Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Cost of Quality

This time I thought of discussing about a concept about Cost of Quality in a product.
What is cost of Quality? The simple answer is to the cost involved in maintain or add quality to a product/service that you are providing to a customer. So how it’s important to an organization? Cost is directly involved with the profit. When cost goes down, profit will go up where revenue is constant.
Now let’s talk this topic in detail.
When discussing the Cost of Quality, there are 3 costing types involved.
  1. Prevention cost
  2. Appraisal cost
  3. Failure cost

Prevention Costs
Cost involved in preventing failures is prevention cost. There are many tasks which are performed in order to capture failures soon in the life cycle. It can be any product development methods.
Let’s have list of tasks which will cost in prevention of occurring failures,
  • Establishing a process
  • Planning for quality
  • Acquiring new tools and use them
  • Trainings to improve competency
  • Adopt best practices and leanings from past experience

Saturday, July 30, 2011

How to be a leader

This time I’m sharing my ideas about how you can be a successful leader. There are two questions that I want to pop out.

1.How you can be a leader?
2.How you can earn the respect as a leader?

I like to quote one of favorite mottos from our CEO. “Leaders are not born, Leaders are trained”. I believe the saying. But you should have a proper set of skills to become a good leader. Anyone can be a leader but everyone can’t be a successful leader.

Leadership is coming with great responsibilities. So it’s not a jewelry that you can wear and show off to people as well as it is not about the authority. So handle these responsibilities with care.

If you want to be a leader to show off, don’t ever try to be one. Then your team or the company will reject you and you will be in a deep trouble. Another issue in some people is that they try to control people or try to show their authority. People try to show their authority when they can’t lead the team by setting examples. Another weakness of some people is that they try to be leaders by back stabbing. If you are in one of these categories, it’s time to re think. Otherwise your team will not move a single bit towards objectives.

Leaders should be people who facilitate the required environment and providing necessary guidance to achieve the set of objectives for a team. So to archive those objectives, you can’t do it by yourself. You need to guide your team to archive that and you need to lead the way by showing examples. Most importantly the credit should go to the team. You shouldn’t expect the credit for archive objectives. People who are not good leaders, they try to get the credit for the work which done by the team and try to sustain by using those.

So how you can become a leader? You need to work for that, you need to be trained for that. So you need to train on the required skills and you need to use those skills. While you excel those skills, you will automatically become a leader. People will gather around you and they will look for you. This is where people will start to respect and treat you as a leader.

If you can’t expert the required skill set due to the lack of commitment, then you should not deserve that role. First, you need to understand your strengthsas well as weaknesses and then you need to work on those areas where you need improvements. If you can do these adjustments, believe me you can be a successful leader sooner.

Please think again and react before you become a pain to someone.

I end this article with couple quotes and i will meet you again with an article of 'Required skill set for a successful leader'

“And when we think we lead, we are most led.”
~Lord Byron

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”
~John C. Maxwell

Monday, May 30, 2011

Criticism in office

When i was adding some comments to our company discussion forum, I have commented on a topic on 'criticism'. So i thought of sharing that comment in my blog.

In any culture, each and every one should respect others, when that happens around you, you will be comfortable in the env and you feel that you are in a free and open culture.

Criticism is another good aspect of an open culture. The criticism should be done in professional manner. If not it will lead to lot’s of problems. Why it leads to problems? That’s an area where lots of people feel personally. So it’s really important how you do it. If you do that publicly then people may get offended, may be de motivated and may lead to conflicts. It’s really important how you put it out. So you should not do criticism, you should do Constructive Criticism.

I extracted below theory from CSTE CBOK on how you do Constructive Criticism.

“In giving constructive criticism, you should incorporate the following tactics:

Do it Privately

Criticism should be given on a one-on-one basis. Only the individual being criticized should be aware that criticism is occurring. It is best done in a private location. Many times it is more effective if it is done in a neutral location, for example, in a conference room or while taking someone to lunch, rather than in the boss' office.

Have the Facts

General statements of undesired performance are not very helpful. For example, statements such as "That proposal is not clear, fix it" or "Your program does not make best use of the language or technology" leave people feeling confused and helpless. Before criticizing someone’s performance, have specific items that are causing the deficiency or undesirable performance.

Be Prepared to Help the Worker Improve His Performance

It is not good enough to ask the worker to "fix it.” You must be prepared to help fix it. Be prepared to train the subordinate in the area of deficiency. For example, in a proposal, indicate that a return-on-investment calculation was not made; or if a program failed to use the language properly, state specifically how it should and should not be used. You should not leave an individual feeling that they have performed poorly or unsure as to how to correct that performance.

Be Specific on Expectations

Be sure your subordinate knows exactly what you expect from him or her now and in the future. Your expectations should be as clear as possible so there can be no confusion. Again, in a proposal, indicate that you expect a return-on-investment calculation included in all proposals. Most people will try to do what they are expected to do—if they know what those expectations are.

One last recommendation for criticism:

Avoid making threats about what will happen if the performance does not change. This will not cause any positive behavior change to occur and normally produces negative behavior. Leave the individual with the assumption that he or she has the capability for improvement, and that you know he or she will improve.”

When you do criticism acceptably, you will respect the other party and you will gain the respect from others.

“He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

How to motivate your self

If I ask you about a person performance based following statistics, what will be your judgement?

There is one person who performed the same task 62850 times and the success of those tasks was 1334. What you think of his performances? Was he performed well? Or was he underperformed.

The person is none other than our spin legend Murali.

He has bowled 62850 deliveries to get his 1334 wickets in both formats, ODI and Test.

He never feared to bowl, he never gave up, bowl by bowl he focused, improved his performance and became a legend

When it comes to our work, Don’t fear your failures.

That’s my first point of how you can motivate you self in your work life.

If you look at our lives, we do the same thing over n over for years, this induce us to get de motivate our self. There are many factors you can consider to be motivated such as money and power, but I believe to be motivated to be success, money and other external things not that much matters.

So when you fail, take it as a pillar to be success. If Murali gave up his bowling, then there won’t be a legend.

The second point is that do all your tasks positively. Learn to let go negative thoughts of tasks before they have a chance to take hold of you. You might not be able to be positive all the time, but it’s really good being positive all the time, which helps you to be open minded. When you approach to perform a task with mind set like that, you will complete the task or will find solutions for complex tasks. When Murali was dried up with wickets he always took that challenge positively and produce new deliveries to take wickets.

When a task is huge or complex, break it down to small chunks. You can complete them piece by piece, by the end of the day you have completes whole task or at least you have completed some. That feels good. Believe me. Break your task in to small pieces, that’s my third point.

Next point is Remember your successes. The reason behind this is when thoughts of successes flow in your mind you will be energetic and will be in good frame of mind to do complete tasks. You feel positive because you believe you r self because of the successes you had.

Final point of the day will be to have fun, whatever you do, make sure you have fun. It’s always possible to do what you most like to do during weekends or whenever a holiday is there. It’s always good to do exercises as a part of you life with other fun activities. When your mind says get a break, it’s the right time to get a break

Even you can have breaks in between while you perform your tasks daily. I prefer to play TT with my friends at office which refresh my mind continue the remaining tasks. Personally I felt that playing TT refreshes me on a packed day.

Every day you need to ask yourself whether you are motivated and satisfied enough.

And it’s all about, stay hungry stay foolish