Effective Execution: Building High-Performing Organizations

By Raghav S Nandyal

'Thorough and broad-ranging.' - Dr Bill Curtis, Executive Director, Consortium for Information

Execution effectiveness has remained an unconscious focus, not the primary focus, as organizations struggle with mediocre execution due to the interplay between unmindful workplace and workforce ineffectiveness. Effective Execution: Building High-Performing Organizations identifies the core foundations on which both workplace and workforce effectiveness must be fostered to make execution 'mindful of waste'.

It focuses on:
How can an organization enable alignment of individuals' work to achieve common business objectives when they come from vastly di­ffering family, social, cultural and competency backgrounds?
Why are some implementations more e­ffective than others when organizations implement the same set of best practices contained in popular management frameworks for performance improvement?

Raghav S. Nandyal draws from his global consulting practice and field experiences to help CEOs and managers develop true learning organizations that build and retain advanced knowledge of their businesses.

'Raghav writes about the importance of problem-solving by maintaining a solid execution focus and getting the job done effectively.' - Commodore Anand Khandekar IN (Retd), Ex-Managing Director, Motorola India Electronics Pvt. Ltd

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jun 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9789390252862

Raghav S Nandyal

Raghav S. Nandyal is the Founder and CEO of SITARA Technologies, a professional services company with core competencies in strategic management consulting and high-maturity process appraisals. He served as the very few certified High Maturity Lead Appraisers by the CMMI Institute, (past: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University), who could lead SCAMPI appraisals on all three constellations of the CMMI and the People CMM. Prior to the sunset of CMMI constellations and the People CMM, he had the unique distinction of being certified by the CMMI Institute to teach the Introduction to CMMI V1.3 for Development, Acquisition and Services constellations, Acquisition Supplement, Services Supplement and Introduction to the People CMM courses. With the release of V2.0, he maintains his certification to lead high maturity CMMI appraisals for CMMI V2.0. As a practicing Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, he has been a prime consultant, coach and an appraiser on CMMI and People CMM based process improvement initiatives in leading multinationals, worldwide. He is on the international review panel for IEEE Software.

Book preview

EFFECTIVE EXECUTION

EFFECTIVE EXECUTION

Building High-Performing Organizations

RAGHAV S. NANDYAL

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First published in India 2021

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Copyright © Raghav S. Nandyal, 2021

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To

My divine parents

Veda and Srinivasa Murthy

Who instilled in me the great Upanishadic verse that epitomizes effectiveness.

Uttishtatha, Jaagratha, Praapyavaraan Nibodhata |

Kshurasya dhaaraa Nishitaa Duratyayaa

Durgam Pathastat Kavayo Vadanti || 1.3.14 ||

Arise! Awake! Stop not till the goal is reached. The path (to perfection) is sharp as the razor’s edge, hard to tread so declare the wise sages.

Katha Upanishad 1.3.14

TRADEMARK NOTICES

Use of any trademarks in this report is not intended in any way to infringe on the rights of the trademark holder.

The author and publisher have taken care in the preparation of this book but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information or program contained herein.

The following service marks and registered trademarks are used in this document:

Carnegie Mellon®

Capability Maturity Model® CMMI® CMM® CMM Integration®

SCAMPI℠ PSP℠ TSP℠ IDEAL℠

SPRUM® SPRUM: Systemic Process Review Using Measurements™

Certified SPRUM Practitioner℠ Certified SPRUM Instructor℠

Certified SPRUM Evaluator℠

SITARA Process JewelBox®

MBTI®

Carnegie Mellon, Capability Maturity Model, CMMI, CMM, and CMMI Integration are registered trademarks in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

CMM Integration, CMMI; Personal Software Process, PSP, Team Software Process, TSP, and IDEAL are service marks of Carnegie Mellon University. CMMI Institute owns all copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property rights in the CMMI content.

Six Sigma is a registered trademark and service mark of Motorola, Inc.

SPRUM and SPRUM: Systemic Process Review Using Measurements are registered trademarks in the name of Raghavan S. Nandyal

Certified SPRUM Practitioner℠, Certified SPRUM Instructor℠, Certified SPRUM Evaluator℠ are service marks in the name of Raghavan S. Nandyal

SITARA Process JewelBox® is a registered trademark in the name of SITARA Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

MBTI is a trademark or registered trademark of The Myers & Briggs Foundation in the United States and other countries

Special permission to reproduce and adapt portions of SITARA Process JewelBox® is granted by SITARA Technologies Pvt. Ltd (India).

CONTENTS

Foreword by Bill Curtis

Foreword by Anand Khandekar

Prologue

Acknowledgements

Executive Decisions

Introduction

Improvement and Its Importance

SPRUM and Its Usefulness

Making a Case for Correct Measurements: The Missing Ingredients

Impact of Workforce Capability on Measurementxl

Integrating Lean Tools to Improve Effectiveness Measuresxl

Concluding Remarks

PART ONE: WORKPLACE EFFECTIVENESS

1 Building a Nurturing Work Environment

Introduction

Work Environment and Its Impact on Effectiveness

Examples from a High-Performance Work Environment

SPRUM Enablers to Build a Nurturing Work Environment

Communication Stances to Ensure Congruence at a Workplace

Concluding Remarks

2 Building Organizational Capability

Introduction

Emphasizing Measurement over Inspection

Shaping Up Organizational Capability Using Internal Expertise

Process Performance Models and Process Capability Baselines

Quantitative Process Management and Statistical Techniques

SPRUM Enablers to Build Organizational Capability

Concluding Remarks

3 Building Organization Culture for Mindful Execution

Introduction

SPRUM Enablers to Build a Culture of Mindful Execution

Concluding Remarks

4 Building Empowerment and Mentoring Effectiveness

Introduction

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator®

Organizational Paradigms: Work of Larry Constantine

Benefits of Instituting a Mentoring Programme in an Empowered Culture

SPRUM Enablers to Build Empowerment and Mentoring Effectiveness

Concluding Remarks

5 Building an Execution Environment of Perpetual Improvement

Introduction

Growing Organizational Maturity—A Staged Approach

SPRUM Enablers to Build an Execution Environment of Perpetual Improvement

Concluding Remarks

PART TWO: WORKFORCE EFFECTIVENESS

6 Commitment for Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason in the Right Way

Introduction

Maintaining a Systemic Focus

SPRUM Enablers to Enable Doing the Right Thing for the Right Reason in the Right Way

Agile Flaws

Concluding Remarks

7 Envisioning Solutions through the Customer’s Eye

Introduction

SPRUM Enablers to Build Envisioning Solutions through the Customer’s Eye

Concluding Remarks

8 Growing a Culture That Is Mindful of Competency Improvement

Introduction

SPRUM Enablers to Build a Culture Mindful of Competency Improvement

Concluding Remarks

9 Growing Community of Practices and a Learning Organization

Introduction

Competency Communities or Community of Practitioners

SPRUM Enablers to Build Community of Practices and a Learning Organization

Concluding Remarks

10 Making Execution Effectiveness Flow throughout the Organization

Introduction

SPRUM Enablers to Make Execution Effectiveness Flow throughout the Organization

Concluding Remarks

Epilogue

Glossary of Terms

References

Appendix A: SPRUM Checklist to Improve Execution Effectiveness

Appendix B: Case Study: Gap Assessment of COVID-19 Using SPRUM Enablers to the Indian Context

Index

About the Author

FOREWORD

‘Compliance is the motivation of the weak!’ International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) have far too often become compliance games. Check off all the boxes and you will get a merit badge to stick on the front door. Tick-the-box compliance leads to one of the three outcomes given below.

1.Sustainable compliance: Practices and processes are periodically evaluated and updated when necessary to stay relevant to changes in customers, markets, technologies and business conditions, sustaining the current level of performance and hoping it is enough.

2.Regression to mediocrity: Compliance is maintained but practices and processes are not updated, resulting in degraded performance as work methods decay under changing conditions.

3.Degraded compliance: Staff slowly undermine processes as they encounter stressful business conditions and begin taking shortcuts on a path to a poor-performing adhocracy.

However, there is a fourth outcome that is not seen as often as the first three.

4.Pursuit of excellence: Compliance is considered only a starting point rather than an objective and staff perpetually seek better ways of performing work to achieve even greater results.

Raghav’s book takes the current quality and process standards as a basement for performance and rapidly moves beyond them to describe methods for the pursuit of excellence. He integrates the best concepts from Lean Six Sigma, Capability Maturity Model (CMM)/CMMI, People CMM, Agile, DevOps and other improvement methods to provide an integrated roadmap for the journey to excellence. At all stops along his richly illustrated journey is measurement. Most hawkers of methods promise orders of magnitude improvements but without rigorous measurement, these are empty boasts. Among the great benefits of this book is Raghav’s introduction to his SPRUM® (Systemic Process Review Using Measurements) method for guiding and evaluating process improvement. Successful improvement programs have all taken an approach similar to SPRUM.

Raghav’s recommendations are founded in his experience at Motorola India Electronics Pvt. Ltd (MIEL). The night before they began telling their story on the internet in the early 1990s, I had a dinner with two MIEL executives in Austin. I was amazed at the story I was hearing, results which to that point had only been achieved in aerospace, the first industry to adopt CMM-based process improvement. Within days, MIEL’s revelations of dramatic productivity and quality gains from process improvement went viral (‘went viral’ was not a concept in the early 1990s). These results validated the value of process improvement through much of the industrial world, especially in India. Raghav has taken these lessons and dramatically expanded them with advances made in the past two and a half decades.

Yet, this book is about more than just process improvement. Raghav focuses on important sections on competency and workforce development. It does little good to improve work processes if people do not have the skills to perform them, or worse, if the staff is in perpetual churn. There are two types of learning curves. First is an organization that is always starting the learning curve anew and never progressing past the initial stages because of perpetual turnover. The second, more extensive curve is the true learning organization that builds and retains advanced knowledge of its business as a stable workforce continues its journey. Raghav shows how to achieve the latter because higher levels of the learning curve confront competitors with a difficult barrier to entry.

So at its core, this is a book about organizational development and a thorough and broad-ranging one at that. Traditional change management is not enough, you must understand how organizations mature through stages of growth in their journey towards excellence. The process maturity framework in its essence is a unique model of organizational development using an organization’s business and workforce processes as the means for transforming both its culture and results. I can summarize the maturity journey in four words: ‘Stabilize’—‘Standardize’—‘Optimize’—‘Innovate’. Follow Raghav through this book, he will show you the way.

Dr Bill Curtis

Fort Worth, Texas

FOREWORD

Effective Execution: A Preview

Raghav Nandyal has been actively and passionately involved in practicing Total Quality Management (TQM) and Lean Six Sigma for over 30 years. He has run through, as a part of his professional work, a large number of organizations—large, medium and small—and thus, has a huge data of ‘hands-on’ experience in this domain. He already has five books to his credit and his latest book is Effective Execution.

The focus of his latest book is:

How should an organization enable alignment of an individual’s work and indeed aspirations, with that of the organization, to achieve common business objectives? The individuals may have been drawn from vastly differing family, social, cultural and competency backgrounds which makes this challenge even more formidable.

Raghav also states that effective execution is all about people. For, at the heart of execution is a human being, whose soul’s work depends largely upon the following.

1.Great teamwork,

2.Clear communication,

3.Performing the defined standard work processes based on strong measurement, process evaluation and process improvement, in that sequence.

4.And above all, a very healthy, nurturing, empowering environment or eco-system within the organization, where the individual gives out his best through self-motivation.

Raghav, time and again, refers to his days (1992–1995) in Motorola India Electronics Pvt. Ltd (MIEL), where he found the above four factors in abundance, and that he gave out his best to MIEL and Motorola Corporation through strong self-motivation.

I had the privilege and pleasure to head MIEL for two years from January 1994 to February 1996 in Bangalore. The organization, which had already achieved world recognition by being the first software entity to achieve CMM Level 5, (the equivalent of Six Sigma in software that only an organization of the stature of Motorola could conceive in its Software Six Sigma programme), grew in strength from 150 staff to over 400, during that period, while still maintaining itself as the CMM Level 5 entity.

While Raghav has enumerated his experiences as a practitioner and an executioner in MIEL, I thought, I would enumerate some of the best practices we, as the senior management of Operations, Human Resource (HR) and Finance, adopted to give a very homely nurturing environment to MIEL. This enabled the staff of 400 to perform their best through self-motivation. This is because, while the sustainability of Six Sigma status in a manufacturing organization is largely due to machine operations, in a software organization, this has to be achieved by each ‘human being’ through an environment of encouragement, empowerment and empathy. The other critical requirement that is needed to succeed with sustaining high-performance operations in any organization is the ‘human or competency factor’. Nurturing the crucial need of improving the people’s maturity in an organization is a constant endeavour, the mechanics of which are often left out. They are brought out in this book by Raghav, spread over five chapters dedicated to improving workforce effectiveness. Addressing ‘how’ to go about building such people capability was perhaps possible because of Raghav’s expertise in the People CMM and his ability to connect some of its recommendations with what we did at MIEL.

Here we go:

1.Immediately after joining the organization, I initiated the process of meeting each and every individual (all of the 150 employees) over breakfast, in batches of five. This enabled me to understand each one of them, as individual human beings, their family background, hobbies, aspirations, etc. This was my way of paying tribute to their enormous contribution to creating the world’s first CMM Level 5 organization. Incidentally, this is a common practice in the Navy, where an officer, after joining his new ship, is invited by the Captain to join him for breakfast, to understand his new shipmate as a person.

2.MIEL was growing fast, with new entrants coming from very diverse backgrounds who had very little knowledge or concept regarding software quality. It was, therefore, necessary to create a very elaborate Induction Training Programme (ITP) of a duration of six weeks, where all the cardinal principles and practices of a CMM Level 5 organization were inculcated into them. I used to meet them on three occasions, on the very first day, on their passing out day and once in between. This was again to emphasize their key role in the organization which they would be required to play.

3.There were some key messages during this Induction Training Programme.

a.Motorola Global culture was emphasized with two strong messages of ‘constant respect for people’ and ‘Total Customer Satisfaction (TCS)’. This was essential because at that time, Motorola was spread across 35 countries and had over 150,000 employees. What bonded this global group together with such diversity of ethnicity, religion, geographical distances, was the Motorola Corporate culture, which everyone from the top to the bottom, followed to the hilt.

b.All the Instructors for this ITP were from within the organization. They emphasized to the new entrants, that they were also like them but now are producing world-class quality software in diverse domains.

c.The ‘key’ to the success of the CMM process, was the ‘peer review’. Here the new entrants learned to review the documents created by their peers, very professionally and dispassionately, ensuring that they were ‘critiquing’ the peer’s document and not ‘criticizing’ it. This was easier said than done. It took at least one week for the new entrants to master the peer-review technique.

4.There were rigorous project reviews every month for every project that was attended by the entire project team as well as all the support functions representatives of HR, Finance, IT and Quality Assurance. This helped to resolve any bottlenecks/ unresolved issues, expeditiously and over 90% of the projects were absolutely on track for execution, no mean achievement with ever-changing requirements. It also helped the junior members of the project team to see how their individual contribution was vital for the success of the project.

5.MIEL was, probably, the first one to introduce the concept of ‘Outward Bound Management Development Programme’ in August 1994 in the Indian Corporate world. A four-day ‘Marine boot-camp’ was conducted for 25 middle-level managers at the Rajmachi Fort near Lonavala, in the hills near Mumbai, in tented accommodation. The participants underwent various difficult obstacles/activities like rappelling, canoeing, etc. At the end of the day, around the campfire, the participants were encouraged to voice their fears, insecurities, uncertainties in facing various exercises conducted during the day. The fact that they all did this, very enthusiastically, showed the trust everyone had in their ‘peers’ who, otherwise, would be perceived as a potential competitor in an organization. This was one amazing experience in strong bonding for each participant. This programme was repeated for each of the project team as well, to ensure strong bonds within project team members.

We had, every month, one Town Hall Session that was attended by all and where any individual was free to ask a question to the management. It was a great experience (and indeed a leveler, sometimes) for the senior management. This was the transparency of governance at its best. It helped everyone to understand the ground realities and also provided the senior management an opportunity to convey the larger goals of the organization, to bring everyone on the same page.

6.Since MIEL was the first entity in Motorola Global Corporation to achieve CMM Level 5, many senior managers of MIEL were given the opportunities to head a number of new software development organizations in places like Singapore, Sydney, Adelaide, Beijing, etc. This helped with the career path of these senior managers.

7.We made sincere efforts to get some senior domain experts of MIEL to be appointed as the members of the different world standards committees as the representatives of Motorola Corporation. And we did succeed in one case. This indeed raised the self-esteem of the entire MIEL.

8.Out of the total staff sanctioned for MIEL, 20% vacancies were reserved for the PhDs. This ensured that MIEL had strong domain experts on their staff, who helped and mentored the younger entrants. This was the initiative of Terrence Heng, the Corporate Software Head of Motorola Corporation.

9.In 1995, MIEL introduced, for the first time in India, the ‘open, negotiated performance review’ for its entire staff. It was indeed a major exercise because the Indian concept of ‘Annual Confidential Review’ was demolished to make way for an open review between the manager and his team member. It took two months of solid weekend training sessions, for the managers, to instill full confidence in them to face and handle their respective team members for such an open review. Looking back, in 1995, it was a colossal task.

I guess I can go on and on. All I can say is that MIEL was full of people like Raghav who gave their best, and indeed were responsible to tell the entire world that India can produce world-class quality software, has a strong domain expertise and all this could be done at a very reasonable price point. In fact, MIEL established the status of India as a major hub of software design centres.

In this book on Effective Execution, Raghav writes about the importance of problem-solving maintaining a solid execution focus; and getting the job done effectively. What gets even better is that Raghav puts the relevance of the 64-enablers to test by offering a case study in Appendix B: ‘Gap assessment of COVID-19 using SPRUM® enablers to the Indian context.’ If they are relevant while addressing a pandemic of an unprecedented type we are currently living in, they should be equally relevant at other times. The most important contribution of this work is he clearly tells us ‘the how-part’ of doing it; what we normally see in maturity models or best practice guides is the ‘what-part’. Within the toolkit of Systemic Process Review Using Measurements (SPRUM), he identifies 64-enablers and sets the book in a tone that conveys: ‘The job is not done until you achieve and surpass all expectations, and until you get what you want.’

I enjoyed writing this preview for the book and I hope you will enjoy reading it as much!

Commodore Anand Khandekar, I.N. (Retd)

Pune, Maharashtra

PROLOGUE

⬧ Author’s Musing ⬧

Some initial thoughts before we begin:

1.Being effective is not necessarily the same thing as being efficient. An organization can be efficient, producing and getting results. But results could include the undesirable which, generally speaking, is called waste. Effectiveness, on the contrary, leaves little to no room for the creation of waste.

2.Getting results means we are getting outcomes that are proportional to what we are putting in. That is efficiency. Results need not be effective. Effectiveness on the contrary is getting things done properly. For effectiveness to manifest in the outcomes of work, we need to listen intently to all voices that question the rationale for what is being done that informs us why something is not going to work, in advance.

3.Effectiveness involves expertise. Which is, knowing where one has to go next with work even before it happens and knowing how to perform it when the opportunity presents itself. There is a big difference in executing work as per the defined mandates of work (that is, a scripted response) and executing work effectively by involving expertise with a tailored response that best fits the manner in which work is best done!

What this book is not about is: a cookbook of quick fixes that will magically make an organization effective. This book will most definitely not be able to help organizations with a workforce lacking in zest, drive and zeal to perform. And perform, well. Or for organizations with individuals who are not conscientious, dishonest about their capabilities and untruthful about their competencies. Or for individuals who are not conscious of building up for the lack of capabilities and competencies by being inquisitive or curious learners wanting to improve their performance but who must be constantly goaded to do so. Or even for those organizations with individuals who are not dedicated to delivering outcomes which are as per the design and expectations of their work engagements. While such disengaged individuals do exist in many organizations and I would blame it more on lack of supervision and timely corrective action, the good news is, no one that I have interacted with over my three decades of work engagements across the globe have ever told me that, they wake up each morning to report to work with the sole intention of doing a mediocre job on their work commitments! On the contrary, the tens of thousands of professionals with whom I have rubbed my shoulders across the world in my management consulting engagements were curious and interested to learn about performance/quality frameworks and understand how their contribution or lack of it affects execution. So, in general, individuals are motivated to produce good quality work. What needs to be addressed by the organizational stakeholders are issues and concerns that prevent people from producing their best results and giving their 100% to their work commitments.

In short, the focus of this book is about: How should an organization enable alignment of individuals’ work, when they are drawn into an organization from vastly differing family, social, cultural and competency backgrounds to achieve common business objectives? And even when organizations implement the same set of best practices contained in popular management frameworks addressing the topic of performance improvement, why are some implementations more effective than the others?

As a student and a practitioner of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Lean Six Sigma, what I have found to my utter surprise is an absolute lack of emphasis on ‘execution effectiveness’ in practice. While the emphasis is on efficiency, driven by the twin objectives of cycle time reduction and minimizing rework, the missing focus pertaining to building effectiveness with the needed foresight to minimize ‘waste’ is quite obvious. When the definition and scope of waste are broadened by adopting the terminology of Lean practices, what is at loss becomes quite evident. In Lean methodology (for example, Six Sigma), waste is remembered as an acronym WORMPIT derived from the first letters of waiting, overproduction, rework, motion, (over)processing, inventory and transportation. While WORMPIT has a strong product flavour, the same holds true for services just as much. But with a slight twist, the following resonates better: waiting, over-commitment, rework, missed deadlines, (call or ticket) pendency, individual-centered-service, team-centered-service.

Popular books on project management, too, seems to lack a definition for effective execution. They define both terms, execution and effectiveness, but separately. In doing so, they fail to offer a proper definition for what it means when the two words are put together. For example, Dictionary of Project Management Terms defines execution as: ‘operation of carrying out a task, activity, initiative, project, or program according to a specific plan of action’ (Ward 2008). And effectiveness as: ‘extent to which the goals of the project or system are attained, or the degree to which a project can be elected to achieve a set of specific requirements. Also, an output of cost-effectiveness analysis’ (Ward 2008). Yet, effective execution is all about people. For, at the heart of execution is a human being whose soul’s work depends largely upon:

1.Great teamwork,

2.Clear communication and

3.Performing the defined standard work processes based on a strong foundation of measurement, process evaluation and process improvement, in that sequence.

And what exactly is the meaning of: ‘defining standard work processes’? The process is a system of practices that only sets the bounds in which solutions have to be conceived by individuals who deliver solutions in a manner they were trained to deliver them. The presence or absence of these three contributing factors becomes evident to other human beings who are the recipients of products or services from execution.

When the two terms, execution and effectiveness, are put together, a whole new meaning emerges with an emphasis on the associated soft or people ‘factors’, and the impacted hard facts which is represented by data for rework, cycle time, and waste. From my research and field practice on this topic, oddly, none of the much-needed emphasis on people factors and the role it plays on data is brought out. Facts and figures (that is, data) are captured for a product or service as realized in execution outcomes but seldom the execution context whose influence cannot be ignored. It is influenced by strong people factors that masks out the understanding of effectiveness. Even if the need for effectiveness is perceived, just how does one realize it remains an unanswered question. What are the practices that an organization should consider in order to effect holistic or systemic improvements to both the workplace and its workforce? Answers to such questions and similar ones are attempted in this book.

Without overpromising and under-delivering, I would like to admit that this book deals with the domain of ‘experience’ that cannot be talked about. But one must remember at the same time that, there is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately. Therefore, it sets the limits of the view of effectiveness from a practitioner’s and ‘mindfulness’ perspective. Both of which are typically missing from the focus of execution.

Having defined processes and operational guidelines to handle execution in a consistent way, ‘while remaining mindful of the consequences at the same time’, seems more critical in today’s context than a focus purely on do-what-is-fit-for-now mindset. In a fit-for-now mindset, all that matters is to build a readily shippable, minimum viable product. The trouble I have run into with an execution focus on ensuring a readily shippable or a ‘minimum’ viable product is that it legitimizes what we, in the process community knew all along as a typical level 1 process maturity behaviour (initial maturity) since the days of the Software CMM (Paulk 1995). In such work cultures, when asked: How much of the work is complete? The answer invariably is: ‘We are 80% done’, driven by the heroics of a few (CMMI 2002; Nandyal 2004, 2011). And in a services context, it is all about striking a one-time customer relationship whose retention value is zero. Driven mostly by profitability concerns, such service and product quality effort emphasizes cycle time reduction over effectiveness. This mindset is evident even among some of the best brands today, perhaps, justifying the need for this book. To relate to what I am saying, recall how you were treated at an airport coffee shop that otherwise belonged to a big brand. Or the service that you received in any one-time, take-it-or-leave-it business relationship.

We shall explore how a contrasting view of execution might differ when looked at by placing an emphasis on soft but strategically important themes such as shared vision, shared mission and shared strategy of the workplace, with a shared understanding of the same and a driven commitment to achieve them among the workforce. Two words—shared and commitment, from this statement, are worth recognizing. Unless vision, mission, strategy and understanding are shared by everyone working to achieve common objectives, they will remain mere hollow words; they will not produce results or outcomes by themselves. The word commitment will be used extensively and it is important to know what it means. Promise or a guarantee about a service or of product quality is what you make to an external person; commitment is what you make to yourself. This book is about documenting enablers that must be in place to ensure that these two words do not remain mere words.

An organization can be thought of as an execution engine designed to produce a defined outcome. When we analyse reasons for ineffective execution, the causes for ineffectiveness are due to two components: ‘workplace ineffectiveness, workforce ineffectiveness, and of course, interactions between the two of them’. The litmus test for ineffectiveness is to enable measurements for the extent of ineffectiveness due to waste that is produced. If factors contributing to waste are properly identified, isolated and perhaps, eliminated from the system, then the chances of building effectiveness in execution can be improved.

It is only when a systemic view of execution is considered, can one reasonably hope for a lasting solution for effectiveness. Being merely execution-focused where the emphasis is on getting things done is not sufficient. Executing effectively is more important. Most modern-day fixes merely address the need for getting things done. For example, Scrum invented in 1993, approaches execution from the perspective of agility by shifting the focus to build a minimum viable product. Some rudimentary ideas from Scrum which recognizes the fact that one cannot eat an elephant whole, are: employ an incremental divide and conquer approach using constant feedback/assessment of progress made by individuals/small teams. Or take the other popular Agile solution for software development of extreme programming. Pair programming is advocated as a mechanism to increase the speed of development with an eye on customer satisfaction, hopefully, making execution effective. But the rules of extreme programming are impossible to materialize without maintaining a focus on improving the overall system with periodic process reviews that use measurements to establish objectivity in improving execution effectiveness. I have boldfaced a few key terms which are at the heart of this