Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

I have been trying to make sense of what anti-fragility means and how do I use that in my day job. As a Business Principal, I tend to work with the abstract but orchestrate a program of work that needs details. This makes my job a little difficult in the terms of designing for more self-preserving systems that preserve the spirit of the abstracted strategy or vision. I came across an article from Daniel Russo on anti-fragility and his attempt at creating a manifesto similar to the manifesto for agile software development. For more reading on Daniel Russo, here is his profile:  http://djrusso.github.io More reading from his paper here:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050916302290 This post is an attempt for me to understand what goes into developing a program that uses every opportunity to strengthen itself and achieve its objective - the vision.  I liked the approach of principles for developing systems that are anti-fragile. It i...

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.

One of my first projects as a scrum master was to develop a product that would be used by teenage girls and mothers who are afraid of an unexpected pregnancy. I had to work with my clients on this project that was sensitive in nature on multiple grounds. Sensitivity #1: I was working with women on a topic related to measuring menstrual cycles and ovulation periods. It is not easy for people in India to hear a guy talk about menstrual cycles so openly. I had to balance between being sensible on how do we treat the entire topic as an objective discussion to shape the product while at the same time not seem like turning women into objects. It was a tight rope but we did it. Sensitivity #2: This was a realm that fell between medical and religious. The stand that the product took was not overtly endorsed by the medical fraternity in India. It was a new methodology that had data that was not collected by medical fraternity and hence concerns were there. This was a blessing ...

The software world has starting being more inclusive. After serving only the geeks and the techies, a lot of the software that is produced in this world has started looking at how it can be mor euseful. One of the key constituencies of software usage is people with disability. The ADA (Americans with disability Act) has forced a lot of the software developers to look at this issue. The software world has also responded sensitively and with care making as much of the software usable by people with disability. One of the key components that we are looking at in this are people with visual impairment. Over a period of time, a lot of the software has made sure that the user experience is adjusted in such a way that is is intuitive. Google has been a front runner in this and a lot of others are also not left behind. Text The size and the font typology is very important. Choose those aspects with ADA in mind. Media like Images A lot of the media , including video and images ,...

The 2 skillsets that a product manager needs a lot are Analysis and Synthesis. I am a business analyst who turned into a product manager. It is easier for me to be reliant on my analysis skills since that is what I am trained as a business analyst. However, what is also equally important is the synthesis skills. How are they different Analysis refers to the ability to break down a problem into constituents and start attacking them. This helps the product manager a lot when there is enough feedback from users and all the product manager has to do is just carry it out. There is no need for prioritisation from the side of the product manager since the user’s preference would clearly give that information as well. This works well when the product is an already released product and it is not difficult to understand what is needed and why it is needed. Synthesis, on the other hand, refers to the ability to piece together multiple pieces of information to understand t...