So learners, we have been talking about it for a while now, right. Why do you need to take decisions?

What are
decisions? What are the kind of datasets that will allow you to make decisions? And what are the implementations of
those decisions? But at the root of it is what we started off with is the topic of this entire module, which is what are
decision support systems.

Now, for definition purpose, learners, this could be anything which allows you to determine, to make judgments, and
come up with a sequence of events that would allow you to take business actions or business implementations.

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Now, decision support systems could be anything. These could be automated tools and techniques or these could be
simple frameworks. You know, frameworks defined by lean, by six sigma, by various other simple techniques like say,
a SWOT analysis, for example.

Now, all these are frameworks or automated tools and techniques could be anything that allows you to take decision
and now to the next part of it as we have discussed this, you know, about the support systems, what are certain
examples that come to your mind.

You know you could have your decision support systems in the form of your crop science, which tells the farmers you
know, what should they sow; when should they reap; what fertilizer should they be using; and what are the quality
and quantum of crops that they can be expecting from using this entire tools or decision science at their disposal. So,
that is crop science.

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You also have you know the applications in larger areas like medical science. So, your entire clinical diagnosis, your
mammogram test, there are a lot of such tests, which are based on accumulating the right set of customer data or I
would say, the patient data and then allowing you to come up with results or actions, yeah.

You have this new category called variables, you know. So, your variables tell you about your pulse rate, your heart
rate, the distance you have covered, the gradient of the ground that you are running on, all this leads to intelligent
calculations that allows you to you know runners to take decisions on how fast should they be running? What's the
pace they should be maintaining? And are they within the right health parameters of their pulse rates and heart rates
to be running that fast? So, all this again is another form of decision support systems.

Coming to other categories. Much within our corporate you know, so your HR teams have access to employee
resource planning. Now, these are again tools, your time sheets. You know, how much time are you spending on
particular activities? What is your capacity calculations? Are you being utilised in the right manner and in the right
way?

Now, all this you know things which could we could not have done in the past or which we could have done in a much
more intuitive and gut instinct driven manner, are now being done in manner, which is much more seamless, which is
much more data driven, rather than gut driven and how do we do all this is through this access to the decision
support systems at our disposal right now.
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Let's look at the spectrum of decision making, yeah. So, which is if you were to break it into a very simple and normal
x-axis and y-axis to understand this entire spectrum of where do your decisions lie. Again, this is a visual depiction
which allows you to visualise the kind of decisions that you as managers or business influencers would be taking.

Now, you know, the y-axis, you know, as you go along the decision-making process could be about your competitive
advantage, which are the decisions or datasets, which allows you to keep building on your competitive advantage in
the marketplace. And on the x-axis, which it is about the complexity of data at your disposal.

So, there is the less complex data which is you know which practically every competitor or your rival in the space
would have. So, this is less competitive, less complex. Everyone should have more of hygiene datasets, but you can
keep moving along both this axis, you will see a higher degree of competitive advantage that you will acquire and
gain, if you do these kind of analysis and techniques. And of course, you know, it would improve your competitive
position in the marketplace, because the complexity of your analysis also keeps on building.

So now, within the spectrum, think about the things that you have within your entire ecosystem of data, yeah, and if
we were to break this further, right, these tools, techniques, and intelligent methods at your disposal, you can
actually start looking at these pieces, the way we start is something which is called as descriptive data.

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It allows you to take descriptive decisions. You know, at best, this kind of dataset would allow you to tell, okay, so you
know these are the segments of my data, this is how much they are spending, how much they are consuming, this is
who they are you know and which kind of geographical locations they are placed, pretty much descriptive. No
analysis or interpretation which has gone into it.

Now, you can move up the curve and there comes diagnostic data, which is about when you start drilling deeper into
the data, the second and third level of cuts going beyond the descriptive data is when you are starting to diagnose.
You know, when you are trying to see okay, you know why are millennials in my entire customer segments or
customer data behaving differently from my vintage customers. Now, you are starting to ask questions. Why are my
customers performing or purchasing or consuming in a certain manner and that is when you try to seek answers to
your questions based on the decision support systems, which you have access to? Now, that is called a more
diagnostic analysis.

You can keep moving up the curve and that is where you can start looking at systems and techniques, which you will
see in this entire spectrum, which are more predictive in nature. So, data and analytics can't just be about you know
what happened in the past, you know, that that just allows you to understand why things happen in the past. That
does not allow you to make decisions based on future.

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And that's where we come to more predictive analytics part of it, which allows you to extrapolate the things that
happened in the past, look at the randomness, eliminate that randomness, and come up with much more predictive
parameters, did these things that happen in the past, will they happen in the future and if yes, the degree of
confidence that I have in these things happening in the future that will allow me to take much more action-oriented
or data-driven decisions, right. So, that is the predictive part of it.

Finally, we come to the top of this curve right, which is high on degree of complexity, which is also high on degree of
competitive advantage, which is much more prescriptive analysis. These kind of techniques which are prescriptive in
nature go beyond just predicting. They are also now about, okay, now that I know these are the things, these are the
consumption patterns, these are the purchase patterns, this is the way my employees would behave for that matter,
right, will they be at writing out, will they be churning out, to have abilities to retain them.

That is when you start taking much more prescriptive decisions. You know, these are the things which are coming my
way, this is the writing on the wall, and you know there are tools and techniques that now I will be using to prescribe
to my stakeholders, to my clients about what they should be doing to handle these future outcomes much more
better.

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The first thing that comes to any manager's mind is something which is much more six sigma-driven is called a very
simple framework, but at the same time, very exhaustive framework called the DMAIC.

It is define, measure, analyse, improve, control. This is the framework that most managers use to start categorising
them, their problems and coming up with a very structured analysis or improvement plan. That is the DMAIC
framework. Most often we see in businesses, we try to jump and come to the solutions, but DMAIC allows you to
take a pause and do it in a much more structured manner.

Now, here is explaining or taking you through one such problem, you know which DMAIC tried to solve. So, let's
understand you know what was the problem on our hands and where did DMAIC came handy to solve it.

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So, here is the team in a particular KPO kind of environment, a KPO right, knowledge process outsourcing, where we
cater to our stakeholders with processes, with solutions, which are much more decision driven, which are much more
intelligence driven.

Within this KPO, we had this process called as global research. A team which caters to a large set of stakeholders
across the globe and provides them and supplies them with market intelligence, competitive intelligence, consumer
insights related information about their existing customers. Its clientele are stakeholders within the system or within
the organisation, which belong to sales, marketing, corporate strategy, client management. So, this is the entire
mapping of our clients or stakeholders who reach out to this team within the KPO and ask them to provide
information about their existing and potential clients.

Now, the problem on hand is this is a team, which receives requests through these large stakeholders, but in very
disparate mediums or request forms. There is no existing portfolio that these stakeholders would know. So, these are
the kind of products that I have access to and this is the kind of information that I should be asking. So, the problem
was many folds. There was no well-defined request mechanism, there was no structured capacity planning. So, these
researchers sitting offshore would start working on requests on a FIFO basis, First In, First Out. You reach out to them
for a request, they will provide you with your request. You know. the request could be simple, give me company
information. I need company information about this potential client and I could be sending you a 10-page report, I
could be sending you an excel format, I could be sending you a 20-page report, yeah.
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Somebody would ask me, I need much more, you know, consumer insights about my existing customer. I need
something much more analytical driven and again you would try to cater to that problem based on the requests as it
arrives in the way that you would deem fit for that particular request. So, as I said, you know, there was no
well-defined product portfolio, no capacity planning, no single request mechanism.

So, that is what you define in the original stages of a DMAIC is define the problem, understand the established
processes, systems, and SOPs, and that is what we did with this particular team was understood the existing
processes and then tried to map it based on the current customer journey, that is another interesting way of looking
at systems and processes within your organisations is understanding the customer or the consumer journey, the
touch points.

So, where are the customers entering from and how are you catering to them throughout their life cycle and are they
exiting out or are they coming back through renewals or are they your long-term lifetime customers. That is the way, I
think organisations should look at that lens to design, devise, and improve any processes by using these frameworks
called DMAIC.

That is what we did for defining this particular team and we understood that the kind or the way in which we were
receiving our requests were through this lens of customer journey, which is lead generation, prospecting, client
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servicing, client maintenance, and going towards renewals. So, this is the way this entire team worked in this KPO,
which was more insurance driven and we would receive requests about, I need to go to my prospects, I need to
engage my prospects much more better through proposals.

Now, this is what I want to do with my existing clients, I want to maintain them for a longer term. This is what I am
getting about their claims information, because this is an insurance company and now, I am going towards renewals,
what should I pitch them to in terms of upselling and cross selling. So, a large range of products or kind of requests
that you would see which was coming to this research team.

So, we categorise our request through this entire framework of customer journey mapping and understood our
portfolio much better.

So, after having defined our existing processes, understanding them through this lens of customer journey mapping,
the next part of the journey was measuring. So, it is a very popular saying that how can you improve if you can't
measure and that is what we try to do in DMAIC. Once you have defined the established processes and systems, it is
necessary to size them up through the measures and that's what this stage does and that's what we did with for this
particular problem of the global research team.

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Now that we understood, here are the kind of research request. The next part was measuring them, which is the kind
of volumes that we are seeing for each of those kind of requests and where are they coming from. So, you know, it is
about regions, geographies, am I receiving these requests from the American region? Am I receiving this from the
APAC region? Or are these coming from UK? So, what kind of requests are coming from what kind of regions and
what is it that they are taking from me or from our team of 70 FTEs in terms of the resource utilisation.

So, there could be certain requests which are voluminous in nature, a particular requester asks, for you know, give
me a list of top 100 manufacturing customers in Germany. Now, this sounds like 100, but you can get this simple
prospecting list. So, the kind of time that you would take in generating this list would be much lesser as compared to
another customer who comes and says you know, I want to pitch to a potential client, which is a large automobile
company in U.S. So, I need to know everything on a 360-degree basis about this particular client, you know, its
current strategy; its current business model; what are the risks and trends; its competitive position; and what are the
products in its portfolio.

So, it is a large and wide and deep request, right, which is, though, just one in nature, but would take a lot of time in
terms of the research efforts that we would spend. So, that is the way we try to measure this existing team for the
kind of volumes, where are they coming from and what is it that they are taking in terms of capacity of the existing
team.

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Now, that is one part of it which is measured. Once again, you know, define and measure are things which are about
if you go back to our earlier discussions, which is diagnostic in nature, which is more about understanding the
existing things, describing them, and diagnosing them, right. So, why are they happening? That is what we are trying
to do in the measure stage.

So, after having defined and measure, let's come to the key part of it, which is about analysis and that’s what we did
with this particular process was now that we know the measures of the incoming volumes, the locations, the kind of
requesters after having mapped them all, it was about analysing them in terms of impact made.

So, once again, this was a kind of graph that was made in terms of the number of requests coming, the volumes, and
the impact made or the complexity of problems or the kind of capacity that they are taking from us and that is where
we could plot a lot of information in a much more intuitive and intelligent manner.

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So, now, I am getting, so if Great Britain is taking 50% of my volumes, yeah, of my capacity and the kind of request
that it's making, it is much more prospective in nature, right. It is just asking me about information, but people from
APAC are taking a lot from me. They are asking me much more detailed, deep insights, and deeper reports, they are
asking me much more analytics-driven reports, right, and the kind of impact that they are making. What is coming
out of US for that matter.

So, it was this entire plot to see are the right kind of stakeholders engaging our team in the right kind of manner. It
was also about going back to these members and understanding about the impact that has been made out of these
reports. If somebody uses you or consumes your team as an information repository, just reaches out to you and asks
for information; obviously, the impact made would be much lower because, this is just information.

But somebody who reaches out to your team and asks much more analytic-driven or insight-driven reports is asking a
lot from your team and obviously, the impact that would be made out of those kind of outputs would be much more
on the client part of the equation.

So, if you reach out to your clients with something that they already know, you are not adding to the entire
competitive advantage, but if you go back to your clients and that is where you make best use of research and
analytics is tell them things, which they don't know perhaps about their own business models, their risks, their
trends, and also about their competition. Their position in that entire competitive position is where you are adding to
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the entire mix, that is where you are adding and servicing your clients in a much more informed and intelligent
manner.

So, that is where we try to look at the impact of our reports made and you know, was it in proportion to the kind of
volumes and capacity and requests that we are serving. So, that was the entire matrix around the impact made.

Now, you don't just stop at analysis. You go back and recommend you want to make improvements. Now, that is
where DMAIC allows you to become much more action-driven, recommendation-driven, because without that a
framework remains on paper a framework. It remains just an analysis.

So, that's what we did through DMAIC in the improve stage. Where we now understood the kind of impact of the
reports made, the kind of request volumes, the capacities driven. We went back to these stakeholders and tried to
map them the requesters on the hierarchy. So, where we servicing some of our customers too much or stakeholders
too much or where we under servicing some of them. Where some of our stakeholders not even aware of our entire
product portfolio of offerings, quite possible, right. As it goes, you don't know what you don't know. So, there was a
possibility that some of our stakeholders were not aware of the larger competences within the team, because we
never marketed them enough. We never promoted our capabilities enough.

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So, that is what happens in the improved stage. So, part one that we did was defined our entire product portfolio
offerings.

The second part that we did was created a credentials deck and shared it with people who mattered with leaders
across geographies and segments and industries who could make the most use of them and cascade it within their
teams. This way, we could clearly identify the matrix of, there were certain junior people or junior level managers
who were using the most of this team because they were aware of this team and we were requesting them on a FIFO
manner, you know, First In, First Out.

This allowed us to define priorities, which are the kind of stakeholders that we would prefer to serve. These are the
kind of stakeholders that we would proactively reach out to these business leaders and segment leaders and plan
with them our capacities of this existing team.

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So, we became much more proactive rather than responding to requests that came our way. So, this was this entire
improvement plan, a well-defined portfolio, your stakeholder mapping clearly done; your proportions, clearly
aligned, so that you are not over serving or under serving to a particular set of stakeholders, you are right serving and
you are also gauging the impact made.

So, going back once again to these entire stakeholders and asking them for the right set of feedback. You know you
tell me, what is it that my report or research allowed you to do, they did allow you to sell more or prospect more. It
allowed you to sell wider or deeper. So, all this kind of analysis that we requested out of our requesters so that we
could loop it back to our team of researchers and make improvements in our research reports. So, a well-defined
plan to improve the research offerings.

At the end of it, what we could see out of it was you know, it allowed us to reach to much more people who really
mattered, leaders who really mattered in the organisation. It allowed us to cross sell and upsell much better. People
who were not using or utilising our analytics offering were allowed to use it much more, because now they were
aware of it through our credentials and portfolio deck and people who were allowed to make much more impact to
their clients because they knew this was not just an information repository team sitting somewhere in an offshore
location, this was a much more competitive team, which deeper competences around insights and analytics and why
should we not leverage this team for this deeper work, rather than just using them as a knowledge repository.

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So, these were the multi-thronged impacts made through the DMAIC kind of model and that is where we were able
to make longstanding, long entrenched improvements.

And finally, it doesn't ends well if it is not looped back into the process, if it is not made into a process which is
intuitive, which is ever evolving, and that's what happens in the control stage of DMAIC. You don't just end or sit on
your laurels after having made the improvements, you go back and define and close loop this process so that it is
controlled environment and it's an evolving environment.

That's what we finally ended up with when we came to the control stage of this entire DMAIC exercise is now, how do
you keep institutionalising these improvements? How do they become embedded within your processes? Like, for
example, you know you keep receiving requests of a particular nature. They could be complex at the very start, but
after having delivered those requests, you realise that hey, this can become a part of my larger model. This can
become a product offering itself after having successfully delivered it in the first time around.

So, you receive a request for a particular university where you do a deep dive research request, the client is satisfied,
the stakeholder is satisfied, and you end up doing multifold business with that university as a client. Now, why don't
you replicate those successes and reach out to more universities with the similar kind of research offering or product
offering aided by a well-defined research and analytics.

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That is what we did in how to replicate your success and when you start replicating your success, right, when you
make it a part of your systems, it becomes a core offering and at the same time, you are allowed to be much more
efficient and cost effective. So, if you keep producing similar kind of reports, if you define the kind of techniques that
are going into it, obviously at the backend, you are allowed to do them in a much more efficient manner.

So, the end result is, you are doing something which is much more faster, much more cost intuitive, much more
structured, but the results keep on improving because the clients see them as something bespoke and customised for
them and the impact is huge.

So, that was the entire control part of the story of replicating your successes. The entire gains that we could make out
of this DMAIC exercise for this global research team was, you were able to do more with less. I mean that would
summarise the entire story. You could make better capacity utilisations. People who were earlier reactive and waiting
for things to happen, but they also had a lot of idle time waiting for things or requests to come their way. We could
now eliminate those entire idle times that the people were waiting for things to happen, because they were much
more planned. We had the calendar written and driven for them the kind of reports they would be doing to the right
set of stakeholders, the right kind of reports, planned in the right manner, so you could reduce or take off this entire
idle times within your systems.

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Your FTEs were much more better absorbed in things, so we could reduce the number of FTEs. We could place those
FTEs in additional new offerings, new product developments, new insights, that we could generate out of reports. So,
people are doing things which are much more templatised, standardised, the quality is ensured, our efficiencies are
entered into the system, you are doing ultimately more for less number of people. So, that is the hard-coded,
tangible efficiencies now entrenched within your system, courtesy a decision support system called DMAIC.

There are also simpler tools and frameworks at your disposal, which I am sure you know, after you hear this out, you
would be compelled to go back within your teams and start implementing this. It is really powerful, we call this the
ILUO method of skill matrix. So, hear this out.

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So, I think in any team, right, starting from businesses or sports or corporates for that matter, yeah, long-term
corporates is about defining the skillsets that you have within your existing teams. Knowledge management as we say
or you know your talent pool or knowledge base. How are you making the most out of your existing talent? How are
you nurturing them and what are your plans to develop them for the future, making them future ready?

So, that is very essential in no matter which domain or team you belong to. A great scientific manner of you know
devising in this entire talent strategy is called as the skill matrix driven by ILUO method of looking at your existing
resources.

Now, this may sound like an acronym, but the fact is it is not an acronym. It is a very simple technique where you
categorise your existing resources of where they stand in terms of their existing competencies.

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So, plot your team members on this entire skillset template where on the rows, you would see competencies, where
you would want to take your team towards in building those competencies and on the columns, you can start
plotting your individual team members, because the skillset matrix is all about individual development plans or IDPs,
and now that you have created this template within the cells, you could start asking your team members to
self-assess themselves or you could aid them in assessing themselves.

The key point that you want to bring to the fore out here is this is not a performance appraisal. You are not rating or
ranking your team members or comparing them to each other in terms of their performance, you are simply
assessing their current skillsets and creating customised L&D plans or training plans for them to improve them in
their course of career.

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Now, that is one aspect that needs to be made clear at the very start. What is this ILUO all about? Now, I is a very
simple line, which says or is a visual way of depicting that here is your learner, here is somebody who is just starting
off and is elementary in his or her skillsets.

Now, this entire skill matrix then progresses from there. The L is the second line. So, if somebody who is better than a
starter, but somebody who has developed sufficient skillsets to be performing some of the tasks independently.

U is the third line, you know, which tries to complete the circle and which is more about so here is your expert. You
know, who is competent and who is doing really well in that particular task. In corporate parlance, you also call these
guys as SMEs or subject matter experts. So, U’s are your subject matter experts. Most of the team and most of the
problems can be resolved by these SMEs for those particular skillsets or competencies and that’s where you as
manager need to define the kind of path and where would you want to take your certain resources to and for many
of these resources reaching to a U is good enough, yeah and that's what could be your ultimate goal or ultimate path
for many of your team members.

Finally, to complete the entire ILUO circle is the O's, yeah. Now, these are people who are not just competent, who
are not just subject matter experts, but they are good enough to train others.

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So now, that's about you know your trainers within the team. So that's what makes it an evolving team, a team which
is independent enough to take care of its learning needs and where all these skillsets acquired are now trainable,
transferable, fungible. So, that you don't depend on external sources to groom your existing team. Create trainers
within so that they can create replicas or miniatures versions of themselves within the team. So, that's the ILUO plan.

Now, how do you implement this is first, you start off by plotting and you first look at your existing team and its
existing plotting of ILUO. Now, that's what we call the ‘As is’ plan or ‘As is’ matrix. Now, as a manager, you define
them, you quantify them, right. There is an easy way you could put weightages to these. I could be one, L could be
two, U could be three, O could be four, and then you put percentages to this or numbers to this.

So, my particular team member has a score of this and I want to take him or her to a score of this. That is the way you
now create your desired skill matrix. When you put your desired numbers.

I don't want everyone in my team to do everything. I don't want everyone in my team to be an expert or a trainer. So,
that is where you define and devise the plan for each of your members, here is it you know on analytics, I want you
to go to the O level of being able to train others. For basic research, I would want you to stick to where you are at an
L level is being competent enough to do certain kind of activities. Graphic designer, I don't want you to do any of
those activities, because I don't want a fish to start flying. You know, it is very different from his or her aspirations,
yeah.
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So, you also map or ask your team members about their aspirations where they would want to go, you build or you
bring in your own aspirations about your team's collective competency strategy and you devise your desired stage of
skill metrics and that is where you come up with a plan.

And then comes the action, how do you make that plan? How do you implement it? Is once you know the journey,
the end goal, you have the end in mind, you can quickly and easily define your plan of how would you reach there.

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 without the prior permission of the publisher.

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