Book Image

Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Developers

By : Abhinav Kaiser
Book Image

Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Developers

By: Abhinav Kaiser

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Professionals
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

The PDCA circle


The PDCA circle is a popular model in practicing continuous improvement or kaizen. PDCA abbreviates to a four activity iterative approach—plan, do, check, and act:

This concept was tested in the real world and made popular by William Edwards Deming, and it is also commonly known as the Deming cycle. The cycle was, however, theorized by Walter Stewhart, and Deming during his years in Japan referred to the cycle as the Stewhart cycle.

When you create a new product, it is likely that it is far from perfect. However, you will probably have a basic or vague understanding of what perfect looks like. So, you start taking baby steps towards the perfection through the use of PDCA cycle. You will get to the point of near perfection as you keep making incremental and nonstop improvements. You can see your product evolve in every step of the way. Most, if not all, organizations use this methodology to make their products or services the best they can possibly be. Apple products did not come out chiseled the way they seem to be.

They grew slowly through multiple iterations of improvements, adding one feature at a time and one product launch after another. PDCA plays a major role in industries where the time to market is as long as the lifespan of a housefly. Let me take you through the individual stages of the PDCA cycle:

  • Plan: Chart out your objectives, goals, and targets that you wish to achieve in a given period of time. The planning stage gives you the direction for improvements and tells you how quickly and how swiftly you need to proceed towards the intended target. To do this stage effectively, you need to have the vision to see things from afar, which could be weeks, months, or even years. Every new product you get in the market is designed during the planning stage and then the team of developers bring the design on paper to life.

    In communication, you need to plan your communication channels, policies, processes, and style guides among others. It is important to know that the communication planning plays a key role in ensuring that information is exchanged effectively and efficiently as well. Also, it can be done economically through the use of technologies such as VOIP and e-mails.

  • Do: In this stage, you start executing your plans. In the design of a cell phone, let's say that the planning stage came up with the concept of haptic feedback in theory. Developers in the "do" stage will look to breathe life into the design and make it a reality. To summarize, in this stage the actual implementation or deployment takes place, as specified in the planning stage.

    The output of the planning stage—various planning documents such as policies, controls, and procedures are implemented in the doing stage. Implementation of communication controls will include training the employees, letting customers and vendors know of the frequencies and mediums that will be used and perhaps hand-holding employees, customers, users, and vendors to carry out the necessary communication-related activities.

  • Check: At this stage, you have a plan and it has been achieved as well. To what extent the plan has been achieved is the objective of the check stage. While the designs are given shape during the "do" stage, it is common to sway from the target—meaning the specifications might not be met. People working on projects can get blinded by the proximity they are in. But, when you take a step back and observe the progress, you will be in a good position to judge where we are in terms of achieving the goals put out in the plan stage. The "check" stage will analyze the product or service and compare it to the specification document from the plan stage, and then produce a delta analysis that basically tells all stakeholders what else needs to be achieved to attain the desired specifications.

    When we implement communication policy and procedures, say by training employees, some may get it and some won't. It is also possible that the infrastructure does not support the communication needs or the users just don't feel like following the new rules around communication. In such cases, as an analyst, you would make observations on where things are not going as per plan and how they need to be tweaked.

  • Act: At this point, you have a gap analysis document in your hand listing the delta between desired and achieved. The next stage is rather logical and predictable, right? You act on the shortcomings to meet the desired results. In the corporate world, when new operating systems such as Android are rolled out, you see a number of updates roll in from time to time. These updates are coming from your act stage and are molding the sculpture slowly but surely. If you look around, you can find a number of examples that are living act stages in play.

    The same goes for communication. Plug all the gaps and ensure that the plan comes to fruition by fulfilling the requirements.

  • The Iteration: The plan-do-check-act process that I took you through is considered a single cycle. You need to do it as many number of times as the product or service is live. The preceding figure shows you how multiple iterations improve the quality of the object and takes it towards perfection. The x axis is represented by time and y axis is represented by quality. As time progresses, you can get in more PDCA iterations, which leads to quality improvement—the objective of the Deming cycle.

  • Applicability: As I mentioned earlier, you can apply PDCA to any area and it is bound to produce positive results, including the area of your personal life where you can set yourself goals to achieve and work towards achieving them. After you think you have achieved them, compare them with your goals and identify the delta. Work towards bridging the gap and repeat the cycle as long as you are competitive to improve on a continuous basis. It works!

I used the example of a product mainly to explain the concept of PDCA. Apart from products, service industries can leverage on it too to improve the services they provide—potential areas could be IT services, hospitality, utilities and so on. You would definitely need to rely on this model if you are looking to bring about improvements into projects. I can probably go on for the next few pages on the industries where the Deming cycle would be applicable and still have a few more pages left. I will not do this, and instead hope that you understand the depth and compatibility with various systems, objects, and processes.

In this workshop, you will see PDCA in action. You will plan the workshop and then run the training to your employees and at the end of every chapter there is an assessment test provided. This test is a good reflector of how well your students understand the topics of this workshop. If you find the results of the assessment unsatisfactory, take a step back, and find another way to train them on the topics where they didn't score well. This way, you are not just delivering the training, but checking the understanding and doing what is necessary to bridge the gap.