Saturday, August 1, 2009

About a concept - OpCord

Earlier, I had published about my journey to entrepreneurship and now, we are making an attempt to explain the concept "OpCord". OpCord means Optimizing with Coordination.

OpCord is a concept which understands that each organization has multiple factors / constraints which affect their output. It believes that one can achieve best results when they recognize all possible parameters and optimize them rather maximize any one parameter. Here, we are listing some of the outputs which organizations are usually interested in:

Organizational Success Parameters
Customer Satisfaction
Employee Satisfaction
Revenue (Top Line)
Profitability (Bottom Line)


Product / Project Success Parameters
On time Delivery
Delivers expected functionality
Product Quality
Within Budget
Organization becomes stronger or product is a hit


Once we wish to achieve many mutually exclusive outputs, we no more can work in silos. Let's say, we would like to maximize productivity but it is important that we do not loose focus from product quality while looking at only productivity. Some times, developer develops one functionality in hurry and is not able to grasp that one small mistake (or bug) today might affect whole product and in turn, whole company in future. At times, we consider only a few outputs in mind and face the brunt at later stage.

Let's focus on optimization of various outputs rather maximization of one of the output precisely because of reasons mentioned above. It is good idea to keep customer delighted all the time but burning employees at the same time, might not keep customer delighted for long time. We need to understand the importance of trade-offs and that one does not get everything every time. It is of utmost importance that we decide trade-offs in the beginning, understand our constraints and achieve most optimized outputs.

Second, most important point, we miss some times is the coordination. A few organizations fail in integration while each and every individual or team or division or dept is doing their best. Organizations are not able to integrate well due to either rivalry, lack of transparency, lack of bigger picture, lack of accountability, lack of coordination, lack of trust etc.

Organizations need high degree of coordination among team members, business analysts, designers, developers, testers, managers to ensure the smooth and best delivery of products. No matter, how great the process is or how great the technology is, we might miss on hitting the road just because of lack of coordination among various horizontals, verticals, domains, divisions etc. Hence, it is very important that we coordinate well.

That's the reason, we thought of optimizing with coordination for organizations and self. Let's opcord and be happy.


Regards,
Hariprakash Agrawal (Hari)
http://opcord.com