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!