Process Ideal Archives - understand-culture

Level 5

The Capability Maturity Model of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute rates how mature a company’s software processes are. Level 5 is the highest. In January 2003, Business Today counted 78 companies in the world assessed at Level 5. Fifty-four of them were Indian companies or the Indian operations of multinationals.

In December 2001, CIOL reported that Wipro Technologies was the first company in the world to reach Level 5 of the People CMM, a version of the model for managing people.

The Mysore Campus

Infosys trains its new engineering graduates at its Global Education Center in Mysore before they start work. The center can train close to 15,000 trainees at the same time. By 2012, more than 100,000 graduates had completed its Foundation Programme there. Infosys calls it the world’s largest corporate education program.

Not Six Sigma

The dabbawalas of Mumbai carry lunch boxes from homes to offices. They are often said to hold a Six Sigma rating. The claim goes back to a Forbes article of 1998. Ragunath Medge, the head of their association, told Forbes they made a mistake “almost never, maybe once every two months.” The reporter turned this into one mistake in 8 million deliveries.

The author, Subrata Chakravarty, later said: “Forbes never certified the dabbawalas as being a six-sigma organization.” He added: “six-sigma is a process, not a statistic.”

In 2010, Harvard Business School added a case study on them, The Dabbawala System: On-Time Delivery, Every Time.

One Voter in the Forest

Mahant Bharatdas was the only voter at Banej, about 20 kilometers inside the Gir forest in Gujarat. From 2007, a full polling station was set up for him at each election, with a presiding officer, two polling officers, a peon and an armed policeman. An election official cited the guideline that “no voter should travel more than two kms from his residence to reach a polling booth.”

The Longest Constitution

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of any sovereign country. At its adoption, it had 395 articles in 22 parts and 8 schedules. Its framing took 2 years, 11 months and 18 days.

The original is handwritten. Its calligrapher was Prem Behari Narain Raizada, and artists from Shantiniketan decorated each page.

The Deming Prize

In 1998, Sundaram Clayton became the first Indian company to win the Deming Prize for total quality management. In 2010, Business Standard reported: “India has the largest number of companies, outside of Japan, that have been recognised for excellence in quality.”

Failure-Based Design

In 2019, the lander of Chandrayaan-2 crashed on the Moon. Before Chandrayaan-3 was launched in July 2023, ISRO’s chairman, S. Somanath, explained what had changed. “Instead of a success-based design, we are doing a failure-based design in Chandrayaan-3,” he said. “What all can fail, and how to protect it? This is the approach we have taken.”

Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023.

The Golden Peacock

In September 2008, Satyam Computer Services won a Golden Peacock award for corporate governance, in the category of risk management and compliance. It had won a Golden Peacock governance award before, in 2002.

On January 7, 2009, its chairman, Ramalinga Raju, admitted in a letter to the board that the accounts showed “inflated (non-existent) cash and bank balances” of 50.40 billion rupees. The award was withdrawn.

The Entrance Exams

In 2024, 12.31 lakh aspirants were counted in the first session of JEE Main, the first stage of the engineering entrance exam. For JEE Advanced, the exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, more than 1.91 lakh students applied for 17,385 seats in 23 IITs, according to the coaching institute Allen.

In the same year, 3.29 lakh candidates registered for the Common Admission Test, the entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Management.

PRAGATI

PRAGATI stands for Pro-Active Governance and Timely Implementation. On this platform, the Prime Minister reviews large projects with officials. On December 31, 2025, Narendra Modi chaired the 50th PRAGATI meeting. It reviewed five projects costing more than 40,000 crore rupees. Since 2014, the platform has reviewed 377 projects.