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Fantastic conversation with the GIM Big Data Analytics Class of 2020!

August 23, 2020 by manshu Leave a Comment

I spent an amazing Saturday morning with the 2020 class of Goa Institute of Management doing their MBA in Big Data Analytics, and it was an absolute delight to interact with students from my alma mater, and answer their questions.

I was incredibly impressed with range and depth of their questions, and during the conversation I provided a lot of references, so I thought it would be useful if I wrote a post linking to them here.

If you were in the discussion, and remember a question or reference that I made that’s not listed here, please feel free to leave a comment, and I’ll add it here. And with that, here are the questions I remember, in no particular order.

How do you build happy teams particularly in the times of this pandemic?

I spoke about servant leadership, and how it lends itself particularly well to the current times because as a servant leader your focus is on serving your team, and this is the primary ingredient in building a happy team. Read this introduction to servant leadership as a concept, and then this paper to see how you can objectively measure the impact of servant leadership on your team’s psychological health.

How are companies changing their onboarding to be fully virtual?

I was extremely excited by this question because I got to share my own experience with the fantastic onboarding experience that ServiceNow has created for its new hires which is by far the best onboarding experience I’ve ever had, and hundreds of others share my sentiment!

Screen Shot 2020-08-23 at 7.30.10 PM

How do you take care of your mental health in an all virtual work environment?

Here again, I spoke about something we do in ServiceNow which is the no email, no slack, no meetings Friday. While I have to admit we don’t follow this a 100%, having a day designated where you don’t have a ton of meetings, and can do some uninterrupted work, and log off early when all of it is done helps your mental health greatly.

I also spoke about Google’s post from earlier this year that has tips on working together when we are not together.

How are Lean principles applied to software development?

Lean principles have their origin in automotive manufacturing, and they were translated to software development by identifying types of waste that occur in the software development process akin to the manufacturing process, and then making efforts to eliminate or reduce these wastes. As an example – “Inventory” is identified as one of the wastes in the Toyota Production System’s Manufacturing Wastes, and the equivalent in software development is “Partially Done Work”, and hence the emphasis on limiting WIP (Work in Progress). This paper on software development waste is a very useful starting point to understand this.

How do you deal with workplace incivility?

The question was more situational, but the situation the individual found himself was that he was facing rudeness, and general incivility in his workplace. Anger, fear and sadness are the three negative emotions that you usually encounter at work, and this MIT Sloan paper on smart ways to respond to negative emotions at work is one of the best resources I’ve found on the topic, and one that I continue to read when I find myself in similar situations.

How useful is an MBA in the software industry?

For this one, I didn’t use many references, and primarily talked about the transferability of soft skills, and hard skills across industries, and disciplines, and how all knowledge is cumulative meaning one piece of knowledge builds on top of another, and when you learn something in one area it is often used in another area as well.

What is the utility of a standup ceremony in Scrum?

Mike Cohn does a great job of explaining the objective and mechanics of how to run a daily standup, and I highly recommend this post. 

What kind of data do companies use to make decisions?

In response to this question I emphasized the need to appreciate the difference between outcomes and outputs, and understand that primarily organizations are interested in outcomes, so the most useful metrics are ones directly tied to outcomes and not outputs. This is a good paper to understand the difference between an outcome, and an output.

To wrap up, I’ll say that I had two activities and a whole set of slides prepared, but we never got past my introduction because the conversation flowed so naturally from one question to another, and I would absolutely have had it no other way, so my gratitude to everyone who attended, and I’m looking forward to interact with you again!

Filed Under: Business and Technology

What is the difference between iterative and incremental in Agile?

July 26, 2020 by manshu Leave a Comment

I’ve often heard people use iterative and incremental interchangeably in an agile context, and if I’m being honest I have often mixed up these terms myself. Mike Cohn does a great job explaining the difference using sculpting as an analogy, and till recently his example was the clearest I knew of when thinking of iterative versus incremental.

That changed last Friday as I was looking through the stories my team will build in the upcoming sprints as there are two pieces of work that we’ll be doing that are great examples of building iteratively, and incrementally.

A quick English definition of both words is helpful before we go any further.

  • iterate:to say or do again and again
  • increment:the action or process of increasing especially in quantity or value

In software terms – you iterate when you take a feature, and improve it successively, while an increment is delivering a feature, and then adding another one, and then another one, and so on.

In my example – we’re going to build a request submission process that requires approval and will trigger emails. Everyone has likely experience with this because they are one of the most common type of processes, and the end state is usually a process where you submit a request, it goes for approval, and upon approval it gets created, and alongside emails are triggered at every step.

This is what it would look like in a simple graphical manner:

Agile - Difference Iterative Incremental

The request creation process is iterative because we will first build something without any logic – everything gets approved, then we go back and add some logic, and allow approvals only, and finally, we add in the capability of rejection as well. This is an iterative process – we are making progress through successive refinement as Mike Cohn describes it.

The email process is incremental because each email notification is complete in its own right – the wording, branding, timing, recipient – everything is delivered fully at one go, and you don’t need to revisit a previously built email in the process of building the second one.

Agile development is both iterative, and incremental, and to some degree you can argue both sides on what is iterative versus incremental on almost everything. But I do believe this is a good example to illustrate the difference between the two, and how someone might decide whether their work is iterative or incremental.

Filed Under: Business and Technology

Book Review: Happier by Tal Ben – Shahar

July 4, 2020 by manshu Leave a Comment

I picked up Tal Ben – Shahar’s Happier after finishing reading Shawn Achor’s The Happier Advantage and I really enjoyed this book as well. In my mind, these two books complement each other well, and you should read them both, but the order perhaps doesn’t matter as much.

Positive psychology is a relatively new field, and in the past I’ve also read Martin Seligman’s works, and I feel everyone should familiarize themselves with positive psychology because of course happiness is relevant to everyone, and it is not something we generally think about in our day to day lives.

The name Happier signifies that when you are thinking about happiness you should think of it is as something in a continuum, and not something that can be achieved and be done with.

At the beginning of the book Tal Ben – Shahar draws out a quadrant of four different types of people – the rat racer – someone who thinks that if he gets this job then he will be happy, or if he buys that house then he’ll be happy. Essentially a person who thinks achieving something in the future will make him happier at that time. Then there is the hedonist who’s maximizing pleasure today, the nihilist who has somewhat given up on life, and the truly happy person who is doing something that makes him happy in the moment, and will add to his happiness in the future as well.

Personally, I relate very closely to the rat – racer in all honesty, and this is something I have to work on, and learn to live in the moment, find things that make me happy in the present, have meaning for me, and as a result are fulfilling to me, and also will lead me to have a happier future.

The book goes quite deep into how you can find such things for yourself, and I highly recommend the exercises mentioned there.

The other concept that resonated quite well with me was the concept that for most people they can look at their work in three different ways  – as a job, a career or a calling. A job is something that you do just to earn money today, a career is when you look at it as a slightly longer term thing in terms of progression, money, titles etc. and there again the motivation is extrinsic. Finally, there’s the calling where you are doing something because of internal motivation, and because you truly love doing it. Here again, I’m at the stage where my work is a career, and I must work towards making it a calling.

All in all, I really loved this book, and I highly recommend that you read or at least familiarize with the ideas of positive psychology.

 

Filed Under: Books

Book Review: Simple Chess by Michael Stean

July 3, 2020 by manshu Leave a Comment

Simple Chess by Michael Stean is the best strategy book that I’ve read. I think strategy is the hardest part of chess, and especially hard for the amateur player. Michael Stean has taken six strategic concepts and explained them in very simple terms with great examples of games that show exactly what he means.

These concepts are as follows:

  1. Outposts
  2. Weak Pawns
  3. Open Files
  4. Half Open Files
  5. Black Squares and White Squares
  6. Space

The easiest and the best concept that I liked from the book was one of outposts. I think that is the easiest to grasp, and implement in your own games, which I was able to do soon after reading it, and therefore I think I really liked it. All in all this is a great book, and I’d highly recommend it to all chess players.

Filed Under: Books, Chess

Book Review: The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

March 27, 2020 by manshu Leave a Comment

What better book to read during a pandemic than one written on the worst pandemic in human history. The Great Mortality is a fascinating history of the bubonic plague that devastated Europe and Asia in the 14th century. Black Death killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe, or about one third of the entire population!

Our modern mind can probably not even comprehend death and misery at this scale, and our current pandemic seems like a walk in the park compared to the Black Death. The book itself deals with this grim subject in a very interesting manner. It lays the foundation by talking about the causes of the plague, its origin, and then traces the plague as it moves from one European city to another.

The author has relied on historical accounts as well as personal diaries, and as a result some passages in the book are deeply moving, and saddening.

The book also tells you a little about life in the Middle Ages in Europe, and you learn about how Astrology was still a prominent part of medicine at the time, and most sailing was sailing from one port to another, not open sea sailing (which is probably how the plague spread).

My favorite parts in the book were those that touched on human nature especially because you can see how nothing has changed in seven hundred years.

For instance, you can see a desperate attempt by some people to give a racist overtone to the current pandemic, and during the Black Death there was strong anti-semitism on display, and large swathes of people blamed Jews for the disease. Mass execution of Jews became common in a lot of countries, and a lot of Jews were persecuted because people convinced themselves that Jews had poisoned wells, and were responsible for deaths.

Another crazy thing is how the demand for notaries increased during this time. A large number of deaths meant that people needed to write their wills, and the orderly transfer of property from the living to the dead became very important, and therefore notaries became high in demand.

Voltaire said that History never repeats itself. Man does. Reading this book made me feel that I understood what he meant for the first time.

Personally, I loved this book, but I do realize it is not for everyone. It is a grim subject in grim times, but what I did like was that it provided perspective, and informed me on how good things are even when they are really bad.

Filed Under: Books

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