Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

My last 2 posts on public policy discussed on the need to revisit our public policy making process and how it can be mapped to software development . There are a few areas that I would love to focus on for convergence of policy making process and software development process. To provide some context on what is really happening in policy making today, please check this video out.

In the last post , I discussed about how policy making is not efficient and how to make it better. I also talked about how it could be compared to a typical enterprise transformation program that consultants do. Let me take it one step further. Let me start mapping the steps to the solution for a more efficient policy making process to the software development process. Sound’s crazy right. lets follow through and try to see if it makes sense.

I have long been interested in public policy but have not gone into the details of what makes it work. While I have been socially aware of all the ills of what public policy has become, I have never dug deep to understand how it works and what really ails the system. When I started learning more about public policy making in India, What I learnt made me compare it with what I have learnt working in software development and in consulting. While we are not supposed to compare apples and Oranges, I did exactly that - comparing policy making and software development using abductive reasoning.

In the good old days of retailers having a single channel with a steady and relatively well forecasted demand, pricing was the forte of the merchandising managers. Ability to negotiate with CPG majors or wholesalers, retailing based on shelf space and target segment was very helpful. The basket analysis can be used very effectively - having Key Value items and anchor items to be able to optimize product mix and margins as well. This ensures we have a good rein on retail operations and also contributing to both the top line and the bottom line.

I have had my regular dose of information, knowledge and awareness on events around me for more than 25 years now from the newspapers. The form has changed now - earlier it used to be newsprint and now it is digital.

Wicked problems are now a well discussed and an on-going subject in various disciplines - predominantly public policy and design. They do apply to IT strategy as well. I am consciously using the term “IT strategy” instead of something more tactical as software development or even more strategic as “Business strategy”. I will explain my choice later in the post.

A job is a social contract - the one between the individual and the organization as an entity. The organization wants our skills as much as we want the opportunity and the money One of my first mentors told me that for employees , employability is more important that employment. That means that we need to pick up skills as we do our job - skills that will help us continue in our employment. This is the age of knowledge workers and we have enough avenues to pick up new skills. This is what I do:

We discussed about how picking is going to become important in e-commerce a f ew posts back . The strategy of picking from store ware houses instead of centralized warehouses is a good move, but we should never over-look another warehouse operation that is as important as picking - slotting. In fact, slotting is what determines how we design the warehouse in the first place. This statement is obviously slightly exaggerated - but it is one of the main factors.

Retail Operations have always had challenges with scaling. Most of the challenges are related to typical operation processes and some of them are related to personnel and training. Operational process challenges include designing process for operational efficiencies, identifying bottle necks, typical logistical challenges, ability to matchup supply to demand - both increasing and decreasing supply to match demand. With the advent of science in the last 30-40 years, most of the operational challenges have been solved. Personnel and training is another challenge - trying to continuously up-skill people on new technologies and processes. This is a constant challenge. However, with the advent of universities that tie up with industry, this challenge is also partially solved. Vocational training helps industry with more trained candidates for the industry. There are organizations at various levels of maturity that still face these challenges However, Retail operations industry as a whole

For the last 25 years, IT systems - be it COTS (Commercial Off the shelf) or custom built - are started with trying to understand how they can accomplish a business process. However, it ends up with business stake-holders having to make compromises to the business process to use an IT system. For some time now, the focus has shifted on the users - finding their pain points and trying to design with the users in mind. This change has done a lot of good. However, that is not enough

Definition The practice of using advanced statistical approaches to allocate proportional credit to marketing communications and media activity across all channels, which ultimately leads to the desired customer action. This is the definition from "The Forrester Wave: Cross-Channel Attribution Providers, Q4 2014 report" that can be accessed here .

For long e-commerce players were pure play online players that concentrated on centralized warehouses and always had optimizing costs as their key goal. However, the e-commerce has changed much since Amazon shaped some of the practices.

Apple is credited for a lot of things - the least of which is managing retail operations. However, that seems to be a key element of product launches with apple these days.

Policy Making is a very good instrument that any organization can use to communicate to its participants and help further the organization's goals. Policy - in a nutshell - is the course of principle of action proposed by the organization or entity. Why do we care Consulting, in a lot of ways, has to deal with processes. There are processes that as consultants, we need to be aware of and respect in our client organizations. There are processes that we have to work around and eventually suggest replacing or retiring. All of these are a lot simpler if we understand policy making better. Under what constraints or conditions was a specific policy made? Why is it still relevant? There are many more questions that we need to ask as consultants. Organizational structure and Policy Making

Pretty stupid question, right? Actually No. This is the new debate that is going on. For more details read here: Wired article on John Deere Do the manufacturer own the product because the product has some software that is owned by John Deere or is it owned by customers. The concept of ownership has been pretty clear for the last century or so, barely going through a debate despite the rise and fall of communism.  

We talk about a lot of agile practices that enterprise needs to adapt. Continuous deployment is an engineering practices in the agile practices arsenal. Till recently, I was a vocal supporter of this practice for enterprise as well. Yet, a few thoughts and happenings have made me rethink blindly supporting this for the enterprise. I still support it but do it with a lot more rational approach. This is a sign of me understanding how enterprise read and understand agile.

What started as a simple thought has now taken the shape of an idea in my mind now. Instead of just trying to keep it hidden, I want to understand what do people think of this idea and would it make sense. If it does make sense, what are the factors that are good in this idea? Are there any ideas that can be used to extend this concept further. More details on the concept here: Product Barter Marketplace from Prashanth Madhavan Narasimhan

The other day I was working on a strategy document for one of my consulting assignments. What was strange was that I had access to all information but I was not sure how to present it in a clear way that would mean action from the stake holders. As consultants, the reason we present the strategy and tactical plans is because we hope the stake holders can gain value. However, we always have impediments in terms of selecting the right information to present, providing the right context and suggesting the right set of next level activities. Frameworks for Decision Making Let me start with a simple decision framework that I used to get the strategy document presented.