service operation v2

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Nottingham University Business School

MBA Programme in Singapore

Bytemobile Inc, United State:

Six Sigma in Software Development

Word count: 2564 words

Prepared by:

Ng Seow Sheng

Operation ManagementLecturer:

Professor Kulwant S Pawar

[22 November 2010]


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Introduction

Six Sigma implementations had been very successful in large corporation such as

Motorola and GE. These successes prompted firms from different industries to look at the Six

Sigma framework and identify similar operation issues where could be addressed by introducing

Six Sigma. The idea of Six Sigma is to improve quality by reducing the number of defects to 3.4

parts per million. In software development environment, it is possible to manage the

performance of software processes. By using statistic tools, measurement such as time, size and

defects could be collected and tabulated. Such metrics help in managing and controlling the

performance of software processes. This report will look at a software base company from

United States on how to address quality issues by using gap model of quality to identify the gap

in quality and propose solution to implement Six Sigma for the day-to-day operation of the

company to improve software quality and reduce the number of defects by achieving 3.4 parts

per million.

Company Profile

Bytemobile Inc is a startup company that was founded by Dr. Constantine

Polychronopoulos from Santa Clara University California in 2000.It is a small company with

global reach. Currently, employed over 200 employees worldwide, it has a very strong presencein EMEA and United States. Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos, now holding the position of

CTO, has been actively involved in new technology and patents. The revenue reported on Inc.

for 2006 was USD20.9 million (Inc. 2007).

Bytemobile focus on delivering data reduction and optimization over the air interface

between a mobile device and the radio station. The value proposition of such solution is to

enable operator to achieve maximum average revenue per user (ARPU) with existing wireless

network infrastructure. Internet surfing with mobile devices becoming more popular as more

smartphones appear in the market, thanks to Apple Iphone there is a huge explosion of data

usage over the radio network that could create huge congestion as radio network has limited

bandwidth. Therefore, Bytemobiles product is able to optimize the usage of radio network by

identifying wastage, example data that is not required by the browser on the mobile device,

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removing such data wastage and send minimum data over the air to the mobile device with little

degradation of user experience.

Market

Bytemobile has been dominant in mobile data optimization space since markets

inception. The target customers are normally mobile operators with 3G licenses and experiencing

huge data explosion due to the growing number of Apple Iphone users. It was projected by

Cisco, 2009 that data traffic will double year by year.

With such data growth over the wireless network, mobile operators are becoming nervous

and some already experiencing congestion in the wireless network as the number of smartphone

users grow. As video traffic grows and contributes a greater proportion of the traffic mix, it

becomes more important for operators to manage it. Video traffic is expected to growth at about

150% a year and will soon dominate mobile networks. It is critical for operators to manage this

growth to control costs and maintain service levels.

Source: Cisco, 2009

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 20130

500,000

1,000,000

1,500,000

2,000,000

2,500,000

Data

P2P

Video

Audio45 % ofTraffic Today

64% in 2013(73% in W.

Europe)

Worldwide Mobile DataTraffic Growth

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Business Strategy

The current business strategy is to help operators to identify network congestion problem

in the radio network and propose web optimization as the value proposition. This is a very

convincing proposition as the operators are facing network congestion over the air interface

before the solution could be proposed. Solution sold to the operators is based on the number of

concurrent users at anytime. Bytemobile will help operators to source for hardware and install

the software for the operators. Professional Services is provided at additional costs to the

operators on top of what operators already paid the hardware and the software licenses. The

value proposition is to create a one-stop-shop to the operators where solution architecture

provided by Sales, installation, implementation and integration provided by Professional

Services and finally Customer Support could maintain and monitor both the hardware and

software aspect of the solution.

Operation from Sales, Professional Services and Customer Support are based on

concurrent users based pricing. Account team will approach the customers by offering solution

based on licensing usage that is tied to concurrent users. Professional Services will install,

implement and integrate solution into customers network based on the number of concurrent

users sold to the customer. Finally, the response time of Customer Support for any issues raised

by customers depending on the number of concurrent users sold. In recent months, Bytemobile

experience huge amount of rework required by the Engineering team and Customer Support

department is extremely busy solving and troubleshooting problems related to software defects.

As such, there is a need to identify where the problem lies; Gap Model of Quality is a useful tool

for this purpose. The following section will look into the Gap Model of Quality and try to

identify potential Gap between customers expectation and perception.

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Gap Model of Quality

The Gap Model of Quality introduces the perception and expectation gap that could be

used to identify product or service quality issues faced by firms. In this section, the gap

experience by Bytemobile will be identified by analyzing current practices against customers

perception and expectation.

Source: From Prof K.S. Pawar lecture notes

According to Gap Model of quality (Berry, Parasuraman and Zeithaml, 1985) Gap 1

ensures consistency between internal quality specification and the expectation of customers. In

Bytemobile case, the solution offered by Bytemobile is based on licensing that count the number

of concurrent users. Unfortunately, most of the operators do not understand the licensing logic of

counting concurrent users instead throughput is the expected metric for measuring the traffic

bandwidth. Operators are more interested to know how much throughput the platform can

process, e.g. 400Mbps, as throughput is a common term used by the operators. These differences

in customers expectation and Bytemobiles current operation created quality Gap 1. This the

responsibility of the marketing department, operation department and research and development

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department either to educate the customer to think concurrent users licensing model or to fulfill

customers expectation by creating licensing model based on throughput.

At the moment, the company suffers a great deal of software quality issues. Current

operation of R&D department experience high load and insufficient resources to address new

development and fixing bugs found in the software. Top management pushed for fast response

and first entry to the market as a result the quality assurance department did not have enough

time to test the software thoroughly before releasing the software to the operators. As a result

the quality expectation of the customers decline greatly.

The company vision and mission is to develop a software solution that is stable, scalable

and modular design. As a software solution company in a very competitive environment, the

company required to response to market forces that shift from one technology to the other within

months, the top management find it difficult to establish specification to response to technology

changes due to lack of trained developer. This lack of resources mean the company suffers

difficulty internal specification to meet intended concept of design as propose by Gap 2 of the

Gap model of quality.

Bytemobile setup a World Wide Customer Support unit to meet customers expectation

by providing service level that is compliant to operators requirement. Gap 3 of the Gap model of

quality specified that even if there is a specification exists, to meet the requirement of these

specifications might be difficult. In the same way, Bytemobile suffers consistent service quality

because human factors exist. The response time to customers requests are always varies

depending on the engineers on duty during that time. Some engineers were swift to respond and

others fall short in responding at the time specified. Therefore, the company suffers in meeting

the expectation of customers to receive consistent customer services.

Gap 4 describe promises made to customers concerning the product service can really be

delivered. Many times in technology products or services, the promises made by the sales staff

may not be met due to technology immaturity in the process or limitation of the technology. In

Bytemobiles product, the same fate awaits them, many times, the sales staff promised that the

solution would be able to deliver 400Mbps of throughput but the fact is the product is not able to

limit the number of traffic by using throughput as the metric.

Clearly, Bytemobile need to address such gaps by looking into the need to improve

quality of its software solution and to eliminate wastage created by buggy software that requires

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rework. The solution for Bytemobile could be addressed by implementing Six Sigma for the

company. The following discussed the possible steps to improve quality by Six Sigma.

Six Sigma for Bytemobile

In view of current challenges to meet the gap discussed above, Bytemobile could

introduce Six Sigma to reduce wastage due to software development bugs. Six Sigma developed

by Motorola is meant to improve the quality of management. Six Sigma was successfully

adopted by General Electric in 1990s. Thawani (2004) noted that at least twenty-five percent of

Fortune 200 companies are very serious about Six Sigma implementation.

There are many Six Sigma initiatives failed to produce favorable result due to focusing

too much on the technical aspect of how-to rather than adopting Six Sigma as a corporate culture

that seek continuous improvement. Therefore, it is very crucial that the top management at

Bytemobile embrace the following themes in its strategic vision in order to be successful; a

genuine focus on the customer, data and fact driven management, process focus, management

and improvement, proactive management, boundary-less collaboration and a drive for perfection

and yet a tolerance for failure. (Chang 2007).

By adopting Six Sigma initiatives for software development the five stages will be

discussed define-measure-analyze-improve-control, DMAIC process. The R&D department has

been working double hard to fix bugs that were found in the field. Instead of being re-active toquality, Six Sigma initiative introduces a more pro-active approach and continuous improvement

to the solution developed by Bytemobile.

As discussed previously, there are four issues observed in Bytemobile for each gap found

in the Gap Model of Quality. Only the problem observed in Gap 2 will be discussed and be

analyzed. Gap 2 suggests that the internal specification to meet the concept of design. As

observed the R&D department is suffering from many defects in the internal specification in the

form of bugs that failed to meet the intended concept of design. The following will discuss the

five stages for R&D department to adopt in order to improve software quality by reducing the

number of defects.

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Source http://www.sixsigmainstitute.com/leansigma/index_leansigma.shtml

Define

In this stage, it is important to define the customers requirement and identified thecurrent problem. Currently, there are a lot of complains from customers in relation to software

quality. Many customers upgraded to the latest releases and found out many problems such as

processes crashed. Some customers found out features found in previous release were no longer

available in current software release.

All these feedbacks are very helpful as this means that customer would like to have more

reliable software and maintain features that are found in current releases while adding new

features in the new software release.

The current tasks are to establish a project charter to define the goal of the project, recruit

members from different department to form a project team, plan the budget, schedule the

timeline and identify stakeholders.

Secondly, the customers need to be identified, external and internal. Requirements

gathering from these customers will be carried out at this stage, these requirements could include

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service requirement and features requirement. Sending out survey forms and interview key

customers to identify their requirement is the most important task.

It is possible to define to reduce the number of bugs reported by the field from the current

twenty-six bugs found in October 2010 to three bugs for December 2010. This would be the

target for the team to achieve.

Measure

Measurement is important as this would be a form of feedback to the team in order to

adjust the operation process accordingly. There is system in place, such as Customer Support

Portal that would send out survey after each support request log by the customer. From such

system, the number of defects, such as bugs and missing features could be tally. A quarterly

statistics could be generated and posted at the bulletin board to remind all the employees of the

number of bugs experience by customers. This could motivate each employee to strive to reduce

defects at each stage of the development process.

Analyze

The statistics collected at the measure stage could be analyzed in details to identify the

root cause. The defects found could be due to coding error, quality control issues or even

improper installation of the software on-site. At this stage, the data gathered could be used for

brainstorming purpose and a cause-and-effect diagram produced to help identify the root cause.

The list of all possible root cause could be generated at the end of the brainstorming

session. This exercise could be carried out quarterly to assess current situation.

Improve

The list of possible root cause identified during analysis stage would then be looked at

and possible improvement or solution could be drawn up. At this stage a test environment would

be used to experiment the proposed solution and repeat the measure and analyze stage to make

sure the solution suggested does reduce the number of defects.

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Control

Finally, the solution found in improve stage would be deployed into the real environment.

It is important to maintain the improvement attained from the solution introduced. If such

improvement suffers undesirable results, the process will need to be re-evaluated.It is very important to continuously improve on the current process and not to allow any

form of defects left unnoticed during the software development life cycle. With the defects on

each stage of the life cycle reduced or even eliminated, a more reliable and less buggy software

release would mean less complains from the customers.

Refer to Appendix A, Chang et al proposed fourteen questions that a manager could ask

at each stage of the DMAIC cycle to make sure that all required information are gathered and

evaluate properly.

Conclusion

Finally, the software quality issues faced by Bytemobile could be identified by using the

Gap Model. Firstly, some of the features found in the software do not meet customers

expectation. For example, customers understood the use of throughput to control the amount of

traffics passing through a system, whereas Bytemobile proposed Concurrent Users count which

is not understood by the customer. Secondly, the software quality misses the Gap of internal

specifications. Software was introduced to customer with many defects that did not meet the

internal specifications.

By introducing Six Sigma to the organization, issues with software defects could be

addressed by reducing the number of defects to 3.4 parts per million. The top management must

be convinced to implement continuous improvement program not just at the working level, but to

make it a corporate culture. At the moment, it is desirable to introduce Six Sigma program to the

R&D department in order to reduce the number of bugs found and to improve software quality.

There are three other problems identified using the Gap Model of Quality that could not

be discussed in this report. This will be an opportunity to further research into apply Six Sigma

to address those problems.

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http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2007/company-profile.html?id=200734930 accessed on 22

September 2010

http://www.bytemobile.com/company/ accessed on 22 September 2010

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http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2007/company-profile.html?id=200734930http://www.bytemobile.com/company/http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2007/company-profile.html?id=200734930http://www.bytemobile.com/company/


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Appendix A

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service operation v2

Documents

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