Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Organisations go through a lot of change and the predominant cause of these changes is growth. Every organisation would like to grow - though the dimension of growth would depend upon the purpose of that organisation. One of my responsibilities as a Business Principal is to understand what growth brings to a specific organisation and how it can impact if the specific actions taken is not mapped in context for future. I had an opportunity to facilitate an exercise for senior leaders in my organisation that had come together to make sense of an organisation-wide study of processes. There was a lot of chaos in the room since there was no one lens through which to view the findings of the study. We used a simple system archetype called "Growth and Underinvestment". This post is a quick experience report on running the exercise for the team.

In my previous post, we discussed principles that can be used for designing Anti-fragile systems. There were some feedback that the case study was not easy to relate and understand the principles better. With the spirit of making it easier for all of us - including me - to understand, I am taking a very recent and relevant case study to understand Anti-fragile systems.

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals. There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal.  We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

As a Business Principal, I have been coming across the term Machine learning for a long time. Several business executives have wondered what this animal is and how does it help them. The series of posts is to list out what Machine learning means to a business principal and some basic industry standard approaches that has been tried out in the past few years.

User Personas are a very good tool for the product owners, business analysts or product managers to be able to co-create with designers. It is predominantly a product of the user research and should not be an amalgamation of demographic data. It is the best way for us to list all scenarios that a persona would take when they want to attain a goal. It is predominantly used to build empathy with user, focus the team and build consensus in a large diverse stakeholder group. The website I referred to is here:  https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/

 I have been thinking of writing a simple app for locating trash cans at Chennai. The first thing anyone would do was to see if the idea has been already implemented. Sure enough, it has been. This is the app - Check it out. http://trashithere.herokuapp.com/ When I tried using the app, I found out that there were only few trash cans. This was a crowd sourced application. I guess this app was not used much. The Spark This led me to questioning myself - What problem led me to this application. I yearned to live in a place that was clean. My assumption was that if people found places to throw thrash, they would not litter. Going ahead with your idea

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.

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

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.