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.

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