Quarter 5 - Week 8

The excitement that surrounded this week pretty much drowned out the thunder of impending doom. The juniors (I keep thinking of kids concentrating on their gold-digging activities, wonder why) brought out the first fest of the year - 'Pehel'. Heralded as the first fest of the PGSEM calender year organized by the first year students, it's name pretty much suggests how original we are. Or rather how original our seniors were. The elections for the SAC are in progress, so there are some very interesting things that the nominees are doing to get votes. All of a sudden, a whole bunch of people have come forth, articulating how they'd like to change the way things are run. Good thing for us that there is enough to be improved. Maybe next year, our juniors will have some work left... in fact, I'm sure our batch will somehow manage to double whatever work we can hand over to them next year. In any case, all of this seems to have allowed everyone a chance to conveniently forget that this quarter will be done in 3 weeks, including exams. So if you haven't realized it, then you should atleast wake up now.

MSP - Estimation. The art of convincing your boss as to why a task that looks like it can be done by a one-handed monkey (who's on a unicylce) in 2 days actually requires 12 monkeys a whole week to do. With free bananas. Naah, we're studying consensus building. That means the TEAM together decides how long they'll need to complete the task. So basically if the schedule slips, everyone's chill because you cant put the blame on any one person. Either that, or the entire team gets fired. Moral of the story: Leave a couple of bananas for your boss as well.

Jokes apart, what we actually did was learn more about Poker planning and how arriving at a team-based consensus can help figure out any issues unknown to individuals. Power of group thinking and all that. This was even tied in to historic data, so we knew on average how much time a particular project might take, given the number of employees and lines of code. This is pure empirical data, so you can't really argue too much. This also helps you figure out (to an extent!) if your team's trying to pull a fast one on you. The next session, we actually did a hands-on, wherein our teams sat together with poker cards and estimated the projects we were going to be working on. A little slow at first, but once people got the hang of it, the project actually came to life. We got to know what others thought the project would look like (the nitty gritties), so now everyone SEEMS to have very similar pictures in their head.

LOC - The first session involved a study of Goldman Sachs. These guys have a pretty good leadership development strategy. First, they make sure they get awesome people. Next, they dump them in the world of finance, in the care of an older person and call the newbie "The Apprentice". Newbie better learn well, and imbibe culture of the company, because these oldies are an experienced lot in the world of finance. Keep up or stay out of the race! But looks like they've been doing quite well, so no complaints. The problems that Goldman Sachs seem to have faced is that they started growing really quickly, which means too many apprentices and too few gurus. So they were wondering if there's a way that leadership could be propagated through the organization (because that's today's mantra!). A council was tasked with trying to figure out what to do, and they studied other organizations known for their leadership training, brought in some quant so that they could actually measure any tangible effect of this training, etc. So the case discussion was about how Goldman Sachs should propose such a plan to senior management, so that leadership is nurtured and training sustained in the organization.

The next session was a guest lecture by a senior head at Cosco India. He spoke about the leadership development practices there, and tried to help us understand what goes into the grooming of a leader. Very intelligently articulated, it was a very thoughtprovoking talk for us all. His reliance on a bunch of models actually made it seem a little too educative, but in the end, his frameworks might end up being something we'll all be needing.

PM - I was actually quite disappointed with PM this week. I really expected a guest lecture from a head at TVS. Yet, the class dealt more with the practical problems faced by a company which was in TVS' position. We had a case study, and people discussed the pros and cons about the relevant exercise. The standard issues about expansion, product placement, branding etc. The prof brought in a very specific instance to the classroom. He spoke about how he had been part of the organization and had gone about a product launch. You remember the Conjoint Analysis from last week? well, this time it was implemented for real. So they do a whole bunch of things and then release the product.

Say what you want about this prof, but from what I've seen so far he's probably more interested in the broader level picture than explaining the intricacies of the numbers to us. He actually tells us that you can't just run a Porter's analysis as and when somebody asks you to come up with a strategy. He says use your tools as and when you need them. Most of them have a specific purpose, use them wisely. He's more like that entrepreneurial guest lecturer, who comes in, talks a lot about some very focussed thing and then tells you that keep theory aside, and THINK. There's no doubt in my mind as to why our class finds it so easy... he just makes it so. I'm just hoping that all the unspoken words that he has is atleast finding some place in my head (somewhere far behind), because it's obvious that he knows quite a bit. What's not obvious is... are we getting it?

Three weeks left.