Transformation ^ 2
Transformation of ( Process Improvement X My career )
Data warehousing - Six Sigma Green Belt - Black Belt - Master Black Belt - Business Analytics and Intelligence - Automation - Process Mining - Generative AI
If you are wondering about these terms and their sequence, they happen the courses that I did during the last 18 years. In the next few articles, I invite you to accompany me as I recount my journey. More than my journey, it is the journey and evolution of process improvement and transformation as a discipline. Along the journey, I will take you through some interesting applications of these methods with the objective of transforming processes.
After my B.Tech in information technology, I joined TCS from the campus. I was put through a two month learning program. Lots were drawn at the end of the program, I was destined to join data warehousing. For a fortune 5 customer, who insisted that IT vendors were also Six Sigma compliant. Shh, we are not supposed to name them! That’s how I pivoted from data warehousing to Six Sigma.
Initially, Six Sigma programs in IT firms were primarily about compliances. Ensuring that you have certain number of ‘belts’. In the process of acquiring those belts, people did improvement projects. The Six Sigma teams had to enable them to execute those projects and ‘drive’ the compliance and the savings target. It was okay till it was not, more on this in the next article. After spending some time in corporate offices, consulting, I moved on to the world of hard dollar benefits. This was a different experience and I learnt more about persuasion and change management than anything else.
In parallel, the data-science was picking up momentum. There were HBR articles written touting the sexiest job of 21st century, books written and courses offered. ‘Given my inclination to anything quantitative, I enrolled for a program with IIM Bangalore. It was worth it. More than venturing into standalone analytics engagements, I was able to do process transformations much better and faster. Be it classification, regression or clustering, every method had a rightful place in the transformation arsenal.
The biggest leap to my practice came in the form of process mining. For folks who have done lean action workouts, you can imagine the process discovery days where there giant whiteboards and post-its and heated discussions on how the process is actually getting executed. All of that was gone. You had an objective, data-based view of your process. With the digital twin in place, the product firms began to offer a host of other features like conformance checking, automation, simulation, prediction etc., Its only a start and its no wonder that the market is expected to grow at 45% a year till 2030.
While all these methods helped you understand the as-is process and get a view of bottlenecks and other causes of variation, automation, data-products and Gen-AI, has helped us implement some quick fixes or band aid solutions and make the process better. From the days of excel macros for RPA, we have come a long way in the form of intelligent automation. Gen AI, though in its initial stages, has offered us tremendous potential to improve operations. We have tested out some promising use-cases in the area of agent enablement and customer servicing.
Its an exciting time to be alive. With all these tools in our arsenal, executing transformations has never been more exciting. In the next few weeks, I will share my experiences of using these tools with a dose of gyaan, that inevitably comes along with grey hairs. Stay tuned.