Given the difficulty level and competition of these exams , you would need to think through why and how you would do it
Define : Definition of your goal is very important , what exactly you want to do in life , why would you like to get into an MBA after all its a place where they would not let you sleep more than 3-4 hours in a day , it will cost you fortune , you would continously staring at your laptop screen and reading numerous reports in record deadlines, there will be cutthroat competition among your pears , you will be almost cut from your family and social life.
Why would one want so many trouble ? and if you have already made your mind then you better have a definition ofyour goal, may be not as ambitious as becoming CEO of MNC in next 20 years but definitely as basic as what do you like to do in general.
1) Peopls People : Are you the one in team who knows most of the people around, communication is an opportunity for you , when you speak people just can not drift their focus , you can get along with every one. In addition to these points lots of clue can be taken from the job you have been doing , have you coordinated many events in college , are you involved in interacting with customer regularly from you team , do you handle communication with internal stakeholders , do you think and work with creativity
If these are some of the things describing you and your work then you must consider Marketing as your choice of specialisation for MBA.
2) The Money man : you have a dmat account from before any of your friends even understood what is dmat, you love to understand money matters , you have done your graduation in finance related subjects , your client is financial instituion and you enjoy understanding thier business processes. If these characterstics describe you to some extent then look for finance as an option of specialisation.
3) Always operational : If you have background of handling things at various levels in shop floors , graduation in mechanical , production , automotive engineering etc and you like to get involved in activities which run an organisation then operations management is the field for you
4) Tech lover : Now a days there are lots of option for doing MBA in systems management and information management , It makes sense for some one who has already spent signifant time in technology oriented
Develop : In all the B school assesments they try to find out candidates who have been groomed well in almost all the facets of thier personality , One may think then what are these people going to do , isn't it their job to provide you direction and develop your skills in multiple dimension of personality but please understand it is easy to start from a point up to where some work has already been done rather than starting from a blank page.
As part of develop phase you would have to develop your skills and personality with respect to the career field you are interested in ( As we talked about in Define stage) so start taking more interest in the areas of your work which are directly aligned with your career definitions. In addition to this work a little on personal aspect as well , good communication skill , positive thinking , good people skill , keeping a calm and composed head are some of the things which you should try to achieve for a successful career in any field.
Decide : After defining your career objective and doing some ground work to develop skills in those direction now is the time to decide which institutes you should choose . The institutes should have good reputation in your choice of area . It is time to do a thorough research both primary as well as secondary and find out which all institutes you would like to target , please keep your mind open and do look at some of the global (but feasible ) options .
After taking this decision you can start applying for admissions in respective colleges.
Demonstrate & Differentiate : Even though steps so far may not be easy but the toughest part is to crack the exam and selection process , this will need a structured approach . Once you are through with the written test , group discussion and interviews need to be taken care and this is where your ground work in step 1 and 2 will help . For beating your competition you will have to stand out in crowd, you should have differentaition points and deep knowledge in the education and work you have done so far.
It may sound difficult to differentiate oneself from thousands of other candidates who have done the same graduation ,worked in the same areas that of yours and even have same hobbies and passion that of yours . That is the reason you will have to focus in a narrow scope which can play as your strenth .
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Challenges of CMMi implementation
CMMi Challenges
What Vs How : CMMi prescribes the end result mentioning what need to be achieved but it does not talk about how to reach that goal which obviously makes it very much dependent on the philosophy and culture of organisation where itis been implemented . The hidden benefit here is that a company can work on a model and customize it specifically to organisational need hence spending resource and money which is just fit for its need rather than simply following some path which may have worked for another organization not similar in size and culture.
Restricted use of Measurement and Analtics : Where large organization may have TB of data available with them in almost all fields for small companies the focus is always too much on running and growing business then collecting data . It is very difficult to clearly define the metrices which business will need to monitor closely . Even if data is available at times it is not very clear how to make sense out of it
Availability of Process blueprints: Process documentation and a central repository of processes is key to management of any activity but in most of the cases process knowledge remains as a concept with various subject matter experts and not codified explicitly , this is common even in sufficiently big organizations. Even if the work of process documentation is initiated , most of the employees take it a liability in addition to thier work and it becomes a part time assignment.
Its not a panacea : Organizations may work under misconception that once CMMi model is implemented it is going to address all the quality related issues
which is not true because quality related issues have much broader scope to be solved by just one model like CMMi , It can certainly be a part of
organizational quality program but one can not rely on CMMi to fix all issues in quality.
What Vs How : CMMi prescribes the end result mentioning what need to be achieved but it does not talk about how to reach that goal which obviously makes it very much dependent on the philosophy and culture of organisation where itis been implemented . The hidden benefit here is that a company can work on a model and customize it specifically to organisational need hence spending resource and money which is just fit for its need rather than simply following some path which may have worked for another organization not similar in size and culture.
Restricted use of Measurement and Analtics : Where large organization may have TB of data available with them in almost all fields for small companies the focus is always too much on running and growing business then collecting data . It is very difficult to clearly define the metrices which business will need to monitor closely . Even if data is available at times it is not very clear how to make sense out of it
Availability of Process blueprints: Process documentation and a central repository of processes is key to management of any activity but in most of the cases process knowledge remains as a concept with various subject matter experts and not codified explicitly , this is common even in sufficiently big organizations. Even if the work of process documentation is initiated , most of the employees take it a liability in addition to thier work and it becomes a part time assignment.
Its not a panacea : Organizations may work under misconception that once CMMi model is implemented it is going to address all the quality related issues
which is not true because quality related issues have much broader scope to be solved by just one model like CMMi , It can certainly be a part of
organizational quality program but one can not rely on CMMi to fix all issues in quality.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Business of Businss Education
The factories of innovation ..some of the greatest B schools of India seems to be on path to new kind of innovation , developing the most expensive post graduation programs on the earth. ISB, SP Jain Institute of Management and research are leading the pack with introduction of new program which can cost you more than 2.5 Million INR to get an MBA degree ( well to be specific some of these may be only diplomas or certificates if not approved by AICTE) . At one side ISB is starting PGPMAX which will be more of a part time MBA course for executives and will be taught at Hyderabaad campus with some sessions in Kellogs and Wharton on the other side SP Jain has already launched a course in collaboration with Schulich university Canada which will be divided between Mumbai and Toranto campus.
There is no doubt that some of the included expenses are stay in foreign campuses , food etc but the point to ponder is whether these courses will be wble to provide you the relevant return on investment. If we include other living expenses for around 2 years , it will come across 3 Million INR, It is enough amount to secure a middle class common man's pension for lifetime so what is the kind of ROI one is looking from this kind of investment , well I do understand intellectual development and ability to apply structured methods for solving strategic , operational issues etc would be some of the great take away from this course but at the end it all boils down to what can you do with such skills i.e How much you can earn or what is the kind of job you are offered.
If we even consider some of the normal not so expensive courses , they have failed to provide a good ROI to more than 50% of the participants . All the media hype about million dollar salary in pink news paper is focused on some top 5- 10% of the class participants , rest go back with a decent increment in their salaries and mostly almost in the similar area of work ( as even in campus placements organizations give due weight to the background of candidate). even though top 20 institutes take fees in the range of 4 to 10 lacs , and the salary of students coming out of program varies between 4 to 11 lac with average being somewhere 6.5 to 7.
two of the Three generic strategies which even watchman of these B school knows is cost leadership and differentiation
Cost Leadership : Salary , roles depend on various factors from business condition to industry need so why can't B school implement a more innovative model which they have been teaching for long time , They can take a fixed component of fees which covers cost of course material , infrastructure etc and a variable component of the fees which depends on what kind of benefit is materialized to the student after course , to be specific let it be a percentage of annual pay package received by student , isn't something similar today's IT organizations doing by charging a variable component depending on how much money IT saved / earned for their clients .
I think We all have something to learn from TATA's here , a 2000$ car and a 20$ water purifier , that is what Indian market demands value for every penny spent , specially in education which is very crucial for indian middle class .
Differentiation : There are very few institutes in India which have created a differentiation , I would consider NITIE (SCM), ICFAI(FIN), FMS(Service), IRMA(Rural), IIFT (IB), XLRI, SCMHRD (HR) , MICA (MarCom) as some of the leaders , rest all are more of "Me too" kind . They should start differentiating in a way which adds value to students and also makes sure that it is filling a wide gap in the industry
There is no doubt that some of the included expenses are stay in foreign campuses , food etc but the point to ponder is whether these courses will be wble to provide you the relevant return on investment. If we include other living expenses for around 2 years , it will come across 3 Million INR, It is enough amount to secure a middle class common man's pension for lifetime so what is the kind of ROI one is looking from this kind of investment , well I do understand intellectual development and ability to apply structured methods for solving strategic , operational issues etc would be some of the great take away from this course but at the end it all boils down to what can you do with such skills i.e How much you can earn or what is the kind of job you are offered.
If we even consider some of the normal not so expensive courses , they have failed to provide a good ROI to more than 50% of the participants . All the media hype about million dollar salary in pink news paper is focused on some top 5- 10% of the class participants , rest go back with a decent increment in their salaries and mostly almost in the similar area of work ( as even in campus placements organizations give due weight to the background of candidate). even though top 20 institutes take fees in the range of 4 to 10 lacs , and the salary of students coming out of program varies between 4 to 11 lac with average being somewhere 6.5 to 7.
two of the Three generic strategies which even watchman of these B school knows is cost leadership and differentiation
Cost Leadership : Salary , roles depend on various factors from business condition to industry need so why can't B school implement a more innovative model which they have been teaching for long time , They can take a fixed component of fees which covers cost of course material , infrastructure etc and a variable component of the fees which depends on what kind of benefit is materialized to the student after course , to be specific let it be a percentage of annual pay package received by student , isn't something similar today's IT organizations doing by charging a variable component depending on how much money IT saved / earned for their clients .
I think We all have something to learn from TATA's here , a 2000$ car and a 20$ water purifier , that is what Indian market demands value for every penny spent , specially in education which is very crucial for indian middle class .
Differentiation : There are very few institutes in India which have created a differentiation , I would consider NITIE (SCM), ICFAI(FIN), FMS(Service), IRMA(Rural), IIFT (IB), XLRI, SCMHRD (HR) , MICA (MarCom) as some of the leaders , rest all are more of "Me too" kind . They should start differentiating in a way which adds value to students and also makes sure that it is filling a wide gap in the industry
Sunday, November 15, 2009
In Company of Kabeer !
Passion for doing something , starting something which may seem nothing but your interest. Your heart wants to follow it not knowing whether there is some benefit in it , whether there is a purpose to it , can it serve higher interest who cares?. Those who start walking are bound to meet with so many destinations , its upto them to choose whether to stop here , whether to walk continuously , should some one else be included , is there anything meaning full to this ... If you would have thought ofthese questions I bet you would have never started that kind of journey which Ms Shabnam Virmani in Kabeer Project.
Kabeer is a mystic poet of 15th century from Northern India , he did not have much knowledge of scriptures or any holy book but seems he had the ultimate experience of true self and purpose of human life , he wrote small verses which contain elixir of life from daily living to highest meditation and very aptly such knowledge can not come from reading , such knowledge can come only fromexperience . Map his words to the most ancient hindu scriptures and it will match word by word be it about description of the lordwithout any form or be it about rituals vs simple meditation. Yet he symbolizes what I may say the most secular figure of Indian history , no wonder India is a secular state , It is land of Kabeer after all. Ms Shabnam Virmani now director of Kabeer project in bangalore started her journey to collect different shades of Kabeer across India, the question is why across India , what do you mean by different Kabeer? well the fact is Kabeer died leaving his work unstructured and unconsolidated , later when people started collecting it they realised there are so many other verses written by local people and credited it to Kabeer ( huh and they say web 2.0 and user generated content is discovered in 20 century after internet) So there is a kabeer who wrote in awadhi and typical north indian but there is one who wrote in Rajasthani and then other in gujraati and also in punjaabi with urdu influence . There can be only one explanation that all these Kabeers are a core idea followed by local people to generate their own Kabeer the one which they understand better , the one which talks in their language and gives example for their lives.
Thats why Miss Virmani found it a passion to explore local folk song artist who sing Kabeer , she did not have any idea of what this project will turn into but today her journey has taken her from bangalore to Malwa, Ayodhya, Kanpur, Jaypur, Karanchi, Lahore and guess what to Stanford where there are research on Indian literature and Kabeer at its pivotal.
Kabeer project today has a set of 4 movies which are screened for free in annual events at Mumbai, Pune and bangalore followed by a gala event of marathon classical and folk singers across border , talking about love, spirituality and boundrylessness. It publishes literature and translation from Kabeers verses and has launched DVDs .People now give ideas to Ms Virmani that she should enhance the projec to promote secular image , to bring Kabeer to urban youth and what not but what she has already achieved was beyond imagination and transformative
for her self and people associated with her . Kabeer is truly becoming an idea much larger than just being a historic poet.. thanks to the project Kabeer
Follow your heart and every time you do start with grass root :)
Kabeer project ORGANISING Kabeer festival in Pune , today being last day there is a concert in Symbiosis Vishwashanti bhawan !
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Promoting organization and not the product
Intel has always been an organization believing in promoting name of the organisation and the brand it stands for rather than promoting any specific product of its own. It has repeated the attempt yet again and this time with all its might . In couple of recent adds where intel describes how its stars are different from common stars and in other where it talks about "our inventions are so big that you can not see them". In first impact it gave me feeling of some political parties which normally promote parties rather than promoting the work done by them but they do so because they have not done any work and they dont have any thing to talk about on the contrary this can never be case with intel which is so fast in product development that the time it releases its ad for one product till than you have other products on the shelf .
Than what prompts organisations to promote themselves rather than any specific product , one reason for sure is that they have moved beyond any competition and competitor in specific product segments which make them fearless knowing their products are picked up by customers anyway. but whats the objective of such ads In old time intels advertisements were criticised saying they don't provide any ( or enough) reason to buy the intel processor.These ads have been able to build a strong top of the mind recall and a better brand value for intel so much so that even people who do not know computers or whats a processor know intel exist at the same time it is difficult to name any other competitor in the same industry ( specially when intel captures 80% of the market share).
In case of companies like Intel the start of such campaign is the kind of product or services they are in, a processor may have been the most critical part of the PC but it was always hidden from the customer and that is where Intel changed the game with intel inside program plus it was very difficult to market or advertise the complexity and benefit of processor to a normal end user so it was easy to just ensure that the name Intel is known .
One more such attempt was recent ad of Tata with tag line "Desh ko hum chalate hai" for one moment I got confused that this is an advertisement of a political party specially its timing with elections but an organization like Tata which is servicing so many touch points of our daily lives can certainly claim that they run a major part of the country and the benefit will be in terms of much needed trust and goodwill.
Overall I feel such marketing happens in following cases
1) Surrogate marketing where product is tobacco, alcohol and can not be promoted directly2) Organizations which have too many products and services either in the same area (bank, LIC) or in diversified areas3) If the product is too complex to explain 4) Political parties or social organizations.
Than what prompts organisations to promote themselves rather than any specific product , one reason for sure is that they have moved beyond any competition and competitor in specific product segments which make them fearless knowing their products are picked up by customers anyway. but whats the objective of such ads In old time intels advertisements were criticised saying they don't provide any ( or enough) reason to buy the intel processor.These ads have been able to build a strong top of the mind recall and a better brand value for intel so much so that even people who do not know computers or whats a processor know intel exist at the same time it is difficult to name any other competitor in the same industry ( specially when intel captures 80% of the market share).
In case of companies like Intel the start of such campaign is the kind of product or services they are in, a processor may have been the most critical part of the PC but it was always hidden from the customer and that is where Intel changed the game with intel inside program plus it was very difficult to market or advertise the complexity and benefit of processor to a normal end user so it was easy to just ensure that the name Intel is known .
One more such attempt was recent ad of Tata with tag line "Desh ko hum chalate hai" for one moment I got confused that this is an advertisement of a political party specially its timing with elections but an organization like Tata which is servicing so many touch points of our daily lives can certainly claim that they run a major part of the country and the benefit will be in terms of much needed trust and goodwill.
Overall I feel such marketing happens in following cases
1) Surrogate marketing where product is tobacco, alcohol and can not be promoted directly2) Organizations which have too many products and services either in the same area (bank, LIC) or in diversified areas3) If the product is too complex to explain 4) Political parties or social organizations.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Next is (G)Wave
It is a lesson for us all to know how ahead of time google keeps itself , It has started developing google wave 2 years back and now is the time when it is ready with this amazing communication and collaboration tool named google wave, needless to say it is designed to accommodate todays youths changing communication method where they are now communicating in a group involving more than 2 people , hence the walls, scrapbooks or tweet posts are growing stronger day by day.
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
The other point to be noted was growing usage of instant messengers which are almost replacing emails, now even if the receiver is offline than also one can IM him which he can open after coming to online so the very first work GW did was to take a hybrid look of IM and email where now there is hardly any difference left . In GW when sender is editing /writing /musing in his email text editor , that is instantly visible WORD BY WORD , now imagine that , this is what is called real time messaging , messages at the speed of your thought ( though I would never like this much realtime ness so google has also given a check box to disable this ). Even more exciting is that attachments also appear realtime on the recipients wave window. The time sender drags and drops attachment , thumbnails will appear at receivers window much before he has downloaded entire lot.
Another cool function is to playback forwarded mails in the sequence in which they were originated and evolved,its so common to forward a mail chain to a new recipient and he has to go through entire chain from bottom to top but now he can just click on playback option and this chain will start appearing from scratch , pretty impressive I would say.This way it is much easier to add a person to the wave and again for people who would like to choose to send a private reply , they can do so privately in wave too. Google calls it a tree structured mailing/messaging where any branch of tree can be taken and expanded only to a limited group ( or to entire public).
This wave will without any doubt collaborate and consolidate all your communication channels. Very soon you will be using waves in your orkut accounts, blogging portals and anywhere else and yet be able to control and monitor all of them from your google wave (email ) editor. So what happens about editing, currently if you share something across so many comunication channels you edit it every where but in wave you just have to edit it once and it will be reflected everywhere . This collaboration is even possible for documents editing and production where same document can be edited (simultaneously!!)by multiple members ( it will include power point , spreadsheets and text based docs).
oh yes it also works on mobiles !
Undoubtedly it is the first and foremost collaborative tool of its kind and competitors of google (like yahoo, MSN and now their marriage..) will find themselves in a shocked state to counter it ,may be copying this formula from google would be easy and at time people do it well ( like facebook copied stuff from orkut and twitter and today is leading the social networking area) but we all know google has the ability to take a quantum leap every time..
Friday, September 25, 2009
ITIL in real life
Those who have ever taken ITIL training know the toughest part is to explain people difference between incident and problem, it is very easy to explain every other difficult concept of ITIL to people but incident Vs problem is always a tricky one. Looking at a practicle example suppose every day when you come from office to home , you wife opens the door, takes your laptop from you , offers you a gilass of chilled water , this is standard operating procedure which is followed on your returning but what if one day to your surprise it did not happen , you came home and there was no one to open door, take your bag and make you comfortable , is this a problem ?
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.
Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .
Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !
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