Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Context The current typical model of starting a large program is to have a discovery workshop for the program followed by detailed project inceptions. The project inceptions are spaced and detailed. There are not a lot of discovery workshops we do that is mutual discovery. It is more of sense making of an earlier discovery process. The Pitfalls and some thoughts With the discovery process feeding into the project Inceptions was great. it gave direction. However, validation of the direction based on feedback from projects seems to be missing. The reason the feedback is missing is 2-fold: #1 - The discovery workshops don't seem to have a cadence with the project Inceptions #2 - The team that does discovery workshops is to involved with the project inceptions and vice versa,

Before I jump into the topic, I will start with some context. We were working on a very complex product - Complexity in multiple dimensions. As a team, We needed a simple way for us to understand how we manage complexity as team scales and use it as a simple communication tool.  To generalise: Context: A complex project A fairly large team High Volatility Product Engineering team Challenges A way to manage complexity as a team Tool for communication on progress  A mechanism to calibrate progress with the bigger roadmap Crystal Ball Crystal Ball is a simple tool for visualising progress on a granular scale. It helps in tracking progress and for teams to look at what they can achieve going forward.  It helps in internalising the progress that the team made in the past few weeks and then relate to it as they plan forward. How we used it Our team was fairly big - a 7 pair dev team with 3 Was , 1 BA and a PM. We also had an XD and...

User  story  mapping  is  a  technique  that  allows  you  to  add  a  second  dimension  to  your backlog. The  visualization  enables  you  to  see  the  big  picture  of  the  Product  Backlog. I references a lot of material from Jeff Patton's website here:   http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

Proto-typing is the next step after doing your user journeys. A lot of us put in a lot of effort in port typing. However, remember that this is not a creative exercise. The goal is to increase the flow of information and reduce uncertainty. Hence the concept of lo-fi prototyping A lot of the content on this video is from: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/the-skeptics-guide-to-low-fidelity-prototyping/  

I gave a try at an automatic leave leter generator. Loading... Features: PDF of leave letter generated Emailed to the person automatically It takes care of a generic set of situations and is generic enough. Feedback welcome. Loading...

User Journey is an activity that we do right after detailing user personas. It is primarily used for: Understanding user behaviour Identify high level functionality Demonstrate vision of the project How do you go about creating a user Journey Your user’s goals Their motivations Their current pain points Their overall character The main tasks they want to achieve Courtesy:  http://theuxreview.co.uk/user-journeys-beginners-guide/

It is recently that I have consciously started practicing Inquiry. Let me explain. I am a consultant who constantly looks at the situation and comes up and implements the solution to progress from there. While I do that, I constantly use Inquiry as a means to progress - one of the key facilitation technique specifically in multiple stakeholder situations.

This is a quick experience report on User Personas - Where it has worked well, where I had challenges and why I had those challenges.

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/

This post is a list of my perspective and questions on my journey in shared spaces. My first experience of learning in shared spaces was back in my MBA days - Where we learn , experiment , fail and reflect as a team. It has been a long time and I got 2 opportunities to do the same in a shared space. Learning in Shared spaces - A Journey

My 2016 resolutions

Big programs of work tend to be comprised of several small IT projects stitched together. Business architecture makes sense that way - build and release in small doses and keep building. Momentum - in both IT roadmap and business outcomes - is great and demonstrable in this way. Theoretically, Everything goes smooth and the program is complete and every one is happy. However, in reality, things never go as per plan. No plan survives the impact when the rubber meets the road.

Large enterprises have started their IT journey in earnest. However, they are miles behind what is happening.  Some of them have been trying to learn faster by creating research programs or separate business unites to try out and learn a few exotic ideas that have not yet gained acceptance in the industry or enterprise. Enterprises have moved record collection and data to IT long back and were pioneers in that. However, since the advent of personal computers, they have been left behind. Internet and mobile have left them far behind. For example, Network security, big data, mobile apps. social applications are solved problems that the enterprise choose to ignore. 

 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

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.