity associated, Intensity of the problem, what should be the impact if not addressed.

·        Business Case – contains the business context of the problem, impact, need and urgency.

·        Scope – Boundary and interfaces of the problem/opportunity

·        Purpose – What is that being achieved at the end of this project

·        Objective (CTQ) – Critical to Quality parameters being measured, baseline and improved.

·        Team composition – Team and their roles

·        Benefits – Benefits achieved at the end of the project, benefits could be Hard/Soft.

·        Timelines – Major phases and their scheduled completion dates

Heat Map - Visual Representation

Heat map is one of the useful and powerful data-analysis tools available in business intelligence. Heat Map is visual representation of data using colors instead of numbers only. This tool is used to analyze the complex data sets for a quick and easy way of understanding.

Popular heat maps being referred/used in the industry includes

• Election results by geography
• Visitors interaction with a webpage
• Usability or consumer experience

There are many ways to create heat maps but the common understanding in all of these representation is usage of colors to communicate the numbers and their relationships. Heat Maps are mostly used for two dimensional representation. But the advanced heat maps can be drawn for more than two dimensions. For example cell size and color both can be used to represent a different relationships. One can add sliders to filter/zoom the data and its relationships as required by the user. If you have to represent the same situation using a bar chart, the visual would be cluttered and difficult to understand.

Example:

Below heat map used to understand the customer feedback from a service operations. Customer provided his feedback with the services offered by the vendor. Feedback can be positive (Happy with the service provided) or negative (Not happy with the services). Purpose of this heat map is to understand the customer view of the services provided with appropriate filters and drill-downs.

Quality Function Deployment

•       Gather Voice of Customer (VOC)
•         Rate the requirements on a scale of 1-5
•         Understand competitors ratings with respect to ours
•         Identify/map technical parameters that influences requirements
•         Build the correlation among requirements & technical parameters.
•         Also relation among technical parameters
•         Analyze the matrix to understand
•         Complete the QFD Matrix

Consulting – Taguchi’s Loss function

Myth: Any outcome between the customer specification limits considered as equal form the customer perspective. For example customer queue time in a bank is between 15-30minutes, as per this myth the customer who is been served at 15 minutes and another customer at 30minutes is received the same quality from the bank perspective as both of them are service within the agree time.

Reality: The quality of service/ product will be of not equal from the customer/ society perspective as it goes away from the target value even though it is within the agreed specification limits.

Justification: Taguchi one of the well-known statistician / engineer developed a representation that measures the financial impact of loss to the society if the product/service deviates from the target value. The representation is termed as Taguchi’s Loss Function. In conventional methods the Cost of Quality is measured considering the number of products rejected or reworked. In this method it is difficult to differentiate the cost of quality if the two products properties are within the specification limits but vary from each other.

From Taguchi’s perspective the loss function is as below. The graph depicts the lross function as a deviation from the target value of a product parameter. The parameter could be a diameter, color, density, hardness any other critical parameter of a product. From the service perspective the parameter could be cycle time, communication, responsiveness etc.

UST – Upper Specification Tolerance, LST – Lower Specification Tolerance

Taguchi believes performance begins decreasing gradually as the design parameter deviates from the target value even though the parameter value is between the LST and UST. Therefore, Taguchi proposed that the loss function be measured by the deviation from the target value. The loss function is

L = K * (Y – M) ^ 2

·        L is the result value of the function, generally measured in monetary units

·        Y measured value

·        M target value

·        K is a loss coefficient (Convert into monetary values)

Example: A company produces a part that has a diameter of 0.5 inches + or - 0.01 inches of tolerance. Failure cost of a rejection is $45.00. There are 30 units produced and the actual diameter is as below. Calculate and compare the loss considering the convention method as well as Taguchi’s loss function method.

Six Sigma – Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Introduction: Beneath every problem there is an underlying cause but we need to identify the root cause to prevent the recurrence. Many times the actions taken to address the issue reoccur again in the same place or in a different place. This symptom indicates that the root cause is not been identified/addressed. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured approach for identifying and eliminating the underlying root causes. It may not be feasible or necessary to conduct RCA for all the issues as it involves time and effort. RCA is an analytical tool to perform a comprehensive, system-based review of critical incidents. Primary objectives of RCA includes

·        The primary aim is to identify the root cause(s) and prevent that problem from ever recurring

·        Systematic way of approaching and resolving the problem

·        Prevent the recurrence at lowest cost in the simplest way

Steps:  

1. Define the problem
2. Gather the information
3. Plan for Root Cause Analysis
4. Conduct RCA
5. Develop the solutions and action plans
6. Manage the Action items

Six Sigma – Root Cause Analysis Techniques

Many techniques available in conducting Root Cause Analysis, each technique has its own advantages and suitable for a particular situation. Common, widely accepted and simple to use techniques includes

·        Cause & Effect diagram

·        5-Why Analysis

·        Brainstorming

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Cause & Effect Diagram: Also called as Fishbone diagram. This is a tool for identifying all the causes of an effect. The effect being examined is the problem/opportunity that has to be eliminated. C&E Diagram is a graphical representation of the causes and effect. Use this technique for

·        Multiple causes has to be grouped logically

·        Understand width and depth of the causes

·        Problem is repetitive

Steps:

·        Write down the effect to be investigated and draw the backbone arrow (as below)

Note: KB Article – Knowledge Base Article has to be selected by the engineer to resolve an issue reported by the customer. Selecting of wrong article either delays the resolution or unnecessary escalation to a next level as the issue is unresolved by the engineer. 

·     Brainstorm with the identified people considering all the broad areas/ groupings of the potential causes of the effect “Classified KB article is incorrect”. Rule of thumb consider the generic 4 categories i.e., Man, Method, Material and Environment. You can define your own categories and may use affinity diagram to group the cause.

·        Group the causes identified during the brainstorming into logical groupings to represent the Cause & Effect relationship.

·        Drill Down all the causes for further reasons and goon extending the branches till the root cause is identified (May use 5-Why technique as required)

Five – Why Analysis: 5-Why is a problem solving technique that allows us to reach the root cause by repeatedly asking the questions. Even though this technique is called “5-Why” we may reach the root cause with fewer or more than five questions. Use this technique

·        Repetitive issue without any supporting data

·        Simple and low risk problems that does not require significant analysis

·        Problem is very specific to a process/ system (Not spread to multiple processes)

Steps:

·        Define the problem

·        Gather the team and confirm the problem

·        Ask the first Question Why? Record all the answers on a whiteboard or flipchart

·        Ask few more successive “Why” until we reach no further causes

·        Confirm the root cause and proceed for next set of actions

Example: Customer complaints on the delay in Pizza delivery

·        Why there is a delay in the Pizza delivery?

o   Delivery boy not reached on time

·        Why the delivery boy not reached on time?

o   He could not find the address

·        Why he could not find the address?

o   Address given to him is incorrect

·        Why the address is incorrect?

o   Address is not available in the records

·        Why the address is not available in the records?

o   Customer is new, manually note down the address

·        Why the address is incorrect?

o   Incorrectly noted while taking orders

Solution: Incase of the first time users, confirm the address once again and provide the telephone numbers to the delivery boy to reach out to the customer in case of any issues.

Brainstorming: One of the very widely used and easy to use techniques for analyzing the problem to reach the root causes. Brainstorming generates ideas and later evaluated to finalize and confirm the causes.  

Steps:

·        Establish a clear objective, Re-phrase for confirmation

·        Create a list of questions

·        cover all potential causes in the following four areas People, Process, Environment, Tools

·        Document all the findings and agree on the same