The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

Last week I took a 3 day class called "Sun Sigma for everyday use". I must admit I had low expectations of it. While I believe in process, too many times I've seen people rely on the letter of the process than using that useful tool between their ears. I hate filling out doc just because the process requires it, and I worry about the fact that you can get overwhelmed by the procedural requirements enough so you miss a crucial issue. I've seen it happen. I had heard that Sun Sigma employed a lot of rigor and so was apprenhensive.

Sun Sigma is a derivative of Six Sigma. The idea is to measure the efficiency and error rate of the process. If your process measures at Six Sigma that is the equivalent of a server uptime of 5 9s. The course was a mainly a survey of tools one could use to better your process.

The course was better than expected. Lots of time was spent on the need to adequately define the problem and define measurements of success. This I am all for. I also liked that while the overall process had a high level structure, the tools employed to define, measure, improve the process were somewhat at the discretion of the team. The tools are useful, especially for providing structure around using data to make decisions. This is all good.

What I'm having a struggle with is the Sun/Six Sigma implicit assumption the resolution of all problems is either a newly designed process or a improved process. It's not clear that the problems I face in my job neatly fit into this assumption. For example, my group maintains a server that serves up some legacy applications. The server has a NSAPI module that no one knows the code for and is quite old. We own one of the applications but not the other. We would like to EOL the server, it would be pretty easy for us to move our application, however the other owners seem to not be planning for a replacement or migration of the other app. I just want them to commit to a timeframe and I am willing to be reasonable about it. It doesn't seem like Sun Sigma could help me here, and yet these sort of problems are precisely where I could use some help.

Thanks for listening.

Kathy