Let’s understand the connection between various philosophies, methods and Scrum framework.

First a definition of what the terms Philosophy, Framework, Methodology and Standards mean

• Philosophy: Broad values and principles which people follow. Philosophy is more of a mindset than telling you actually how to do things.
• Framework: Framework is a bare minimum essential guideline under which you operate and solve specific types of problems. E.g. Scrum and Kanban are frameworks which give broad guidelines.
• Methodology: Methodology gives guidelines about tools, techniques and sometimes includes a framework to operate too. It is not necessary that an approach of describing everything is always great. Most times, methodologies are over-defined and a lot becomes irrelevant for use. Some of the methodologies are PRINCE2 by Axelos, Extreme Programming (XP)
• Standards: Standards collect best-practices, tools, techniques, processes which are generally used in the industry. It’s basically a collection of various things put together. For e.g. PMBOK by PMI is a standard of project management.

Lean

Lean is an effective way of eliminating waste and implementing Customer Value focus. Lean is the over-arching philosophy consisting of the 5 broad principles as described as: 

Within the umbrella of lean, there are various other philosophies are prevalent in the industry – DevOps and Agile being the most widely used philosophy

Agile

Agile is a philosophy and consists of thought processes which are summed up in the Agile Manifesto. Agile Manifesto consists of 4 values and 12 principles. The 4 Values are

• Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
• Working Products over Comprehensive Documentation
• Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
• Responding to Change over Following a Plan

Some of the key thought processes on which Agile principles are based on are

• Focus on Value
• Elimination of wastage and improvement of productivity
• Respecting Change
• Iterative and Incremental Delivery
• Collaborating teams
• Working with variable scope
• Focus on working product
• Time boxed delivery
• Focus on continuous improvements

Most Agile values and Principles are directly complying to the broader Lean philosophy.

Scrum

Scrum is a framework to handle complexity. Scrum complies to all of the agile principles and values in some way or the other. The framework consists of the 3 Artifacts, 5 Events and the Three Roles which are the minimum in handling the complexity in work effectively.

DevOps

DevOps is a philosophy. DevOps isn’t a framework or methodology in and of itself. It doesn’t stand alone. DevOps adopts and leverages multiple frameworks and methodologies such as agile, lean and ITSM. DevOps is benefited tremendously from the work the Agile community has done, showing how small teams, operating with high-trust, small batch sizes with smaller, more frequent software releases, can dramatically increase the productivity of development organizations.

ITSM

IT service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, plan, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers – commonly called Support/Maintenance/Production Support services. Various Six Sigma tools, XP techniques, software development techniques, DevOps Tools are used.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a set of statistical quality improvement techniques which can be used to achieve Agility or become Lean. Without quality, the product may not deliver value to the customer. Hence the Six Sigma techniques are used frequently while executing work in various frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP.

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Lean Software Development Principles

Lean development can be summarized by seven principles, very close in concept to lean manufacturing principles:

1. Eliminate waste
2. Amplify learning
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as fast as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build Quality in
7. See the whole

Eliminate waste

Lean philosophy regards everything not adding value to the customer as waste. Such waste may include:

• unnecessary code and functionality
• delay in the software development process
• unclear requirements
• avoidable process repetition (often caused by insufficient testing)
• bureaucracy
• slow internal communication

In order to eliminate waste, one should be able to recognize it. If some activity could be bypassed or the result could be achieved without it, it is waste. Partially done coding eventually abandoned during the development process is waste. Extra processes and features not often used by customers are waste. Waiting for other activities, teams, processes is waste. Defects and lower quality are waste. Managerial overhead not producing real value is waste.

A value stream mapping technique is used to identify waste. The second step is to point out sources of waste and to eliminate them. Waste-removal should take place iteratively until even seemingly essential processes and procedures are liquidated.

Amplify learning

Software development is a continuous learning process with the additional challenge of development teams and end product sizes. The best approach for improving a software development environment is to amplify learning. The accumulation of defects should be prevented by running tests as soon as the code is written. Instead of adding more documentation or detailed planning, different ideas could be tried by writing code and building. The process of user requirements gathering could be simplified by presenting screens to the end-users and getting their input.

The learning process is sped up by usage of short iteration cycles – each one coupled with refactoring and integration testing. Increasing feedback via short feedback sessions with customers helps when determining the current phase of development and adjusting efforts for future improvements. During those short sessions both customer representatives and the development team learn more about the domain problem and figure out possible solutions for further development. Thus the customers better understand their needs, based on the existing result of development efforts, and the developers learn how to better satisfy those needs. Another idea in the communication and learning process with a customer is set-based development – this concentrates on communicating the constraints of the future solution and not the possible solutions, thus promoting the birth of the solution via dialogue with the customer.

Decide as late as possible

As software development is always associated with some uncertainty, better results should be achieved with an options-based approach, delaying decisions as much as possible until they can be made based on facts and not on uncertain assumptions and predictions. The more complex a system is, the more capacity for change should be built into it, thus enabling the delay of important and crucial commitments. The iterative approach promotes this principle – the ability to adapt to changes and correct mistakes, which might be very costly if discovered after the release of the system.

An agile software development approach can move the building of options earlier for customers, thus delaying certain crucial decisions until customers have realized their needs better. This also allows later adaptation to changes and the prevention of costly earlier technology-bounded decisions. This does not mean that no planning should be involved – on the contrary, planning activities should be concentrated on the different options and adapting to the current situation, as well as clarifying confusing situations by establishing patterns for rapid action. Evaluating different options is effective as soon as it is realized that they are not free, but provide the needed flexibility for late decision making.

Deliver as fast as possible

In the era of rapid technology evolution, it is not the biggest that survives, but the fastest. The sooner the end product is delivered without major defects, the sooner feedback can be received, and incorporated into the next iteration. The shorter the iterations, the better the learning and communication within the team. With speed, decisions can be delayed. Speed assures the fulfilling of the customer’s present needs and not what they required yesterday. This gives them the opportunity to delay making up their minds about what they really require until they gain better knowledge. Customers value rapid delivery of a quality product.

The just-in-time production ideology could be applied to software development, recognizing its specific requirements and environment. This is achieved by presenting the needed result and letting the team organize itself and divide the tasks for accomplishing the needed result for a specific iteration. At the beginning, the customer provides the needed input. This could be simply presented in small cards or stories – the developers estimate the time needed for the implementation of each card. Thus the work organization changes into self-pulling system – each morning during a stand-up meeting, each member of the team reviews what has been done yesterday, what is to be done today and tomorrow, and prompts for any inputs needed from colleagues or the customer. This requires transparency of the process, which is also beneficial for team communication.

Empower the team

There has been a traditional belief in most businesses about the decision-making in the organization – the managers tell the workers how to do their own job. In a “Work-Out technique”, the roles are turned – the managers are taught how to listen to the developers, so they can explain better what actions might be taken, as well as provide suggestions for improvements. The lean approach favors the aphorism “find good people and let them do their own job,” encouraging progress, catching errors, and removing impediments, but not micro-managing.

Another mistaken belief has been the consideration of people as resources. People might be resources from the point of view of a statistical data sheet, but in software development, as well as any organizational business, people do need something more than just the list of tasks and the assurance that they will not be disturbed during the completion of the tasks. People need motivation and a higher purpose to work for – purpose within the reachable reality, with the assurance that the team might choose its own commitments. The developers should be given access to the customer; the team leader should provide support and help in difficult situations, as well as ensure that skepticism does not ruin the team’s spirit.

Build Quality in

The customer needs to have an overall experience of the System – this is the so-called perceived integrity: how it is being advertised, delivered, deployed, accessed, how intuitive its use is, price and how well it solves problems.

Conceptual integrity means that the system’s separate components work well together as a whole with balance between flexibility, maintainability, efficiency, and responsiveness. This could be achieved by understanding the problem domain and solving it at the same time, not sequentially. The needed information is received in small batch pieces – not in one vast chunk with preferable face-to-face communication and not any written documentation. The information flow should be constant in both directions – from customer to developers and back, thus avoiding the large stressful amount of information after long development in isolation.

One of the healthy ways towards integral architecture is refactoring. As more features are added to the original code base, the harder it becomes to add further improvements. Refactoring is about keeping simplicity, clarity, minimum number of features in the code. Repetitions in the code are signs for bad code designs and should be avoided. The complete and automated building process should be accompanied by a complete and automated suite of developer and customer tests, having the same versioning, synchronization and semantics as the current state of the System. At the end the integrity should be verified with thorough testing, thus ensuring the System does what the customer expects it to. Automated tests are also considered part of the production process, and therefore if they do not add value they should be considered waste. Automated testing should not be a goal, but rather a means to an end, specifically the reduction of defects.

See the whole

Software systems nowadays are not simply the sum of their parts, but also the product of their interactions. Defects in software tend to accumulate during the development process – by decomposing the big tasks into smaller tasks, and by standardizing different stages of development, the root causes of defects should be found and eliminated. The larger the system, the more organizations that are involved in its development and the more parts are developed by different teams, the greater the importance of having well defined relationships between different vendors, in order to produce a system with smoothly interacting components. During a longer period of development, a stronger subcontractor network is far more beneficial than short-term profit optimizing, which does not enable win-win relationships.

Lean thinking has to be understood well by all members of a project, before implementing in a concrete, real-life situation. “Think big, act small, fail fast; learn rapidly” – these slogans summarize the importance of understanding the field and the suitability of implementing lean principles along the whole software development process. Only when all of the lean principles are implemented together, combined with strong “common sense” with respect to the working environment, is there a basis for success in software development.

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DevOps cannot work independently. It has to be integrate with the existing frameworks. Software we create does not exist separately from the people who use it and the people who create it. Devops is about finding ways to adapt and innovate social structure, culture, and technology together in order to work more effectively.

There are many software development methodologies, but they focus primarily on requirement management and its impact on the development effort. There are many excellent books  that cover in detail different approaches to software design, development, and testing; but these, too, cover only a fragment of the value stream that delivers value to the people and organizations that sponsor our efforts.

What happens  once requirements are identified, solutions designed, developed, and tested? How are these activities joined together and coordinated to make the process as efficient and reliable as we can make it? How do we enable developers, testers, build and operations personnel to work together effectively?

DevOps describes an effective pattern for getting software from development to release. We describe techniques and best practices that help to implement this pattern and show how this approach interfaces with other aspects of software delivery.

The pattern that is central  is the deployment pipeline. A deployment pipeline is, in essence, an automated implementation of your application’s  build, deploy, test, and release process. Every organization will have differences in the implementation of their deployment pipelines, depending on their value

Please refer to the following links to know more about DevOps Methodologies and Frameworks

• DevOps and Agile
• DevOps and Lean
• DevOps and Scrum
• DevOps and ITIL

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Toyota developed the Toyota production system (TPS). TPS borrowed ideas from ford but developed the just in time philosophy (JIT) pull concept to address the issues or high cost associated with fords large inventories. The Toyota production system in an integrated system, that comprises of its management philosophy and practices.

Philosophy

• Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

Process

• Create a process flow to surface problems
• Use pull out systems to avoid overproduction
• Level out the workload(Heijunka)
• Stop when there is a quality problem (Jidoka)
• Standardized tasks for continuous improvement
• Use visual control so no problems are hidden
• Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology

People & partners

• Create leaders who live the philosophy
• Respect develop and challenge your people and teams
• Respect challenges and help the supplier

Problem solving

• Go see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation
• Make decision slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options : implement decisions rapidly.
• Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hence) and continuous)

House of quality

Toyota visualized its values, principals way of working and the ,most important tools in the Toyota house of quality, the roof of the house expresses the goals of the organization (best quality -lowest cost-shortest lead time-best safely- high morale). The foundation of the house addresses the principles, followed by number conditions that are always needed. Here you can find standardized work and visual management. There are two pillars. The first pillar is called Jidoka and is about building in quality thaw second pillar is called Just In Time and inclines a number of logistical principles and tools. In the centre of the house you will find the continuous effort of improving the organization.

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One of the key ways in which “Agility” can be achieved is by reducing variations and addressing elements which reduces productivity. There are fundamentally 3 types of variations that can be distinguished

Muda : Waste, Non-Value add activities, Idle time etc

Muri : Overburdening of the system or impossible to achieve

Mura : Unevenless, irregularity or lack of uniformity

As the names suggest, the 3 terms are of Japanese origin, specifically Toyota.

Muda

Reduction of Muda (or wastage) can be achieved by assuring that a process will not consume more resources than necessary. Generally a “Value Added” activity is the one where customer pays for it, or a user gets benefitted by it etc. Examples of some of the types of wastes which can be eliminated

1. Producing good more than the need : Producing good which a market does not need is a waste.
2. Wait Time or Idle Time : Too much capacity and less work or too much of time between tasks, dependencies on tasks resulting in idle time.
3. Transportation : Moving between offices, travel time, transporting goods physically between offices or warehouses
4. Unnecessary Supplies : Developing more than what is needed
5. Defects : Defective code or redevelopment effort
6. Unused Expertise : Experts doing mundane work or highly paid workers doing day-to-day work

Muri

Reducing over-burdening of the system can be implemented by implementing “FLOW”.  Lean methodology (or any Agile methodology) focusses on getting the “right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity“. This method of doing the “right things to the…….” is called achieving FLOW.

Mura

A common misunderstanding is that improving productivity means working faster. Lean (and other methodologies like Extreme Programming and Scrum or even Agile Principles) endorses sustaining the pace of work. Work like a Tortoise (steady pace) instead of running like a hare and then resting before resuming work. “Pull” system is an essential element of Scrum and other Agile methodologies. Kanban implements Pull system and Just in Time is achieved. This is Mura.

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Why Lean-Six-Sigma go hand-in-hand?

The Key principles of Lean are

• Value – Define what is of value to the customer
• Eliminate Waste – Identify the Value Stream and eliminate what is of no value to end customer
• Flow – Create a constant Flow
• Pull – Produce on demand and reduce backlogs or holdups
• Perfection – Continuous improvement

Lean is silent on Quality and therefore only a lean thinking may result in reduction of wastage, optimization, reduction of costs and enabling a perfect just-in-time pull system. However, without quality focus there is a danger of producing goods which are optimized, developed at a low cost but of lower quality. This would be un-acceptable to the end-customer.

Six Sigma is a long term strategy to improve quality and reduce variation. Six Sigma employs various statistical tools and techniques to improve quality and reduce variations.

Together with Lean-Six-Sigma focus, organizations will be able to get a focus on optimization at the same time focus on the long-term goal of producing great quality goods.

Therefore Lean in isolation might not be a viable idea without Six Sigma. Therefore when talking about Lean, Six Sigma is always considered.

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What is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma is a long term, forward thinking initiative designed to fundamentally improve the way of doing things so that quality improves and variations are reduced.

Six Sigma is more sophisticated than applying simple problem solving tools. Six Sigma applies statistical tools to identify and remove causes of variation.

A process performing at a Six Sigma level means that 99.99966% of the products produced are statistically expected to be within specifications.

Statistical Meaning of Six Sigma

Lets consider a process which has upper specification limit (USL) and lower specification limit (LSL). Lets say a pipe with diameter 3cm has to be produced and the USL and LSL are 3.1cm and 2.9cm respectively. Each pipe that will be produced will never be exactly 3.0 cm. The measurements are likely to be 3.01cm, 2.99cm, 2.92cm, 3.09cm and so on. The deviation from the mean measurement is called the standard deviation or SIGMA. For e.g. the mean could be 3.001cm.

Six Sigma defines that the SIGMA should be so low that you should be able to fit 6Sigmas on either side of mean. Higher the variation from mean, the higher the chances that your sigma will be higher and higher the chance that you wont be able to fit 6 sigmas on either side of mean.

The diagram above represents a process where the measurements are such that 6 sigmas are fitted between USL and LSL. This represents 0.002 per million defects or 2 per billion cases.

In the real world, the mean shifts by about 1.5 SIGMA on one side of mean, thus you will be able to fit 4.5 sigmas on one side of mean and 7.5 sigmas on the other. Thus, you can have 3.34 defects/million on one side and zero defects on the other side. If you achieve this, you would have achieved six sigma accuracy.

Mumbai Dabbawala – A case study of Six Sigma

A dabbawala is a person in Mumbai, who is part of a delivery system that collects hot food in lunch boxes from the residences of workers in the late morning, delivers the lunches to the workplace, predominantly using bicycles and the railway trains, and returns the empty boxes to the worker’s residence that afternoon.

It is estimated as per various studies and surveys that dabbawalas make less than one mistake in every six million deliveries. That is better than 3.34 defects in 1 million as required by Six Sigma process. Therefore we can say that Dabbawalla network operates at Six Sigma efficiency.

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Kaizen

Kaizen is a lean management technique and has Japanese roots. Kaizen stands for “To disassemble and put together again in a better way”.

Kaizen focuses on

“Better 80% right today than 100% right tomorrow”

Characteristics of Kaizen

• Focus on “Small Improvements”
• Teamwork and empowerment
• Participation is voluntary but with full commitment
• Solve the problems at the work place rather than in conference rooms or on excel spreadsheets. In a manufacturing setup – on the shopfloor, in a IT environment at a “Teamplace” or “Workplace”.
• Resources are dedicated. The team is pulled off their day-to-day jobs. The team is considered as on vacation from their regular responsibilities
• 3-5 days in duration
• Implementation should be immediate
• Management supports the event. That means all necessary teams, departments are made available.

When to use Kaizen

• Obvious waste or inefficiency is identified
• Scope of the problem is clear
• Results are needed immediately
• Implementation risk is minimal

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What is Lean?

Each company that want to become world class has to solve the same challenge. How can we provide products or services with maximum value for our clients at the lowest possible costs and with shortest delivery time? With regard to the production and delivery process operational excellence is a requirement.

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.

Operational excellence is about delivering to customer expectations, without failures, on time and in a cost -efficient manner. It is a philosophy where problem solving, teamwork and leadership result in the on-going improvement of an organization. The process involves focusing on the customer’s needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered and continually improving the current activities in the workplace.

History of continuous improvement

In the last few years, the Lean and the Six Sigma philosophies merged to Lean Six Sigma as a holistic view and approach for process improvement. Is is combination of Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma and uses a combined set of both Lean and Six Sigma tools. It also embraced best practices from other improvement methods like total quality management, total productive maintenance and theory of constraints. Lean Six Sigma includes common goals of lead time reduction, operational cost reduction and overall quality improvement.

In this section we will review the history of quality management general in general and what is Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma in particular.

History of quality  management

The origin of managing quality dated back thousands of years, building the great pyramids of Cheops at 2560 BC could not have been done without proper quality management.

The concept of quality as what we think of it now first emerged during the industrial revolution previously goods had been made from start to finish by the same person or team of people, with handcrafting and tweaking the product to meet quality criteria. Mass production brought huge teams of people together to work on specific stages of production where one person would not necessarily complete a product from start to finish. In the late 19th century pioneers such as Henry ford recognized the limitations of the methods being used in mass production at the time and the subsequent varying quality of output. Henry ford (1863-1947) was the founder of motor company and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. Many would say that Lean started with Henry Ford initially this was more a lawn initiative than a quality management initiative. Each t-ford was supplied in any possible color, as long as it was black, and it was supplied with a tool box in the trunk, later ford emphasized standardization of design and component standards to ensure standards and was implemented by inspection of product output to catch defects.

What is Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing focuses stability and elimination of waste. Lean manufacturing began with Henry Ford who was the first person to truly integrate and entire production process. Sequence using standardized work and interchangeable by lining up called this flow production (1913). The problem with ford’s system was its inability to provide variety. As mentioned the model-t was limited to one colour and to one specification, as a result , all model -t chassis were essentially identical until the end of the production in1926.

In the 1930s and more intensely just after world war II (1950) Kiichiro Toyoda,  Taiichi Ohnom and others at Toyota started looking at ford’s situation. While ford was producing 8000 vehicles per day, Toyota had produced only 2500 vehicles in13 years. Toyota wanted to scale up production but lacked the financial resources required for the huge quantity of inventory and subassemblies as seen at the ford plant. It occurred to them that a series of simple innovations might make it possible to provide both – continuity in process flow as well as a wide variety of product offerings. Soon after, Toyota developed the Toyota production system (TPS). TPS borrowed ideas from ford but developed the just in time philosophy (JIT) , the pull concept and judoka to address the issues of high cost associated with ford’s large inventories. The Lean thought process is thoroughly described in the book the machine that changed the world (James P Womack and Daniel T. Jones 1990) and in a subsequent volume Lean thinking (1996), which specifically describes the five Lean principles.)

History of six sigma

The year was 1979 when Motorola was engaged in a painful process of self-discovery and began to realize the extent to which it had lost market share in many key segments, including televisions car radios and semiconductors. That same year, during a company officers meeting Motorola’s president and corporate chief began voicing the standard, politically correct excuses. Blame it on the Japanese, blame it on the economy in general, blame it on weak research and development.

While all this was going on, a lone voice in the back of the room spoke up loudly and clearly saying I will tell you what is wrong with this company… our quality stinks! That voice was art sundry, a sales manager for Motorola’s most profitable business at the time. Everyone thought he would be fired for this ballsy assertion. How could someone make such a statement in such horrible and turbulent times? Surely Motorola had always been and still was among the world best manufacturers. Regardless of the head times it was facing.

Motorola was at a major turning point in its history it could continue on a downward trend relative to competitors, or it could break that trend with an ambitious culture change and quality improvement initiative. This was that moment Motorola began its search for ways to eliminate waste and improve its quality. Two Motorola engineers, Bill Smith and Mikel Harry, were credited for their pioneering work aimed at improving processes and for finding and resolving defects. Their work on process capability, tolerance critical-to -quality characteristics, and design margins laid much of the foundation for what today is called Six Sigma.

Lean principals

Womack, Jones and Roos published two successful books entitled that machine that changed the world (1990) and Lean thinking (1996). Both books address the revolutions in manufacturing represented by the Toyota production system of the Toyota Corporation of Japan. They compared this way of working with the traditional mass production system that was used by other companies in the western world. They described in their books Lean thinking the following five principals:

Please refer to the following links to know more about Lean

• Toyota Production System
• Lean Software Development
• What is Muda, Muri, Mura?
• What is Six Sigma?
• Why Lean-Six-Sigma go hand-in-hand?
• What is Change Management?
• Lean and Agile Process Improvement Roadmaps

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