Alone but not lonely

Now a days when I step into City center U station of Munich to catch my train for office , the scene is pretty obvious , hundreds of commuters and everyone is looking down at his smart phones with intense concentration . catching up with office emails , checking profile updates , watching movies , browsing through songs , reading e books and what not.


Smartphones have not only given a new power to human fingertips but have also done this with grand style , users just love to see things happning at slightest movement of finger hence quite obsessed with these gadgets . In many cases folks who are standing alone in the platform are involved in various activtities over hand sets and very well connected with their buddies at the other side but whats more funny is even when we are in group , then also standard operating procedure is to stay busy with your phone , stay aloof to the real folks standaing beside you and submerge yourself in virtual world

It seems we have to improvise the old saying "Men is a social animal" , now its "Men is a social networking animal" . Today one wants to be left alone with his smart device and social networking sites and in those sites he is busy connecting with others ignoring real people around him

The Inheritance (Good Vs Bad)

I was wondering what happens when some leader leaves his organization for a new leader to take over , what happens when highly successful organisation like Apple , Microsoft , Infosys changed thier leadership where organisations were doing extremely well , product and service innovation was good and customer and market had lots of trust in the future of organisations .

The new leaders definitely had advantage where most of the things are running on autopilot and all they have to do is to meeti thier customers , take positive feedbacks like "Keep up the good work" and after that they can devote larger chunk of their time creating future vision and exploring new avenues for the organisations and thats exactly what market and customer (and employees) is expecting from them to take the organisation at the next level.

On the extereme opposite side there are desperate cases of leadership changes where existing leader has not been able to control the damage and the organisation is been handed over to a new leader expecting total turn around and exponential improvements.

Most of the time leadership changes will happen when organisation is in crisis , one of the example is Satyam where new leader will have a frustrated customer to face who will not listen to anything , any new plan , ideas . Over that entire market and insudtry will be looking at new leaders with an expectation of miracle . What makes it further difficult to execute plans here is highly demotivated team / employees who are no unsecured and worried about their own future .

After you ......

Buddhism deals with one of the mostcoplex topic - death , and the way of doing it is very simple imagining every day as your last day and thinking what would I do if this is my last day of life today . For an entreprenuer or an executive who is running a business succession planning should be a similar afair , specially for entrepreneur it is life changing matter to leave the organization they built from scratch , so continously they need to have succession planning in thier mind , what if I leave this company today - who will be the most suitable person to run it after me . In case of family managed businesses answer to this question is crystal clear , Children are going to take over one day and a great deal of effort is spent on grooming children on thier future role from education to th ecorrect experience and mentorship . For organizations which are professionally managed , succession planning and next line leadership is the buzz word of the day and it has been there from more than couple of decades but the success of such programs is always questionable . In very few such organization we will have a clear visibility as who will be running the show after the current leader. Consider example of GE where Jeff immelt had clear step wise vision placed for 3 prospective leaders out of which Jack welch came out as clear winner , some thing similar happened in ICICI recently where 3 strong candidates were mentored for the top post . Such succession plannings brought predictability in the business and hence no knee jerk reaction in the share market when a new leader is announced about whom stakeholders dont have any idea. However it may sound easy to say that one should always be in look out for his successor when he is in top job but thats the beauty of being in top job that you probably never want to leave it ... It is as hard as thinking about end of life ...

Abandon

One should abondon yesterdays bread winner before one really wants to let alone before one has to. - Drucker

Drucker quoted it so strongly decades back and it seems to be true irrespective of time and context , organizations and individuals need to come out of their comfort zone a little earlier and start looking out for next big thing , the problem is if they dont do that willingly at early stage then after some time they will be forced by changing business environment to abondon exiting belief and adopt new and then they will have little or no time to react , infact entire approch will be reactive and no space for creatvity and pilot runs.

Abandon the way you work : In todays dynamic (yet vibrant) business environment , organizations need to ask continously what will be the next way of working . They can not keep working on same set of business processes because technology is injecting changes into processes every now and then and significant number of disruptive ones.

We need to constantly think about new way of working and abondon old ones. for example Even before there is need or question of cost advantage we need to evaluate cloud computing.
In fact in my opinion Abandoning itself may not be as beneficial as the process of thinking in this direction which will help you visulaize new and improved ways of doing things.

Project Management - what not to do

A new manager is sent to save a project which is showing red in all its SLAs and KPIs , team is all burnt up taking heat from Customer , client and top management , people are working overt time but something has gone out of hand , may be some wrong decisions , may be a heavy work inflow because of some upgrade / roll out which has lead to mounting backlog and a tired and
demoralised team . Management is keen on getting things back on track , they are looking for a super hero to save the project , they do a head hunting and bring a "Manager" who has proven his worth in the past ( well at least in his resume) , all eyes are set on him and he is feeling trapped under pressure cooker .
If I am that manager , what would I not do

1) Don't ask for too many new dash board / Reports : I may have a way in which I understand things , I may have learnt and built priorities in my previous projects to resolve such situations . So when I come to this land where existing reports , terms , KPIs are nothing but Greek and Latin to me . I may not understand the reports , I may not find the data which I am looking for and I immediate temptation is to walk in to the team leads , module leads and tell them to create some more dashboards , which I think is relevant and flash necessary information . Now imagine this is a team which is already slogging and I may have added to their frustration . More reports mean taking away a little more productive time from their schedule and filling little more dissatisfaction .

2) Don't jump into decision : Just after my arrival , I start making decisions , changing team structure , setting new target for people . Its not that I am doing it out of my random thought . I have good experience in such projects and some of these things have worked in past for me so I think it will work here too . A team hates manager who takes decision without getting
himself involved in the situation , all projects have different grounds and so different ground realities . My past experience can be perfectly the right thinkg to do but it will be much better to apply it after knowledge of environment and context , the biggest factor ignored most of the time is the ecosystem of team . I am desperate to get results but then it is not a war front .

3) Build consensus rather then imposing decisions : Before I enter into team , the team is already under leadership of some one else . Existing organizations may have ways to take decisions , it may be a good possibility that previous manager made decision on his own but if a new manager does it , that may slightly difficult for team . The best way is to have consensus driven decision making , If I have valuable inputs , I am sure team will understand provided I have supporting arguments to convince

Goodness in grievance

Mahabharata ended and Pandava reclaimed the glory which they deserved , It was time for Sri Krishna to go back to his Kingdom so he asked his aunt Kunti , is there anything you want ? What esle I can do for my loved pandva's ? Kunti's response to this question was very astonishing , she said oh lord I want that more problems should come to our lifebecause whenever we have been into trouble we have remembered you with utmost sincereity , we have called upon you for help and guidance and you have always appeared to show उस the path in troubled waters. If we are in trouble that would meen being constantly in toubh with you , thinkig of you and your belessed presenece.
Kunti is attitued towards problems and grievance in her life is not very common otherwise , that is because normally when challenged by difficulties of life we are toobusy in fighting with them to notice what kind of changes they are bringing to us , I am not saying these changes are always good but certainly there are lots of positives in such situations. Bad times are the real groomers of any individuals and some of the most admired people could do wonders because they faced bad times , some of the greatest innovations of human history are from the period of world war.

Changing (BA)asics

Business Analyst is supposed to bridge the gap between business users and technical solution provider by using the business domain knowledge and technology understanding.
As per international institute of busyness analysis, “The Business Analysis Professional is responsible for requirements development and requirements management. Specifically, the Business Analysis Professional elicits, analyzes, validates and documents business,
organizational and/or operational requirements. Solutions are not predetermined by the Business Analysis Professional, but are driven solely by the requirements of the business. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change. “
This traditional definition for role of a BA is accurate for customized application developments where some needed to help customer understand his requirement , document it and explain to technical team for developing application. In current IT project landscape there are many ways to address a business problem and hence role of BA is changing with broader set of responsibilities

Package Implementation : Packages are off the shelf component which provide standard set of solution for a particular business function ( with minimum development effort) so in such projects the role of BA changes to Business process Analyst and even business process re-engineering. BA will perform "AS-IS" and "TO-BE" process analysis and then help technical consultants to customize wherever needed.
Support Projects : For support projects BA will handle level 2 and level 3 support for an application where his job would be to resolve functional queries posted by end users. He may also be involved with application developers for bug fixing and other maintenance related issues.
Reporting projects : One of core responsibility of BA is process large data and derive conclusion from it, reporting or data warehouse projects focus on this strength where a BA needs to provide reports as needed by business.