manage well

Today evening, we lost at least 9 innocent lives in the fire at Carlton Towers, Bangalore, and many more are still battling for life. All these were office-goers who worked an honest living and were part of the burgeoning IT industry. While details will be out in next few days, preliminary reports, live tweets from some of the people stuck in the building, and eye witnesse accounts all suggest that these most of these lives could have been saved. I write this blog post to offer my tribute to those lives that we lost, and want to share my anguish by means of lessons that we project management can (and must) learn and hopefully avoid such tragidies in everyday project, and in homes and workplaces where we work and our families live.

Emergencies can strike anytime

This was otherwise a perfectly normal day – as normal as it gets. No rain, no thunderstorm, not really hot day, no major loadshedding. We don’t know whether it was a short-circuit (reports at this hour do suggest that short-circuit was the most probably culprit), or some other cause, but the circumstantial evidence suggests that there was nothing that could perhaps be blamed on an ‘external’ factor. I am reminded of the famous lines from Fred Brooks timeless classic, The Mythical Man-month, that it is ‘termites’ more often than the ‘tornadoes’ that hit the project. Most often, our carelessness and neglect sustained over time leads to breeding grounds for such termites and results into such grave catastrophes. It is important to ensure that regular health checks are part of any infrastructure, project or a system, for nothing is big enough to escape an emergency, even if its probability of happening might be miniscule.

Continue reading ‘What can fire tragedies teach project managers?’ »

This was the theme of IIMB-NASSCOM Leadership Summit 2010 where I had opportunity to share my views as a panelist. It was a great evening where we panelists got to share our thoughts, and also learn from each other and from the enthusiastic participants, essentially students of PGSEM and PGP and other courses of IIMB. In this blog, I will share some of my personal reflections that I shared at the summit.

One thing about predicting future is while short-term predictions tend to be conservative, the long-term predictions tend to be optimistic. So, while we still don’t have personal flying machine, fuel cells, foldable LCDs or many of the several James Bond gizmos, it is also a fact that short-term bandwidth requirements, mobile handeset adoption, and even the longevity of recently conclused recession have all been proven wrong and how! The recent controversy about melting of Himalayan glaciers and threat to Amazon forests has only once again vindicated the theory. 

Issues

Continue reading ‘IT industry at cross-roads: Top three priorities for IT companies in years ahead’ »

 (This plog post is contributed by Lt Col (Retd) Rahul Kumar, Managing Director of Srijan Consulting, Bangalore. In this post, he analyses recent failure of the Common Admission Test (CAT) conducted by the premier B-schools of India, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), and raises key questions on how one should have done adequate planning, thorough testing, backup planning and then some more! You can write to him at rk@srijanconsulting.com)

The Business Management Gurus had a PLAN – to go online for CAT. And do I hear that this was all that was required? PLANNING was ZERO!

Continue reading ‘What can we learn from CAT’s failures ?’ »

Just got this in my mail inbox:

ACM Bulletin Service
Today’s Topic: Congress Passes Resolution to Establish Computer Science Education as a National Priority
October 22, 2009

Continue reading ‘Congress Passes Resolution to Establish Computer Science as a National Priority’ »

A friend sent this story sometime back:

The Japanese have a great liking for fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So, to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring back the fish. The longer it took them to bring back the fish, the staler they grew. The fish were not fresh and the Japanese did not like the taste. To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little hashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive.
 
Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis! But today, it has got over that crisis and has emerged as one of the most important trades in that country! How did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan?
 
To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. And they survive and arrive in a healthy state! They command a higher price and are most sought-after. The challenge they face keeps them fresh!
 
Humans are no different. L. Ron Hubbard observed in the early 1950′s: “Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment.” George Bernard Shaw said: “Satisfaction is death!”
 
If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. Your challenges keep you energized. You are excited to try new solutions. You have fun. You are alive! Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Do not postpone a task, simply because its challenging. Catch these challenges by their horns and vanquish them. Enjoy the game. If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Giving up makes you tired. Instead, reorganize. Find more determination, more knowledge, more help. Don’t create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.
 
Moral of the story: Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

Continue reading ‘Where is the shark in your cubicle ?’ »

A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer,”This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.”

The barber puts a dollar in one hand and 25 cents in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?”
 
The boy takes 25 cents and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!”

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey son, may I ask you a question? Why did you take 25 cents instead of the dollar?”

Continue reading ‘Dumb and Dumber’ »

We Bangaloreans love our city, its greenery and reasonably well-maintained gardens, its great weather, its wonderful people who are mostly peace-loving and gentle in nature, its attitude (“swalpa adjust maadi“), its food (simply too good !), its openness and warmth towards non-Kannadigas (thanks for making us a part of your culture – and yes, we promise not to ever let you down), its intellectual capital and its generally understated elegance anchored by universal middle-class values like simplicity, respect, hard work and honesty. We also love its IT industry like a rare vintage wine, and its newfound romance with its vibrant enterpreunership eco-system that continues to attract best of the talent from all over India to its doors.

Of course, we don’t love its roads…and we simply love to critize its perennial and ever mounting traffic woes.

After living in Bangalore for last 14 years, and paying all my taxes to Karnataka government on-time, I feel I have earned the coveted rights of being called as a ‘Bangalorean’. It is with this self-endowed right and pride that I share my view of what ails Bangalore traffic.

Continue reading ‘Solution to Bangalore’s Traffic problems ?’ »

Books continue to be my biggest source of wisdom – they are the true time machines. You can travel back in time as the author takes you on a journey to the distant past and helps you form a mental picture of the unique circumstances that led to them taking a certain decision. Unless one truly understands the context, one can’t really distill the knowledge from those stories and convert it into timeless wisdom.

I especially like reading books a couple years after their release – gives the story enough credibility (or otherwise) because there is enough experiential data to validate the thoughts and ideas proposed in the book. Sometimes, it also brings out ‘timelessness’ of ideas – and helps you understand things that continue to withstand the tests of time, while in some cases, you find why the idea that was very hot once, has now fallen out of favor. Sometimes, I re-read books after a few years just to understand ideas that have a deep foundation and have clearly provided firm guidance, especially in turbulence, while there are some that faded into oblivion.

Some of my favorite timeless ideas from The HP Way include:

Continue reading ‘My favorites from “The HP Way”’ »

Change is painful, especially when you have to change yourself. However, in reality all change is really about – changing yourself ! When people ignore this simple and timeless truth, they start accumulating a lot of ‘rigidity’ – growing at the rate of one day at a time, until that years-of-accumulated-and-hardened-behavior becomes a Frankenstein’s monster and an inseparable and indistinguishable part of themselves ! So much so, that they don’t even see that as the problem. I read somewhere that it takes an average of 21 days for a practice to become habit. I think the same must be true for negative change – i.e., refusal to adapt to changes around us. And in, perhaps, as little as 21 days, we just fortify ourselves against the impending and growing change around us. When that happens, another fantastic thing happens. Since we are out of tune with the system, there is a real danger of the system rejecting us. To preempt that from happening, we reject the system ! We criticise the environment around us, we comment on people’s behavior, we become cynical of changes, we are uncomfortable with others enjoying their newfound happiness…and we defend our own stand tooth and nail….and become even more rigid in that process. There is one thing as maintaining your values and convictions, and quite another to be rigid. A hairline separates them, and any judgment is as subjective as any other one. In reality, one person knows the right judgment – you.

The trick, of course, is to view every small, delta, incremental change as something as trivial as driving you brand-new car on a dirt road in the country. Just as you would slow down at every hump or look out for potholes, and chickens and dogs trying to cross the road, so should you in real life.

Mac Anderson is Founder of Simple Truths who make lovely self-help books. In a post, he shared a wonderful story:

Continue reading ‘Change yourself, not the mirror’ »

A Lean Enterprise is defined as “a business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, and customer relations. Business and other organizations use lean principles, practices, and tools to create precise customer value—goods and services with higher quality and fewer defects—with less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time than the traditional system of mass production.”[1]

Womack and Jones describe Lean Enterprise in detail as follows[2]:

“The objectives for the lean enterprise are very simple: Correctly specify value for the customer, avoiding the normal tendency for each firm along the stream to define value differently to favor its own role in providing it. …Then identify all the actions required to bring a product from concept to launch, from order to delivery, and from raw material into the hands of the customer and on through its useful life. Next, remove any actions which do not create value and make those actions which do create value proceed in continuous flow as pulled by the customer. Finally, analyze the results and start the evaluation process over again. Continue this cycle for the life of the product or product family as a normal part, indeed the core activity, of “management”.

Continue reading ‘What is a Lean Enterprise ?’ »

Over the years, I have had the good fortune of stumbling upon several universal truths of software development. that have stood the test of time. While some of them were gratefully borrowed from other more competent professionals, several of them have been earned first-hand

I offer them here for your critique:

Continue reading ‘Some ‘universal truths’ of software development’ »

This mail is doing its customary rounds on the net, and not for a wrong reason! Though there are obvious pitfalls of stereotyping people, it also serves as a handy learning guide, even a field manual, when the similarities are generic in nature, and far outweigh the minute differences that might make an individual unique and different from others, but not dramatically different from other fellow tribesmen. The fact is we are all different, and success at workplace is also impacted by our ability to recognize, appreciate, respect and work through such cross-cultural differences. In today’s increasingly globalized world, this serves as a good starting point to recognize that there are people different from us, and a team’s success is impacted by mutual understanding of such differences.

These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany. She is an accomplished designer…check out her work at http://www.yangliudesign.com/. I found her usage of metaphors captured in nice little icons very interesting, and even if it is a gross generalization of human beings, it is a nice piece of creative work!

Legend: Blue –> Westerner, Red –> Asian

Continue reading ‘What is your cross-cultural quotient ?’ »

Yesterday evening, I sat through a technical seminar on online ad optimization. It was a very enlightening talk, reasonably technical, that help me get started on this subject. I learnt how online ad optimization involves so systematic gathering of data, slicing and dicing, analysis based on demographic strata such as age, gender, ethnicity, wage groups, etc. They also collect data on unique visitors, and are doing real cool work like frequency capping (i.e., don’t show the high-priced ad more than a certain number of times to the user who doesn’t click on it in that many number of times – the logic being he is most likely not interested in it), and so on. After the talk, I had a few questions. The answers left much to be desired, and hence I thought of posting those questions in a blog post. So, here we go.

Just a small caveat: I am a die-hard supporter of “no-irritating-online-ads-please” policy. Yes, yes, I understand the economics of how ad revenues help in cross-subsidizing the magazines or newspapers or the websites, but I think there is a fine line between what is done and what is not done, and every customer knows where is that fine line ! So, let’s get going…

1. Why does online ad optimization include ‘unique visitors’ as a data for analysis and not ‘repeat visitors’ ? I read long back that it takes up to 6 times the time, money and effort to attract a new customer as compared to retain an existing one. Why not focus efforts on people who are coming to your site twice, thrice…ten times a month as compared to the unique visitors. A frequent visitor likes the user experience on your site (that’s why he is coming to your site so many times !), and might be more open to what you advertize on it than a vagabond visitor.

Continue reading ‘What is wrong with online ad optimization ?’ »

A friend sent a nice story:

A gentleman was once visiting a temple under construction. In the temple premises, he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. Suddenly he saw, just a few meters away, another identical idol was lying. Surprised, he asked the sculptor, “Do you need two statutes of the same idol?”. “No”, said the sculptor, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage”.

The gentleman examined the sculpture. No apparent damage was visible. “Where is the damage?” asked the gentleman. “There is a scratch on the nose of the idol” replied the sculptor. “Where are you going to keep the idol?” asked the Gentleman. The sculptor replied that it will be installed on a pillar 20 feet high. “When the idol will be 20 feet away from the eyes of the beholder, who is going to know that there is scratch on the nose?”, the gentleman asked.

The sculptor looked at the gentleman, smiled and said “The God knows it and I know it !!! ”

Continue reading ‘How are Ethics and Excellence related ?’ »

The world of new product development is (NPD) is an extremely challenging one, and while the output of such an endeavor is never a sureshot guarantee, the journey itself is immensely fulfilling. Edison was reportedly asked by his assistant on not being successful with his electric bulb work despite two years of efforts, something that Edison could not understand… “what failure…we have discovered so many ways how an electric bulb won’t work”.  In a corporate context, however, we all must work within boundaries of finite resources (time, resources, people, etc.) to create the next telephone, the next microwave, the next LCD television, the next Windows or the next Google. It is perhaps the dream of every professional to be part of such life-altering Greenfield projects (many times also referred to as the ‘Version One’ in software world) and make a lasting impact on world around us.

However, innovation doesn’t only happen in such large doses. It also happens in small doses: small-small daily changes, enhancements, modifications, improvements done in thousands and millions of places in a product such that the final impact is as breathtaking as the version one. In fact, some might consider such ‘brownfield’ effort as much, or even more, challenging than the Greenfield because in a brownfield effort, one must work around constraints and ground realities that are not up for change. Irrespective, there are adequate challenges and learning opportunities in any endeavor that creates, or improves upon an existing product or service. This is the opportunity for a technical professional to sometimes work as an artist and make her lasting impression on the canvas, while also working as a child building grand designs of lego building blocks. As a manager, the fun is little more challenging than for others J

While a traditional project manager applies all his knowledge and skills to synthesize all tasks, inputs, resources and constraints to build a plan to execute the project, a project manager working on a new product development endeavor must recognize that the work has innate challenges, and quite often the task is a wicked problem.  There is an element of risk, a certain amount of discovery that in fact makes working on such a project worthwhile. It is not by accident that the best talent in the world gets drawn to companies that routinely engage in such work. Welcome to the world where the only objective is to create disruption ! However, traditional project management is all about applying time-tested sound principles and practices to bring a project under control and achieve all its goals. However, managing a disruptive endeavor is much more than that – to begin with, not all goals might be known. Some risks might be completely immitigable, and one must simply learn to accept them. Many of the activities in an NPD project might actually be undertaken for the first time, and hence for all practical purposes is more of research work than a mere development.  In short, one might not be able to apply all practices of traditional project management in letter and spirit and yet be able to create the right disruption that is envisaged. However, it is not an impossible problem.

Continue reading ‘How do you manage a Disruption ?’ »