Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

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.

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 ...

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