Saturday, October 16, 2010

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1



Right now we have managed to go agile with all our projects. When it comes to agile, we are quite keen on SCRUM as disciplines scrum brings to the project teams as well as to the customers help a lot in our offshore project context. In our organization, some teams pushing it to the extreme while others take the process bit relaxed..We believe that if something works right that’s the way to do it!

Ok.. This is the story… 3 weeks back, while having a discussion with my CEO over lunch.. we came up this idea of getting our management in to agile.. It started with a simple conversation … “Let’s think loud….Why can’t we have a backlog for our management and work as a management team across our departments to be more solution focused...” :-)

Great idea …but hell ..it will be really challenging to do that.. There are challenges when implementing such concepts with the management in an organization.. how far we can use the transparency..can we have all management tasks on the wall…? how about layers within the management ? (Of course we don’t have huge hierarchy), is it only the management concepts of lean we need to add up..? …lot to think about….. I will discuss them later..

One thing I love working at Exilesoft (may be most SME level software companies) is that, no matter who that is, if anyone got any good ideas we can execute them in no time..( One of the recent examples is our recent job advertisement campaign which was quite successful. Few engineers came up with this new idea for a recruitment campaign and we changed our standard recruitment campaign over night. it worked!)

Ok..Coming back to the story.. We need our management to go agile.. But how do we do that.. ? Its challenging than implementing agile in a software development team.

First we had to convince ourselves why we need our management to go lean.. Of-course there were quite good reasons;

  • 1. We have a challenge.. Our CEO spend time in Sri Lanka and Norway.. so most the time its challenging to have that transparency of the management activities while he is in Norway. Simple rule.. Status reports doesn’t work.. we all know that…

  • 2. Some of the team members in the management team also travel frequently, so again how do we have that same transparency of work just like when we were collocated?

  • 3. There are certain tasks in the HR dept, IT dept, which are always dragging due to other commitments (Which are not marked as “Critical” )such as Employee handbook, some New backup process etc. which needs to be finished at some point , instead more tasks are adding in to the list and sometimes we lose track of time of these long term tasks.

  • 4. Management needs to be cross functional too to deliver the best and help each other.

  • 5. Maximize the time utilization, if someone has got some time he or she should be able to pick a task or help another to get a task going..

  • 6. We are a start-up.., so I don’t have to tell you the challenge.. we need to deliver more with less.

Ok we had enough reasons to go lean..go agile.. But then..Which agile would it be ..?

Next:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 4 – How did we implement it ?


3 comments:

software testing companies on 12:39 AM said...

This post is very useful for me. I learn many concept form it. Thanks for it.

Thush on 2:19 AM said...

Ive not completed the post yet ( Sorry for the long delay due to my extreamly hectic schedule)

Testking 642-359 on 12:37 AM said...

I read with great interest.Thanks you for sharing. I enjoyed..

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