While working in Amazon, I have learned a very good concept called KAIZEN. Kaizen is a Japanese concept which talks about continuous improvement. Do not worry a lot about major changes, rearchitecturing the whole system or reorganizing your team. Think about small improvements you can make in your day-to-day life. Can you be 0.001% more efficient by keeping your coffee mug on your right side than your left side? Can you be little faster by aligning your chair, keyboard and monitor correctly?
Kaizen is called "Kaizen" and not bug fix/project/enhancement if the change you have brought has following properties:
- is completed in not more than 5 working days
- has a direct dollar impact i.e. you can actually derive number of dollars your kaizen will have
- it is not a workaround but an actual root cause elimination (this applies only when you are solving any problem)
Following are few examples of kaizens which can be directly related to you:
- unnecessary compiling of unchanged classes
- long queues at coffee machine taking lot of your time
- network delays while working remotely
- number of times you type backspace.. instead try typing slow
- number of obvious bugs you fix.. can you write unit tests? if written, can you automatically run them at every check-in?
- amount of time you spend on documentation you are never going to see as soon as project is started.. work on only relevant documents
5 comments:
yeah I too agree that kaizen, six sigma, continuous process improvement are just not management jargon but they do help if one implements correctly. The examples you mentioned are secondary, don't you think at some point it too matters that company should cap activities like chat s/w and emails other than use of official?
Good writeup. I too believe in this...Keep writing
Bhavin, capping of activities like chat/emails is a trade-off between employee satisfaction and efficiency.
If employees are really spending lot of time in chatting, it should be capped. But if it is making them innovative by talking to others, keeping them fresh and hence more efficient, then why to cap it?
Personally, I don't think chats/emails should be banned at all. As an employee, I would like to work free instead of working in restricted environment!
Interesting read. I liked your blog. Maybe I will be back to read more. I do not agree with blocking chats/emails etc at workplace. Freedom is worth more than anything when it comes to innovation.
I believe in you keep writing.
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