Quarter 5 - Week 7

It's getting closer and closer to the end of the quarter, and you begin to think "Now's the time I'm going to get started with preparing for my end terms! I'm going to do much better this time!". Slowly you realize that all your project submissions, assignments and quizzes happen to fall over like dominoes for each coming week. And then you realize that the "preparation" you want to do won't happen this quarter. And then you decide "I'll do better next quarter". Considering we're almost half-assed managers right now, I'd think we should be able to plan our schedules better. Wonder whether we'll feel like complete asses by the time we're done with this course! That'd be a total transformation. From complete techie to complete ass.

MSP - Negotiations. That full stop tells us how important this is going to be for us in our coming future. Looks like we're going to be negotiating for better deals on all aspects of life, and so our prof thought it vital to be a part of our course. And what a way to handle it. The first session was the general gyaan about what are the different aspects to negotiations, what a BATNA(Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement) is and what are the different types of negotiations. The second session was a fully blown practical, hands-on approach. Our batch was split into three teams, and we were made to act out a negotiation with each other. So we had around 10-15 minutes to decide (within our sub-teams of course) about what we were willing to consider negotiating on, what we were unwilling to budge on, and what we could let go. Thanks to some information asymmetry, it was made a lot more fun, and sure as hell was an action-packed session! If this is something I'd have to do every once in a while, hell, management sure sounds like a lot of fun! Who said geeks don't know how to have fun? (For the record, PGSEM students are cool, in fact, they're the epitome of cool.)

LOC - This week, the first session was related to the formation of tribal groups (Me Manager, You secretary! Them all chimps! Grunt!). We're told that there are five different stages to this group-isms. The first is when people think that "Life sucks!". So they find each other, get together and tend to do whatever they can to get out of the pitiful existence they have, if need be, even resorting to anarchy. The second is when people think that "MY life sucks!". So they feel that some people in the org are getting to be successful, while they're not. Typically, these guys will find out more like them and wallow in self-pity. However, there is a nagging thought in their mind that "Things CAN change". So they're not really in as bad a situation as Stage 1. However, it's extremely simple for people to slip into that. The third stage is "I'm awesome, you all suck!". Here's where everyone's doing pretty decently, and the person tends to think that he's an irreplacable wheel in the organization, and that if he leaves, the whole company collapses. Standard ego traits that you might see or even have within you or your company. The fourth stage is "My team's awesome, the other teams suck!". Muccchhh better. More like what we all think. Here's a stage when people are not really insecure, and there is scope for betterment of life, and almost everyone seems to be satisfied, for the most part. There's a team based approach here because of which you tend to identify with your team as part of your identity. The fifth stage is "My company's awesome". This one's very interesting, because apparently, you can't stay in this stage for long. This is the stage you'd reach if the entire company's working together on a project that means a LOT to them, maybe it opens up a new market, maybe the company's last chance to avoid total breakdown. But ultimately, the people come together from various teams to ensure that the dream is converted to reality. And maybe due to the inherent nature of the transformation/co-ordination required, the teams just gel together. After the project is due, it's very much possible that the company goes back to stage 4. Pretty interesting session.

The next session, we had a speaker come from Deloitte, and talk to us about the issues of ethics and conformance that organizations face. He chose to take the recent sub-prime crisis as an example, where questionable decisions were made. He and a co-author (nice guy, at the start he kept mentioning My co-author and I together thought of this... My co-author and I together worked on this.. etc. Rare to see such people) came up with some sort of model that tried to penetrate beyond the layer that dealt with ethics. They were trying to see if there was something deeper to the entire issue of what led to such debacles in the industry. They had a triangle that covered three essential features that need to be handled together for decisions to take place effectively. I'd tell it to you, but it's hush-hush managementy stuff, which we paid a lot of money to hear. Naah, I'm just messing with you. I just dont remember it right now, and I'm too lazy to take ten steps to pull out my notes from my bag.

PM - This week was all about conjoint analysis. Before you go "Woaahhh!! Awesome management jargon!", let me clean this up for you. Even though we had done this in the Principles of Marketing course (Refer Quarter 3), either I was sleepy or something, because I didn't really get it when the guest lecturer taught us. But today, for some reason, I was wide awake (OMG! Surprise!) and I got a good understanding of the funda. So please, allow me to explain something that I seem to understand.

A conjoint analysis is typically used to find out how consumers respond to different attributes in a product. Take for example, a toothpaste. Now, you'd think "What's in a toothpaste? I dont really think too much when I take it.", and I'd say "Ahaah! You're wrong!". You might THINK that, but subconsciously, your mind's pretty much thinking it all through. Let's pick a few attributes - Brand, Quantity, Taste and Color. Brands - Colgate and Pepsodent. Quantity - 100g, 200g. Taste - Minty, Salty, Tasteless. Color - Red, Blue. Trust me on the math, there are 24 possible combinations here, like (Colgate 100g minty red paste, Pepsodent 200g salty blue paste), get it? Now, what we do is, we get a person to sit patiently (maybe by offering him a free movie ticket, or some free food etc.) and ask him to order them all up based on his preferences. Now he might not just be quantitatively figuring "this has x value, that has y value, add, subtract etc.", he might be making some qualitative judgements here as well. Which is what we want! So after doing this with quite a few people, you analyse the data to find out which attribute seems to mean more to people when compared to the others, and what could be the apparent sensitivity that a particular attribute brings to the table. Conjoint analysis tends to bring some sort of method to the madness by trying to quantify the perceptions, likes and dislikes of the consumer. So then you'll also know that if you were to knock 10g off your product, or change the flavour, what's the possible outcome. Maybe you'll find that "Brand" is a highly sensitive thing, and that changing it can majorly affect the uptake of your product.

I'm a little pleased with my intake this week. Maybe I'll prepare for the exams early after all! :)

Quarter 5 - Week 6

I miss the constant buzz of familiar voices that I was used to in the last year. Now most of the time, the classes are reduced to a very low hum. The faces I see are new, and there's a glazed look as people think about which classes they need to attend next, which assignments they need to work on, while they attempt to understand what the prof is saying. Maybe it was just one of those weeks, or maybe it's just Bangalore's weather, but it almost feels impolite to not drift away in class nowadays.

MSP - We had a guest speaker from Thoughtworks over with us. Since we're beginning with studying Agile (What?! Weren't you supposed to have been doing this all along??), we had someone represent one of the first (if not the first!) companies to implement Agile in their organization. The people who proudly strut around telling anyone who's willing to lend them a ear that they're 'doing Agile' will probably keep their mouths shut for a while now. The speaker today was way ahead of us. They seem to have modified their work environments to facilitate easy movement of furniture. It's almost like they've got small cells of 5-6 computers put together as Agile teams. The whole place is adorned with Post-its, and there's even talk of setting up one full wall as a video screen - which would in a way act like a visual portal into the client's site. Why? So we can spy on each other under the pretext of doing Agile. Ha. Ha. Kidding! (Ahem!) I couldn't help wondering that to save time and costs, we're willing to waste Post-its and keep a wall-sized screen powered on all the time. Nature's always the loser in the corner. Anyway, our speaker spoke to us about how they implement Agile, how it came to be, and described some of their advanced practices. It was an eye-opening talk. I'm no longer telling people I do Agile... why? Because I know what Agile is now.

LOC - This week was a little interesting, it had quite a bit to do with ethics. We had a guest speaker come over from TI. Apparently, Texas Instruments has been around for a very long time, and they've strictly adhered to a no-shifty-antics-and-stay-ethical strategy. They're so serious about it that if someone gifts something to them, they actually dont accept the gift personally! They'd probably stick it up on a wall proudly proclaiming that their customer gave them this. That way, it becomes a property of the company, and not one person anymore. And it sends across a good message to the guys in the company. The whole session was all about Ethics in organizations and how they ensure that this is nurtured and inculcated in every employee.

The next session was about the growth of managers in stages. There seemed to be five steps to becoming an effective manager. It went through the motions of how you observe and follow whatever you're being told, then you tend to follow the norms, then you tend to think for yourself and take some risk with management, then you think for both yourself and those around you, and finally you begin to think for the environment. This theory seems to be drawn from a general theory which can be applied to individuals in general. But the whole point of this was to explain to us that it's possible that your behaviour and mindset are different. That would mean that you might be in a role of a project lead(behaviour) but you're always thinking that you'll use these projects to climb higher(mindset). The behaviour is an indication of probably a stage 3 manager, but you end up acting like a stage 1 manager. Therefore, be careful of such people who seem to exude a different management stage than the stage they truly are in.

PM - This week was about how we involve the customer's wants into our product's requirements. By using the Kano model, we can check a lot of parameters against a lot of others. It was extremely comprehensive. On one dimension, we could see what features mattered most to the customers. On another, we could see how much certain technical features meant to the customer. It was also possible to see the correlation between various technical requirements. A couple of the groups were required to prepare their presentations for today, and they did a great job! There was also an element of Consumer Behaviour. One of our classmates who was presenting today has also taken the CB course, so his excitement was quite infectious. He was actually explaining the funda behind that section in the Kano model, and it was unfortunatethat he had to stop because there of the time constraint. The rest of the class went about on the theory of this topic, which could actually be boiled down to this paragraph.

Funny how we can avoid the hefty fees of the PGSEM by just sharing what's on the blog, it's just a pity that we cant claim the professors' wide and varied experience as our own. If it wasn't for our professor's experience, our class would have gotten over way earlier. Oh, what I'd do to get some of that cool experience!

Quarter 5 - Week 5

It never fails to thrill me when we hit the five-week mark. It keeps saying "50% of that step you're taking is done... now all you have to do is drop that foot on the ground". You'd expect that the act of raising your foot against gravity to leave it hanging in the air is the difficult part, and letting momentum take you forward to easing it on the ground is easier. Considering how a similar effect DOES NOT happen in each quarter, it's obvious I've drawn the wrong parallel. Does that make it perpendicular? (You'll be glad to know I'm not sleeping enough each night. That will probably explain this past paragraph. Oh, the joys of an executive MBA...)

MSP - Making the excuse that "I didn't prepare for the class" begins to get old, even when you're telling it to yourself. Now I understand that convincing yourself is the easy part... so that should be a sign that goes "Isn't it time you read those articles?" Anyway, this past week I was woefully unprepared for the classes. Luckily, it had to do with the Agile process, and what makes it different from waterfall. Now I thought that if I'd heard it once, I've heard it a million times. And I've heard this spiel almost five times now. Everyone from my lead, the guys from another of our company sites, our annual conferences, to a 'certified' Agile coach has told us about this magic pill. So I'm pretty sold on it, in fact I sell it everywhere I go. But when you listen to the same thing in a class, it's a different thing. All of a sudden, it is no longer about the practicals that you associate it with. It's about the theory. It's about WHY people use Agile. It's about who all are using Agile. It's about how it's no longer a fad, and that my clients, YOUR clients, and their clients are all saying they want that silver bullet. It's no longer about having the maximum number of people working low wage jobs so that work can be outsourced to you, it's getting to be about the quality and reliability of the work you do, and the associated accountability, so that the clients will require MINIMUM maintenance from you. Managing Software Projects, an art in so many people's eyes, is slowly but surely making its transition to a science.

Beyond the general theory of "Why Agile?", we had a guest speaker come in from (top secret) company working on a (top secret) project for a (top secret) client. I am not supposed to be saying this out loud on a public forum, but I couldnt hold myself back. Act like I didn't tell you anything. But in any case, this person described to us as to how they went about implementing Agile. The best part? His diagrams were convoluted and you could point off his problems so easily, that you realise, the theory that the prof tells you is one thing, practically whatever we're doing is still sufficiently unstable, just a little less so. The difference is that now we can observe where we're truly going wrong. There is a minor debate going on the side, that Agile requires outspoken team members, being given the opportunity to be self-sufficient and self-moderating. The argument being put to that is if you can find so many such people who want to be that way. It's one thing to be given the power, it's yet another to accept the responsibility. Thankfully, most of the experienced guys in class say that their companies have such responsible people.

LOC - Yet another class I wasn't prepared about. But listening (or trying to listen) to the discussion in class, I gathered that it's about the attempt to do a turnaround within an organization. The first session was about HCL, the second was about Surat. I dont really know if HCL's was a success, but I hear Surat's was downright amazing. Apparently the leader (S.R. Rao, I hear) empowered his team, put the whip in the hands of the common man by giving him the right to question and tracked his team. I remember a few words out of this week... cynicism on the parts of the IT employees on whether the company's promise to 'make the change' was going to hold, and accountability in the other where 'the ones making the change were being policed by the ones who had to live with the change'. Maybe there's more to these cases, let me get back to you on this. But if you want to take something away from this paragraph, remember: "Get the people on board, so you can make the change with their help... because if you fail, it will be easier for you if you fail together, than be the lone person being judged by everyone for having caused increased irreparable damage."

PM - I met a couple of old friends again this week 'Segmentation' and 'Positioning'. Did I tell you that Product Management is apparently actually an advanced Marketing course? So these sessions were all about how you target the appropriate customers for your product. And how you let them know about it. We started off with understanding how a market is segmented - basically split it up into four areas, where you dont have a product, have a product but either dont want to sell it to a particular segment (conscious choice) or dont even know that the segment exists, lost one of your segments, captured some segments, or had some from the very beginning and didn't have to fight for them. So it's important to know what the customer wants, and what your rival's customers want, so that you can use them like trading cards depending on which strategies you employ to garner more market share. The next session was about how you let the different segments know more about your product, and constantly keep giving out the same message so that it's imprinted in the customer's mind.

Since a few of our classmates were cursing that people like me don't have enough exams and assignments, I have some great news! We have two assignments for this week, two assignments for NEXT week, a quiz this week, another next week, so I too now have reason why I shouldn't be getting even the bare amount of sleep that I claim to be getting right now.

Quarter 5 - Week 4

It's funny, I seem to remember that our batch would interact a fair amount with our seniors when we were in the first quarter. You know, something like a.... drive to go back to a college atmosphere... a little buzz about the Student's committee, and the kind of talks we could organize. Whether we lived up to the hype can be debated till we leave college, and then some more...

And then, I was looking through some old comments on this blog, and was pleasantly surprised by the following blog. I think you'll find it a very interesting read. It's by a fellow PGSEM-er.

http://www.anmbadiary.blogspot.com/

MSP - This week we had what I find the most involved session I've ever had at IIMB. We were looking at Brainstorming, and how to conduct it in organizations. What seems to have been drilled into us, is that we will find ourselves thinking together as teams, and the team has someone to bring it to order - the facilitator. He's pretty much the boss, and the servant of this group. Boss, because he's to control the group and ensure it doesnt deviate from the topic, servant, because he's there to ensure the OTHERS can have a fruitful discussion and not to give any opinions himself. That's a little difficult for us, we're all opinionated people right? And we want to tell everyone how we really think the world should be run, right? Well, wrong. Stay with the trend, maaaan! We're not really here to lead, we're here to facilitate! Yes, that's right, you read it here first!

Before I continue to deviate, let's get back. We were treated to a hands-on session, where we were split into groups and each group was assigned facilitators and observers(the minute takers). In the absence of the facilitators, the groups were asked to take on roles of "troublesome" people, just to ensure the facilitator had something to facilitate and some problems to fix. As if our teams weren't gleefully waiting for an opportunity to make life hell for the few of us unfortunate souls, now we got an official go-ahead and marks for it! MAN! We made those facilitators WORK for their marks. Chaos in the room as we tried to figure out what we could do to double India's IT/BPO exports by 2014. It was all such good fun, I still dont know how time passed. But I actually understood that decisions CAN be taken within an hour, hell, we just solved a major issue of the country! Now let somebody else implement it. Seriously, we definitely can come to conclusions within respectable time limits, for stuff at work.

The next session was about use cases, I'm guessing everyone had assignments for this day, hence they had all forgotten to read up for the day. The prof was a little foxed, but he gamely took us on and tried to explain the necessity of writing good use cases. There was constant pounding on the fact that the days of using Excel to maintain your cases and requirements are long gone. Now we have tools that we can use, such that if we want to change one use case, we can find out everything that depends on it, and everything it depends on, to figure out what gets affected. So stop using notepad, when Word is out! It's redundant. Our prof isn't specifically trying to sell any particular software, in fact he's a open source enthusiast himself, so he doesn't really mention WHICH software. But I'm guessing it's not hard to find.

I think the hard part would be to convince your team (not even your org, that's a long way off) about the necessity of such a tool. I already got a glimpse of it, when I suggested we use Clearcase for tracking some stuff. The irony was, just a year ago, I was sitting in one of those chairs, telling the guy who suggested we start using such tools that "we don't need such tools, it's too much documentation that only ancient organizations use". Fate knows its stuff, I'll give her that.

LOC - Our prof, innocent harmless giraffe that he is, told us that we should probably try to read a major portion of an assigned book for reading by this week. I dont know about the others, but I earnestly picked up the book, and every two hours slept for another four. That thing should be easy to read! But it's got so much introspection, that I keep drifting off into what I should do (ahem, the managerial term is "reflection") and then I feel so exhausted, I fall asleep. Anyway, by the time I had read half the book, it was already Thursday and the next day were the classes, so I had to hurriedly prepare for the other subjects.

But I dont regret it. This week was more about "Who am I? What am I doing for myself?". Sounds selfish? It is. But not in the obvious way. This week was about personal development. The cases for this week reflected that fact. One was about "A manager and a parent" where the manager who's doing exceptionally well at work, comes home to find out that his personal life is so close to crumbling. And then he tries to "manage" in his personal life, and then "father" his employees at work. The poor guy got so confused, and it was difficult for him to separate his work life from his personal life. And that's the point. They ARE going to affect each other, so it is absolutely essential for us to maintain some sort of a balance. I might be on a roll at work, but if I'm not investing enough time at home, then tomorrow, when I am no longer necessary at work, I would have lost both parts of my life. We work so we can live comfortably right? So live a little. Be there. For yourself and others.

The other session covered something similar, about a man who was doing so well at work. He was so busy, that he probably had 10-15 minutes at max as a break. And as he reflected, he realizes that if he is to continue growing at this pace (he's scheduled to be on the board within three years), then he has to keep up in this rat race. He cant start slowing down now, even though he is growing apart from his kids, and his wife is drifting away too. But since he's so successful at work, he's able to wish it all away, so he may look into it later. But the point comes back. Just because we think today we need to concentrate on work, will the family be there tomorrow, waiting, so we can fix our relationship there? Relationships aren't tangible, and curiously enough the glue for it isn't available in the market. It needs time, and effort, to keep building it from everyone involved. So we need to stop acting like we can just walk in and fix things whenever we want.

And ultimately, all this affects our behaviour at work. And the way others look to us. What kind of role models do we want to be? What kind of lives do we want to live? One person questioned, that if we all started balancing work and home life, then will any more Gandhis emerge? It's because of their single-minded dedication that they achieved such greatness. So, is it really worth it? Deep stuff this week.

PM - We were supposed to submit some assignments this week. We didnt even get started till Thursday. I blame that LOC prof. (Yes, yes, we got the book a month ago, but since when did we managers start taking blame? I haven't yet done the Ethics course anyway.) So a little rush here, a little documentation there, a few crazy Skype calls everywhere, and a manager who's trying to understand, very hard might I add, if this course we're doing is really helping us, or giving us a reason to shirk work. (See, now if they had given us an Ethics course earlier, I wouldn't be reading my material in office hours. I blame it on the college too!). Anyway, this week was about the diffusion of new products in the market. What this essentially talks about is that people who come out with products overvalue their products by about three times. For e.g., let's say that a guy talks about his ergonomically designed, scented, always cool to the touch, exfoliating, skin-enriching, fairness-enhancing, UV-filtering, bacteria-killing, gold-shaving-filled cake of soap. So he's thinking, we dont need any other products! Just bathe with this, and you get the best of everything! Such a bargain!

Now in reality, this is just a healthy, wealthy(gold-filled remember?), beauty soap. Stylish if you really want to add more.

But to the consumer, it's just. a. soap.

And that's the point. The producer overvalues what he's got, because he understands it completely and he's so enthusiastic and caught up in it, that he tends to forget if normal people value it the same way. At the same time, the consumer is thinking that if he is to move away from his previous product, this new one better be, well, better! And if he has to change the way he uses such a product, then hell, this thing better be worth it's weight in a month's salary given in one-rupee coins! We saw how we can draw a two-by-two to decide if a new product can take off. The two axes being: Amount of behaviour change required, and actual change in product. So if there's too much change in the product, and very little change in the behavioural change required, then the person will pick it up. If it's the other way around, like hell that's going to happen. An example for the two cases? The first, power steering. The second, the Dvorak keyboard. Look it up. Apparently it lets you type a little faster, but check out the layout. Would you use it?

We also discussed "Crossing the chasm". Apparently, the world is filled with Innovators, Opinion Leaders, the Early Followers, the Late Entrants, and the Laggards. The innovators try out new products, a very experimental lot they are. The opinion leaders tend to catalyse the diffusion process as people look up to them, and it's due to them that the products are adopted at a faster rate by the early followers. The late entrants get in because there there's very low risk now, and everybody's using it. And finally, the laggards start using it, because there's NO OTHER option available. After that, the product just dies if there's something new in town. For e.g. Orkut and Facebook. Try guessing which stage they're in?

A lot of takeaway this week. Looks like I'm not wasting my money after all.

Quarter 5 - Week 3

The fun times have begun! A couple of quizzes this week and both on Saturday! It's a good thing that they're all announced and that they're based on our previous readings. No more having to mug formulae... atleast for this quarter.

MSP - This week we looked into Requirements Gathering. We analysed a couple of cases, the sinking of the Vasa (a ship made in Sweden during the 1600s or so) and the working methodology of Praxis, a company that is highly reputed for its extremely low bug rate and which works on not-so-normal projects like, well, the Lunar Landing mission! While Requirements Gathering, Risk Management etc. sounds like everyday words like 'tea', 'coffee' and 'pantry' to the guys in the service industry or the 5000+ strong product firms, the young 'uns (especially the startups) probably have no idea what it means to do Requirements Gathering. Apparently, you bring together key members from the team working on the project, or everyone of them if its feasible, and some representatives from the client who stand for every discipline/role that might use the software. Then you guys brainstorm in meetings, yell at each other, throw this out, pull that in, check if "what you mean is what I mean?" and pretty much have a party. Praxis for example, took ONE YEAR just to gather requirements for a project of duration four years. A pretty long time you might say, but it works for them. At the end of this project, they had four bugs... that's it! Four! I can make that many bugs in 15 minutes! Apparently they use formal programming methods which apparently applies mathematical models as an approach to software development. It's quite interesting, though it seems like heavy investments. Look them up.

The other case was the Vasa, and since they failed everyone has something to say about it. The article tried to draw a parallel between it's construction and that of software. It is said that the king of Sweden wanted a super awesome fleet of ships and after the first signoff phase, he kept changing the requirements. And his tool of motivation? "If you dont do it, I'll treat you with contempt". Nobody questions the king, no matter how wrong he is.... in those times!

LOC - We studied how leaders have an issue with growing up. Actually no, it was more like growing into the next role. We've done this article before, so not much to really assimilate in that one. It talks of how roles like 'Managing Self', 'Managing Others', 'Managing Managers'.. etc.... tend to have conflicts during their transition phase. We even did a case where we analysed if a person who was brought in to turn the company around would really be the right choice. I spaced out a bit once in a while, so I dont remember too much from this week, except for thinking that all this seems obvious.

PM - This week was all about how to differentiate your product in the marketplace. Today, any incremental cool 'thing-of-the-future' you do can be easily replicated by other companies. On the other hand, the more you focus on the entire experience of the customer ranging from stating a need they have, to searching for it, to buying it etc., then the easier it will be to get sufficient points for differentiation. We studied how Price Value comparison charts can be used to determine how the company is doing regarding the competitots.

Well, all quizzes are done for this week! Now, to start preparing for the midterm.... assuming there IS a midterm!