Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Pune Startup Ecosystem

The Pune entrepreneur ecosystem is becoming more and more vibrant with lot of communities and a couple of new ones setting base. It has never been easier to become an entrepreneur than now with so many groups pitching in to help you succeed.

Paul Coelho said "When you want something all the universe conspires to help you achieve it". Well I am not sure that the universe is conspiring, but definitely the Pune communities are.To help you understand the communities and how you can benefit from them, Navin and I have tried to catalogue all the serious groups who are working with startups.

Remember this is an informal article. To understand more about each group directly contact the group. The groups are alphabetically arranged.

Headstart (Headstart.in) is a website and an online google group (headstart-network@googlegroups.com). While they don't directly have any meetings in Pune, the online community is quite active and has a lot of members from Pune. Questions get answered pretty fast and there is lots of information on events and general entrepreneurship.

Why you should join: A great place to get your technical questions answered. Also a lot of information on whats happening in the entrepreneurship space across India. Because the group is PAN India you get a more diverse opinion and can meet entrepreneurs across India.

Who should join: Entrepreneurs who are keen to keep up with what is happening around India in their space.



Indian Angels Network (http://www.indianangelnetwork.com/) is a group of individual investors who invest directly in startups. They have recently set up a Pune chapter. The Indian Angels typically invest larger amounts going upto USD 1 mn.

Why you should join: A well established PAN India group with lots of professionals serious about the startup space. They have done a large number of successful investments over the last four years.

Who should join: Investors who want to invest 10 lakh or more per year in startups


MentorEdge (Mentoredge.com) is an initiative by Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad).The group arranges structured meetings between mentors and mentees. It typically has meeting once every two months. It has recently started operations in Pune.

Why you should join: With the backing of IIMA and a PAN India network they are able to bring mentors and mentees on a common platform across India. Great place if you want to meet mentors

Who should join:Entrepreneurs who are looking for mentors and mentors who want to help entrepreneurs. The focus is primarily philanthrophic so you should only join if you are passionate about helping entrepreneurs.


Pune Angels (pune-tech-angels@googlegroups.com) is a long term mentorship plus investors group. The group has mentors with vast experience which work with entrepreneurs on a long term basis. The group also has investors who fund small amounts ranging from 5 lakh to 25 lakhs.

Why you should join: A great group if you believe in entrepreneurs and want to mentor them or invest in them.

Who should join: Investors who are passionate about entrepreneurship and want to invest small amounts in startups. Mentors who want to work with startups on a long term basis (six months or more). Entrepreneurs can request for mentors/investors by writing a mail to vikaskumar1974@gmail.com



Pune Open Coffee Club (http://punestartups.ning.com/ )is an informal club with over 2300 members. It has a highly active online newsgroup (punestartups@googlegroups.com)and is a good forum to get answers to technology related questions. The club isquite informal with meetings scheduled by the moderators or group members as required. A great place for startups to meet other startups and general networking.

Why you Should Join: Great place to discuss and learn from the experiences and mistakes of others. Finding local vendors at cheap rates. Getting partners for your venture. Questions get answered pretty fast as the group is active. Gives a lot of local insight as most of the members are from Pune.

Who should join: Entrepreneurs, Would be entrepreneurs



Startup Saturday Pune(An initiative by the Headstart.in guys) is a more structured group. They organise a session the second Saturday of every month. The sessions usually have a specific theme for e.g. CleanTech, Brick and Mortar etc and there are startups which present their story. There could also be a relevant panel which tries to help with the problems the startups are facing. The best way to know about the Startup Saturday is to subscribe to the Headstart google group (mentioned earlier) as the details are always posted there.

Why you should attend: Understanding the different areas (beyond just technology) where entrepreneurship is flourishing. Learn about opportunities beyond your space. I have personally learnt a lot from these sessions especially on topics like entrepreneurship in adventure sports and Clean Tech. So get off the couch and explore.

Who should attend: Anyone who is interested in the startup ecosystem.



Tie Pune (http://www.tie.org/) is a global network with more than 54 chapters having regular meetings and mentoring sessions. In Pune they have a meeting second Thursday of every month where they take up specific issues related to business like recession, outsourcing etc. If you want to attend these sessions then send a mail to namita.shibad@gmail.com .

Why you should attend: A global pool of vastly talented mentors with lot of regular activities going on around India. Gives you a global reach and potential to meet mentors across the globe.

Who should attend: Startups who have already found a bit of feet and are looking to take their startups to the next level and want to get in touch with high profile mentors and discuss serious business issues.


If you are looking for specific technology-related groups or mailing lists then check out
http://punetech.com/wiki/Category:Groups_and_Organizations

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Why you don't need 5 crores to retire

Recently i read an article in a so called business magazine which pretend to analyse your case and suggest how much you need for retirement.So the person under the scanner was 35 years and wanted to retire after 20 years and needed around 1 cr to retire at todays costs. The analyst did some idiotic calculation and came to the conclusion that he would require some 5 crores to retire. He took the assumption of inflation at 6-7 percent and returns at 7-8 percent and advised that he should atleast work for four more years (ie 24 years) before he should retire. Then he would have the requisite amount. It is amazing where you do not know whether you will have a job the next year to be able to predict that one should work for 24 years. The analyst has in a casual way doled out a life imprisonment to the poor chap and doomed the guy to work for eternity before he can sit back and enjoy a warm cup of coffee without thinking of his future. The sad part is the guy will take it seriously and slog his butt of for 24 years before he sits back and realises that he most probably did not need so much anyways. And then will give that money to his kids to start this journey all over again.

The analysts of today are in an inane way because of these stupid predicitions creating a generation of people who want to blow up all their money today. Yes you heard me right - the analysts by telling people to invest and save their money are actually encouraging people to blow up their money. Think about it, if somebody told you that it would take 30 years to fulfil your dreams what would you do. Save your money for 30 years , or feel that since you have to work anyways for the rest of your life you might as well get your small pleasures today itself and go ahead and start blowing up your money. So with no tangible goal in sight all the people in their 20's and their 30's are spending their money like they have never heard of Fixed deposits and Pensions. Also because the only way it seems to get to the elusive figure of 5 crores to have higher returns people are investing whatever little is left in the equity market. Buoyed up by the analysts who claim 50-100% return in the share market, people are dumping all of their hard earned money in the equity market only to loose all of it when the market tanks. Equity markets can give good returns but it has to be treaded carefully. And it is definitely not the place for people who have only 5-10 lacs in saving and two kids to feed.

So anyways back to the main focus of this blog - why we need much lesser than what the analysts are saying to be able to retire.
Lets look at some of the components of our annual expenditure and try to guess at what it will be after 15-20 years.


I am just for the examples assuming that you are spending around a lakh every month

Mortgage
One of the major components which could be as high as 30% of your expenditure is the mortgage on your house. So Rs 30000 goes out this way. 15 to 20 years later you would have paid of this and it will go down to 0. If you are smart you have taken a fixed interest in which case inflation wont matter. Incase you havent do it the next time the interest rate softens.

Reverse Mortgage
While reverse mortgage has failed this time around rest assured it will be back with a bang again. So you will not only not be paying mortgages but actually gaining out of your house maybe 20000-30000 pm. Here inflation will work to your favor and if the analysts are right you might be getting as much as 50000-1 lakh as reverse mortgage.

Food
This is one thing which will most probably be hit by inflation the most. So food will definitely become costlier. In this I guess what would increase more is the cost of eating out. Also remember while cost of growing rice might increase, the cost of buying rice from the shops might not increase so significantly. As retail chains make their supply chains more efficient and as a lot of the intermediary cost might go down because of internet a lot of the cost of growing rice will be offset by reducing the cost of the chain. Also because of competition there will always be a pressure on reducing the cost. Because of this my guess is food will maybe double in cost in the next 10-15 years. But remember food forms a small part fo the expenditure amybe 10%. And remeber as your kids shift out you will have less mouths to feed. So in the end the impact will be marginal.

Telephone and communication Bills
When mobiles were launched it used to cost 16 bucks for a minute. Now it costs less than a rupee. And with web based alternatives for free calls and sms there is no reason to believe that the costs of telephone bills will ever go up. Infact they should move more and more closer to free. With everybody having a mobile you do not need to even have a landline. Also cost of sending snail mails and postage stamps has all become zero.


Books,Magazines and music
Internet has created an alternative which has dragged the cost of books and music to virtually free. When you retire you don't need to buy and newspapers, books, magazines or music. You will be able to easily get them free of cost on the net. So that cost will also be virtually zero.


Clothes
In 2000 an Allen Solly shirt used to cost around Rs 1000. Today it may be costing around Rs 1200. Not very significant. What is more interesting is that they have a sale every six months where they sell the same shirt for 700 bucks. You can buy the 'honest' Peter England shirt for 600 bucks even without discount. With consumerism the market has got flooded with so many brands that nobody can really raise their prices. So while cotton might have got costlier, cotton shirts have not. I don't see any reason why shirts would be costlier 15 years down the line. And if the sales remain as today you might end up paying less. Also remember you are not getting taller and hopefully not fatter. So all the shirts you would have collected over the years would be still there after you retire. Even now my cupboard is so full of clothes that I dont know why I need more clothes. I think i just buy more clothes for the heck of it. There is no real need. And nowdays the shirts are being made of much better material. so they last for much longer. So in totality the cost of clothes after you retire would remain most probably the same.


Holidays
Six, seven years ago a flight ticket used to cost much more than today. With budget airlines, a well planned off season travel could cost you peanuts.
Even international flights are much cheaper than they were in 2000. While hotels have increased their rates marginally, because of the net you can find much better deals which actually mean you might be paying much lesser. Also you can buy a RCI or a Mahindra resorts membership which will take care of the inflation. Add to this the fact that rupee should become stronger, and the fact that countries like USA and Australia have virtually no inflation the next 15-20 years might see internation travel being cheaper. Even within India with so many hotel chains opening up, a hotel room has actually become cheaper than 4-5 years ago.
So my guess is the cost of well planned holidays to countries whose currency has depreciated vis-a-vis India , fifteen years down the line will be similar to today.

Servant and driver
Almost every indian house has a servant. And the cost of a servant has been steadily rising and will become astronomical in fifteen years. It will become so costly that you won't be able to afford one and the cost will come down to zero. After retirement you will have ample time for household work. Aided by your sophisticated washing+ drying machine, your dishwasher, vacuum cleaner and the advanced microwave you wont need a servant anyways. Look at the saving on the broken glasses. With advancements in technology houses will remain much more cleaner and we will move more towards the american culture.
Ditto for the driver. It will be nice to drive on your own and will give you an opportunity to exercise your hands.

Electricity
The cost of each unit of electricity will go up. But the number of units we consume will definitely come down. With CFL's and much more energy efficient devices the cost of electricity might actually stay there only or increase marginally.

Taxes
How did I forget this one. In the 70's you had to pay tax of around 98%. If you dont believe me google on the tax slabs of the 70's. Now taxes are between 20 to 30 percent and are slated to again go down. So chances are high that you will be paying much lesser tax fifteen years down the line than you are paying today. Other forms of taxes like excise and customs steadily coming down will also have a positive impact.

Capital and Savings
This one is subtle. Remember today your income is divided into three parts. Taxes, Saving and Expenditure. Once you retire your income will only be divided into two parts, Taxes and Expenditure. So you will need much lesser than today for having the same money in hand. Also remember not only are you not having to save you are also going to consume your saved capital which would be totally tax free. All the analysts make a mistake here. They try to create so much capital that the interest can sustain you. But why would you want to keep your capital. You should be able to consume small portions of it as you go along. And remember this is tax free

White Goods
A computer 20 years ago costed 80000 bucks. Today you can get a ten times more powerful machine in Rs 20000. When we bought a 21 inch color television way back in 85, it costed around 12 thousand. Today you can get a 29" flat television for ten thousand. In a couple of years you might even get LCd's for the same price. A refregirator has always costed around RS 15000 since I can remember. A washing machine is again in the same range since eternity. White goods have become cheaper or remained the same. At the same time they have become more efficient and require less repairs and last for decades without any major problems. So don't expect to spend much on white goods after you retire. Also you will have bought most of them before you retire so you can just continue using them. Again all the newer goods are now only marginally better than their older counterparts. So while a 4 mega pixel camera is twice as powerful as a 2 megapixel one, a 12 megapixel one is only marginally better than a 10 megapixel one. what I am trying to get to is that the newer white goods are just marginally better so unless you get bowled over by the glitzy ads you don't really need to keep replacing your machines every three years.
So when a 80 Gb Hard disk came out, there was a need to replace your 40 Gb one, the same is not true with your current 500 Gb one. I have a laptop with 140 Gb Hard drive and i have never used more than 80 gb.
Also many of the white goods are getting combined and making other white goods redundant. So an IPod and a pair of speakers can replace your complete music system, and an IPod plus a laptop can replace your music system, DVD Player and your television.

So until you want the latest 40 inch LED, you can safely assume that your expense on White goods is going to come down


Petrol
This one is tricky and could go in any direction. With rupee appreciating, petrol should become cheaper though inflation may take all that benefit away. But with cars becoming more efficient the cost of driving should stay similar or may come down. In ten years you might be using very cheap bio fuel or even using water and air to drive. Also car costs have stayed put or come down with more cars available in the cheaper segments. A sx4 at 7 lakhs now gives relatively similar features as a Corolla. If you remove your ego you can get a car with bells and whistles at 5-6 lakhs something one could never dream of about 5 years ago. Also once you retire you will need to drive less anyways.
So my guess is the cost of car + petrol will not be vastly different after you retire


Kid's Marriage
One of the biggest concerns of all the parents is the cost of marrying their kids after 15-20 years And they are budgeting anything around 50 lacs to 1 cr after inflation for this. Well i think this particular one is very hypothetical. I am not even sure people will be marrying after 15 years. And i am sure that if you dont have enough money for a lavish marriage at that time he or she will understand and be open to a marriage in a court or temple. Saving for marriage seems very futile and unnecessary. So i would not factor this one at all into my retirement.


Kid's Education
This one is going to be costly. No doubt about it. But most of the kids education having been completed before you retire and easy loans for post graduation you should be able to see through this without too much of a scare.



There are many other areas of discussion, but I think you are getting the picture. The future might not be so costly as we are making it out to be.

Below I have made charts for a family of today and how they may look like after 15 years. From my understanding if you have around 2 crores you should be able to easily manage an expenditure of around 16 lacs without any worries. Even conservatively I still get around 5 lacs still available for expenditures which are difficult imagine today.








So what I am trying to conclude is that the retirement is not as far fetched as it seems and with a little bit of pragmatism and restraint you should be able to live a happy retired life in anything between 1 to 2 crores even after fifteen years. So dont get swayed by the analysts. They have their own axe to grind. Think about what you want and make your decisions. And yes start saving today because you can retire much faster than you realise.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Linear Vs Parallel

Suppose we have to select two complementary food items for a party and there are two different people who are going to do it.
We have given them instructions that the first person must select a drink and the second person a starter.

Should we let both the people do their tasks parallely or should they do it one after another.

Let's look at the problems which can be caused if the activities are done parallely

Parallel Activities

Issues of each item
Each of the individual items itself could have some issues associated with it.
So if the first person selected Wine, he might have selected Wine which is Corked, Oxidized, Maderized or Refermented.
Hence there could be an inherent bug in each of the food products itself which might not get spotted till the party started and then we see all the guests politely refusing when we open the wine bottles. Same could be for the other item we selected.

Issues of complementing
The different food items selected might not complement each other. So one person might have selected white wine and the other might have selected poppadums. I for one would not want to eat them together.
Since either of them does not know what the other person is selecting there is a low probability that the items will complement

Issues of missed opportunity of complementing
Let us assume that they magically are able to select complementary food items, say wine and cheese, we run into the third level of issues.
They might complement each other no doubt but we could have done better.
Wikipedia tells me that Gouda is more of a fit with Riesling, Beaujolais, Merlot and Zinfandel while Brie goes better with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sparkling wine and Ice Wine.
So while I have been able to pair Wine and Cheese and my guests will be happy, some of the more discerning ones would have loved that the wine and cheese have a deeper relationship. So rather than an issue the third level is more an opportunity which we missed out to please our guests

Now let's look at the same two tasks if they are done linearly

Linear Activities

Issues of each item
As above the first person could have selected a wine which is Corked, Oxidized, Maderized or Refermented.
However when we start the selection for the starter, since the wine will be taken into consideration, it is possible that the issue might get spotted.
The Wine is available right through the process of selecting the starter so there is some probability that somebody might spot that the Wine is bad. So the second activity acts as a QA for the first activity. Visualise this in a project where coding is done after all the screens have been already designed. If there is an error in the screen say a spelling mistake, the coder might notice it even though he has nothing to do with it.

Issues of complementing
Since the Wine is available to the second person there is a greater possibility that he will select a more complementing starter like cheese.
Again there is no guarantee, but the probability of the items fitting is significantly enhanced
So if the screens for a Module are already designed chances are higher that the coder will better fit the code to the screens.

Issues of missed opportunity of complementing
The linear approach gives us the chance to create a better fit. So now that we already know the wine which has been selected, we can read up Wikipedia and select the cheese which goes best with it.
So if the screens are ready, the coder might realise that there is a better way of coding the screens than he was planning to because the screens are available to him. For example he might see that every screen displays the current User's Name which might encourage him to store it in the session, rather than pass it through the query string because the frequency is too high. Similarly if it is only visible on the home page he might not store it at all.
So based on the GUI the code could be optimised accordingly.

Increase in Calendar Time
The classic problem pointed out with linear models is that it takes more time. So if we were selecting both the items together we would have taken say two hours. Now we will end up taking four hours. Note that the effort has not increased. We will still take four hours, two hours of each person. Its the calendar time which has increased from two to four hours.
While this looks like a problem, in a project this is really not an issue because there are always other activities available to be done. So if these same two people had to choose food for twenty different parties then this would not be a problem since while one person is complementing food for one party the other could be choosing food for another party.

This is the major reason why I have seen Project managers schedule things parallely. The percieved increase in them leads them to believe that they are better off doing things parallely. However they end up introducing the three different problems which are mentioned above which actually ends up increasing the calendar effort also as all the bugs in the system have to be solved. Add to that the people related issues with one team blaming the other for the issues and you have your hands full.

So until you have a very small project where you do not have more than one module it is always better to work linearly than parallely.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Self - Explaining and Forgiving Roads

The yearly cost of road accidents in the countries which are part of the European Union is estimated to be around 160 billion euros. Beyond the monetary cost, the human grief and suffering is incalculable. Across the globe we are no better. Approximately 1.2 million people die every year in road accidents and more than 50 million are seriously injured. Road accidents are a leading cause of death in people between the ages of 10-24.

Alarming figures when you look at it on paper.

Most of these accidents are caused because of human mistakes. To err is human seems to come with a baggage of death and lifelong suffering.Since accidents are caused by human error, the obvious solution has been to educate humans. So all the initiatives have focused on educating the driver (I see people whizzing past huge hoardings saying Speed thrills but kills), having motors to adhere to tougher guidelines and finally strict enforcement. However this approach has not really helped much with no significant drop in accidents.

Around the turn of the century various countries got together and started the European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP) an initiative to reduce death and serious injuries on Europe's roads. From here emerged the concept of Self- Explaining and Forgiving Roads.

The vision of "The self explaining and forgiving road" is a new way of thinking in planning and designing road infrastructure. Design of roads must focus on simplicity and clearness instead of complexity and ambiguity. Whatever we do about design - including use of information technology - with the aim to help the road users to manage traffic situations in a safe manner - road users will make mistakes and accidents will occur. The higher the speed the more serious the consequences will be from making mistakes in traffic. (ARRB Conference October 2006)

Self-explaining roads are designed and constructed to evoke correct expectations from road users, eliciting proper driving behaviour.Forgiving roads are designed and constructed to avoid and / or mitigate negative consequences of driving errors

Finally many governments agreed that humans are liable to error and just because they have committed an error they should not have to be punished with consequences upto death. Thus was born the concept of forgiving roads. A road which would forgive and minimise the impact of a mistake, which recognised that mistakes were inevitable and would try to minimise the impact of an accident.So rather than people having to protect themselves from oncoming obstacles in case they have skidded, the obstacles were themselves moved away as far as possible. And obstacles which could not be moved away were made flexible, so as to cause minimum damage.For years we had tried to convince people not to sleep while driving. And we are yet to succeed. But the consequences were dramatic, to the extent of death. So while education was still important, roads were made forgiving. So now you had rumbling strips at the edges and the divider. So if you were going towards the edges the car would start vibrating and hopefully you would wake up before you hit the edge. And hopefully the flexible objects would cause less damage even if you hit them.
Also was added the concept of self - explaining, an approach which forces you or makes it very easy to follow traffic guidelines. Roads which would shout out about themselves so that humans caused less mistakes. A bright colored 3d divider so obvious that nobody could miss it.
From childhood students are taught to look right, look left, and look right again before crossing the road. But just because you did not pay attention in school does not mean that you should be run over by a car. From here emerged the concept of Pedestrian refuges.

Pedestrian refuge islands are raised median islands that provide a location for pedestrians to safely wait for a gap in the traffic so they can finish crossing the road. This makes crossing the road easier for pedestrians by allowing them to cross in two stages and deal with one direction of traffic flow at a time.(http://www.irap.net/toolkit/default.asp?p=treatment&i=92)Easier than the looking in all directions. This approach becomes critical in cases of major intersections which could have sixteen or more points of conflict (http://www.tfhrc.gov/safety/pedbike/pubs/05085/chapt11.htm)

Not only was it made easy to follow driving guidelines but in various cases the guidelines were created such that people would be forced to follow them. Roads were created in such a way that you would automatically avoid mistakes. So straight roads were curved forcefully to make sure that you would not take it easy and sleep. Or instead of crossings many roads had roundabouts. The fact that roundabouts are difficult to manoeuvre makes people more conscious and reduces the number of accidents. Sometimes increasing the effort may be beneficial if it reduces the errors in the system

So why should most of us who have nothing to do with designing roads learn about Self-Explaining and Forgiving Roads.Well because this same approach can make highly usable Websites and also gives us insight into better Project management Systems.

But first to Websites.Look at Google, the number one search engine. It is designed on similar ground either accidentally (no pun intended) or intentionally.
Self Explaining - That is an obvious one. With one text box and one button in the page how many mistakes can you make anyways.
And then the Suggestions as You Type reduces the number of errors you make. It also points me towards the right direction without having to read any signboards.

The forgiving nature of Google is more interesting. So type http://www.gogle.com/ or http://www.gooogle.com/ and you reach google. Type "self forgivng" in the search box and it will ask you if you meant "self forgiving". Rather than you getting frustrated that you are not getting any relevant results and then breaking the laptop, it points out the possible error and saves mass destruction.

And what do we as project managers have to learn from all this. Plenty actually.A lot of the pain from the systems and environment can be taken away if we design them in the same way as the self-explaining and forgiving roads.

The forgiving roads approach tells us to create systems with the objective of
a) Minimising the error caused by humans
b) Understand that beyond whatever we do, we will cause errors. So create a system which minimises the damage if an error is caused.

This is in sharp contrast with the traditional approach where systems have been designed for intelligent, sensible and logical people to work in an efficient way.
But wont the approach increase the effort like the roundabouts. Definitely. But like the forgiving roads creating small local problems to sort out the global problem of accidents, we also create systems which might increase the initial effort but reduce the errors in the system. And since a significant effort of a project to the tune of 40-60% is in rework, we significantly reduce the overall effort.

This approach teaches us some interesting things -
a) Not to plan activities back to back because then the system is not forgiving. A delay in one activity creates a cascading effect which leads to all the other activities having to be rescheduled and maybe even lead the whole project getting delayed
b) It points out that most probably the agile approach of creating User Stories is a good approach. Like the pedestrian refuge it allows us to only focus on a few activities at a time. The User Stories approach creates small islands between tasks which reduce the effort of trying to understand the magnitude of the whole project every day and just focus on a few tasks.
c) Daily deadlines is bad because it assumes that humans will work methodically and systematically something against the human grain. Shifting to more forgiving models of one or two weeks could be more desirable
d) Rather than pretend that the Parkinson's Law ("Work expands to fill the time available") and the Student Syndrome("Given a deadline, people tend to wait until the deadline is nearly here before starting work.") do not exist or ticking the team off every day a better approach is to create short iterations where work automatically gets timeboxed forcing people to complete their work. It is the same thing which I had discussed in shifting things from being Important to being urgent.

e) Having good versioning systems. Versioning systems are designed to forgive humans who realise that they need the document five seconds after they have pressed Shift-Delete. Versioning systems allow people to make mistakes and recover without telling the Project Manager that they need two days to recode the module.

It is interesting this new thought process. From trying to create a disciplined and structured set of humans to creating simple systems which understand and work with rather than aginst human beings. Maybe we will see more of this in day to day objects as I still try to figure out how to scroll thorugh excel sheets on my Blackberry.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Important But Not Urgent

As i was doing some research on Agile development and TOC i saw various references to important but not urgent tasks.
And then i suddenly realized that i had an answer to a problem which i had been grappling in general over the last few years but specifically over the last few weeks.

So here is a problem related to allocations, all the parties agree that it is a serious issue and it should be solved, people have also tried to put in effort to sort out the issue.
So
1) The issue has been there for over four years
2) Everybody is convinced that the issue is serious and needs to be solved
3) The solution is known and pretty straightforward - Most of the issue can get sorted out if teams just updates deallocation information.
However after four years the issue is still there. Nobody wants to update the deallocation.


When i was asked to solve this issue i talked to all the concerned guys. And they all really wanted to solve the issue. But even after a lot of discussion for over three weeks. Nothing happened - no change.
And i spent a long time trying to figure out how come when everything is in place this issue does not get sorted out - everybody agrees, you have a solution , man what else do you need.
And then when i saw the references to 'important but not urgent' i realised that was the problem.

This issue was doomed not to be solved because it was important but not urgent. They had lived with this problem for four years, a week would not make a difference, so while everyone agreed, there was no real push.
There is a fundamental flaw in the rock-pebble-sand parable (http://responsivereaction.blogspot.com/2007/05/rock-pebbles-and-sand-important-things.html )
If you focus only on the rocks, you will never actually ever focus on the pebbles because by the time you finsih with the rocks, there will be more rocks and then more.
That is exactly what happened in this case. New urgent things kept coming up and this issue kept getting postponed. Also as the severity of the issue increased so did the people's resistance to it. So it became more and more difficult to get it in the urgency list

It is like google. Hardly anybody i know ever clicks the next page. If your site does not appear in the first 3 or 4 hits you can rest assured that nobody will ever visit it. Same is with the senior management, if your issue is not in their first three urgent issues you can rest assured the issue will never get solved.

When i look around i see that this simple 'Important but not Urgent' phenomenon also explains a lot of things which have always baffled me

a) I have talked to many people who are unfit and most of them want to get fitter.
They
1) Want to get fitter
2) Feel they will be much better of if they are fitter
3) Have easy access to a gym
4) Have enough money
and yet they are still as unfit as before.
I feel it is because of the same reason. getting fit is important but not urgent. There is always a reason to do it tomorrow and this has gone on for years.
However I have noticed that these same people are able to get super fit when they are looking for a bride. 3 months to their marriage and they are jogging in the morning and taking care of their diet. The moment their is an urgency to getting fit ,most people are upto it.

b) Same is the reason why people who even if they want to are not able to quit smoking. They make a new year resolution and then keep it only for the next three days. Because New Years resolution are important but not urgent. Writing 'Cigarette Smoking is injurious to health' on cigarette cartons makes the whole issue important but not urgent. Showing images of damaged lungs is useless because everybody knows it will not happen tomorrow.
Yet many people have been able to leave smoking when their wives are expecting. Suddenly only nine months creates a sense of urgency which makes leaving smoking at the top of the list

c) This same concept also explains why Parkinson's law is inevitable - Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Tasks which are important but not urgent will suffer one of the two faiths:
1) They will keep getting delayed till the last moment when they become urgent. So while the amount of work is same the calendar days will keep expanding till it is inevitable. This is why most projects get completed only on the last day. All the tasks are important but only become urgent when the deadline is near.
2) People will keep working on the same thing achieving more and more perfection till the deadline approaches and the task becomes urgent. This commonly happens with creative work like graphic. Give a week to a graphic designer and he will create ten copies of a graphic and then choose one. Give him a day and he will make two copies and choose one. (Timeboxing is supposed to solve it http://www.davecheong.com/2006/07/26/time-boxing-is-an-effective-getting-things-done-strategy/ )

So to get back to the allocation problem which I was discussing - I talked to the resource head and he did try to create a sense of urgency by updating team leads that there team was not deallocating resources. However nothing much happened, so he gave up trying. This happens because everybody has a different trigger. What creates urgency for one does not do the same for another. So while escalations do create urgency most of us have got so used to it that they no create a sense of panic in us. For most of us there has to be something more dramatic for us to actually feel the sense of urgency.
So you have to sometimes take dramatic steps like stopping allocation till somebody believes that the issue is urgent and takes action to sort it out.

Even the Extreme Programming- User Story approach sorts out the problem of getting activities done in time by creating a sense of urgency every week on a regular basis. It forces you to consider each task as urgent much before the due date forcing you to deliver on a consistent basis rather than at the end.


So will this article be of any value to anybody - Actually no because like the thought in this article, this article is also doomed to be useless - Because it is 'important but not urgent'

Saturday, August 9, 2008



Process Mash Up
– Game Theory and TOC





As I was reading Game Theory and specifically the prisoner’s
dilemma I was amazed to see the correlation between it and the thoughts
proposed by Goldratt.

Combining both of them it seems to answer more clearly why a
company will necessary perform much below the sum of the capabilities of the
employees.


Let me first get into my understanding of the Prisoners
dilemma.



So each of the players are interested only
in their personal gain in any scenario as that maximises their return.

Now if we apply this to the standard way bonuses or any
incentives are determined in an organisation we get a beautiful view to the
Local-Global optima problem




Hence it seems that every employee will necessarily put his
interest over the company’s which will result in everybody gunning for local
optima.


While this deduction may seem obvious in TOC, putting it in
the context of the Prisoner’s dilemma helps us to always garner all the
knowledge of Game theory to solve this conundrum

On a side note it seems you can apply the Prisoner’s dilemma
to marriage and realize why marriages are doomed to fail