To hell with recession, go lean and yield more from less
By Saheer Karimbayil   |   Thursday, 25 December 2008, 01:15 IST   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: "As current recession takes a big toll on Indian IT companies, slashing down the unnecessary expenses and simplifying the complex projects are the needs of the hour," asserts Neville Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman of ThoughtWorks while addressing a panel discussion on 'Lean For Lean Times: Delivering More With Less. Roy endorses 'lean approach' in software development, which, he says, is all about compressing the development cycles. Delving a little bit to history, Roy attributes the demise of GM to a failure to adapt to such inevitable transformation and credits the success of Toyota to its approach of building on scarcity and not on abundance. Roy would like to also apply the approach in the maintenance of manpower too. He says that a company needs to make sure that it has got only good talents. In this way, all the under skilled laborers will be considered as the company waste. Wipro Chief Quality Officer Jagdish Ramaswamy, another panelist in the debate conducted by ThoughtWorks, has a clear reason on why Indian companies fail to quickly adapt to impending transformation. Ramaswamy says the rate of attrition is comparatively high in India, crippling the process of what he calls 'enculturization'. If employees are not able to get used to the culture of their particular company, that will take a big toll on the performance of that firm. Ramaswamy is a strong supporter of Six Sigma approach, a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola. While, according to him, this approach brings team work, Roy says that the approach is something complex and expensive, except for some benefits. What if one could do less with less and still win! This is the point Ranga Shetty, Senior Director of Engineering at Yahoo is trying to drive home. According to Ranga Shetty, when one does one thing, he or she should focus exclusively on that and excel. As there will be more technology tomorrow than what is there today, there will be more functionality tomorrow than what is there in place now. So, one has to make sure he or she does not confuse customers with a hell lot of choices. Simply put, keep the product or solution as simple as possible. Ranga Shetty validates his argument with a jam example. When samples of 24 types of Jam were kept for customers in a shop to choose, a lot of people turned up to taste it and move around the table, but the number of people who bought them were very less. But when the shop people reduced the experiment with six samples of jams, the number of people who turned up was small but buying increased ten times. Another panelist KB Unni, MD, Seven Hat consulting, was not ready to take any extreme position in the debate as he tried to put several approaches including Six Sigma and lean on single platform. "I cannot understand why companies, after availing many benefits from Six Sigma, throw out the very approach just for replacing it with some thing else. Six Sigma is the most suitable approach to a business where more transactions take place," he opines.

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