Communication and IT miniser Mr. Kapil Sibal has released 2 key policy documents in a span of 3 days. The vision and intent has far reaching impact on the high tech industry and economic growth in general. It could also be considered as UPA governments desperate attempt to over come the scandal taints its suffering from.
The last significant document on telecom came out in 1999 in the form of National telecom Policy of 1999 which opened up the circle level spectrum auction mechanism and technology priroties around GSM and also the foreign direct investment related directives. What followed was nothing but a revolution in India's communication sector, taking the telecom density from 2% to roughly 50% today. This policy at least in intent is similar. I cant see the elements of the plan in it - only a vision. But so far so good.
IT Policy-2011
I captured 2 major initiatives apart from the usual bits on e-governance and SME investments
India's IT service professional pool from current 2.5 million to 10 million by 2020!!
India's IT & ITES industry revenue to triple from current $88 Billion to $300 Billion
At least one e-literate indian in each household (we dont have one literate indian at each home save the e-literate part, but this is vision)
Telecom Policy-2011
In line with a demanding industry and direct competition from countries like China this document have evolved a much more strategic. It doesnt sounds as muc sound bytes as the above one.
Broadband Penetration
1. The new policy has set a traget of 175 million broadband connections by 2017 and 600 million connections by 2020.
2. It has also revised broadband download speed from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps and subsequently to 2 Mbps by 2015.
3. Even broadband connectivity to all 2.5 lakh village panchayats through optical fiber cable has been extended from 2012 (as per government of India's Bharat Nirman Program) to 2014.
4. The rual teledensity is planned to increase from 35 to 60 by 2017 and 100 by 2020.
5. IPV4 to IPV6 migraiton by 2020 in India
Boost for Manufacturing of Telecom Equipments and User Devices
1. The draft policy on manufacturing aims to meet 80 percent of Indian telecom sector demand through domestic manufacturing with a value addition of 65 percent by the year 2020.
2. Plans are to also create a corpus fund for promoting indigenous R&D, intellectual property right (IPR), and entrepreneurship.
3. Telecom Finance Corporation as a vehicle to mobilize and channelize financing for telecom projects in order to facilitate investment in the telecom sector.
Spectrum & Licensing
1. the government has made available additional 300 MHz spectrum for IMT services by the year 2017 and another 200 MHz by 2020.
2. Overall to bring a roadmap for spectrum releases, spectrum trading, spectrum usage efficiencies. Acknowledgement that this is the critical resources in government hands
3. "One Nation, One license" across service and service areas.
4. The policy also talks about making Roaming free.
5. The concept of full mobile number portability is also taking shape in the draft policy.
Other interesting clauses
1. undertaking legislative measures to bring disputes between telecom consumers and service providers within the jurisdiction of consumer forums and consumer protection act.
2. Deploying cloud computing technology, the government is identifying areas where existing regulations may impose unnecessary burden and is planning to take consequential remedial steps for propelling India to emerge as a global leader in the development and provision of cloud services which will help in benefiting enterprises (including central and state governments) and consumer
3. The emergence of new service formats such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications (e.g. remotely operated irrigation pumps, smart grid etc.) represent tremendous opportunities, especially as their roll-out becomes more widespread.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
MVNO, NRP, MVNE - Telecom value chain
Some key terminologies in the telecom value chain space
- MVNO`s - a mobile operator that does not own its own spectrum and usually does not have its own network infrastructure. The Partner will have a business arrangement with Three to buy minutes for sale to their own customers.
- NRP - National Roaming Partner: normally have a network that includes a range of MSISDN`s and IMSI`s to connect customers. The National Roaming Partner would normally have a number of business arrangements with traditional mobile operators to allow customers to roam, and buy minutes for sale to their customers.
- MVNE - A Mobile Virtual Network Enabler is a company that provides services to mobile virtual network operators, such as billing, network element provisioning, administration, operations, support of business support systems and operations support systems, and provision of back end network elements to enable provision of mobile network services like mobile phone connectivity. A MVNE does not have a relationship with end-user customers. The MVNE provides infrastructure and services to enable Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) to offer services and have a relationship with end-user customers. MVNEs offer the ability for a MVNO to focus on their core strengths of brand, customer loyalty and marketing and leave the back-end enablement and operations, to MVNEs. They also have shared risk-reward arrangements with the MVNO with various kinds of revenue sharing models, usually tied to the number of subscribers that the MVNO has projected in their business plan.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Augere and LightSquared stories in affordable inclusive broadband
Sanjiv Ahuja, ex CEO of Orange PLC (his feat include growing orange from 40m customer base to 100m customer base in the last 4 years of his association. In the same time frame he also extended it to 23 countries up from 17 countries. Of which 14 countries were from Africa). No wonder he pursued his competency, experience and passion in similar direction. He is now incubating 2 major 3G/4G communication network companies globally.
Augere is wireless broadband provider in India, Pakistan, Rwanda and Bangladesh. Obviously with further plans to roll it out to third world coutries. He has purchased licenses at fraction of the metro level license costs in rural areas.
Lightsqaured is a extra terrestrial satellite network for providing broad band into rural areas.. particularly in south america, easter europe and south asia. SkyTerra Communications is acquired by Harbinger Capital Partners in 2010. Sanjiv Ahuja further is invited to become CEO and chairman of this initiative. The organisation is at various stages of getting approvals from FCC and European Communication Commission. This is not an entirely new concept. The differentiator is timing and also the fact that this is coming along with similar initiatives from the same group so there is always collaboration.
The universal need for broadband is one thing, but the business acumen to build founding markets in rural lands of Africa and Asia is another thing. they are cheap at the moment for picking, growth in next decade needs to come from this space etc. We will need to see how this story develops in next 2-3 years time frame.
Potentially Sanjiv has the reach and experience of running a multi national telco specifically in the same countries he is trying to set up rich broadband networks. He has the financial backing of the VCs. And above all timing. This should win :-)
Augere is wireless broadband provider in India, Pakistan, Rwanda and Bangladesh. Obviously with further plans to roll it out to third world coutries. He has purchased licenses at fraction of the metro level license costs in rural areas.
Lightsqaured is a extra terrestrial satellite network for providing broad band into rural areas.. particularly in south america, easter europe and south asia. SkyTerra Communications is acquired by Harbinger Capital Partners in 2010. Sanjiv Ahuja further is invited to become CEO and chairman of this initiative. The organisation is at various stages of getting approvals from FCC and European Communication Commission. This is not an entirely new concept. The differentiator is timing and also the fact that this is coming along with similar initiatives from the same group so there is always collaboration.
The universal need for broadband is one thing, but the business acumen to build founding markets in rural lands of Africa and Asia is another thing. they are cheap at the moment for picking, growth in next decade needs to come from this space etc. We will need to see how this story develops in next 2-3 years time frame.
Potentially Sanjiv has the reach and experience of running a multi national telco specifically in the same countries he is trying to set up rich broadband networks. He has the financial backing of the VCs. And above all timing. This should win :-)
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Middle Manager - The changing fortunes
Came across a term called Middle Manager (MM)- and instantly it sounded something as fundamental as 'Knowledge Worker' termed by Peter Drucker in 1990s and which paved way for a new era and people realising the significance of the change business was facing.
As per Collins dictionary; Middle Managers have been described as ‘executives or senior supervisory staff in charge of the detailed running of an organization or business and reporting to top management.
Why middle manager so important suddenly.. this was a role which was vulnerable to all the offshoring discussions, all the recession stories and eventually to younger generation who will do it at half the cost what the experienced middle manager will do stories?. It certainly wasnt a group which was positioned as powerful or seemed to be achieving bargaining power in todays market place.
Things seems to be changing. The arche-typal portrayal of middle managers as fathers struggling to keep up with the increasing costs of young family and ever threatened by prospects of losing his middle class jobs seems to be changing for a more favourable image. This is not just in developed countries, but also in the relatively under developed countries like india, philippines and Brazil.
The increasing outsourcing engagements require people who make the contractual terms and the financial commitments come to life day by day. The traditional jobs which deal with design / develop / implement of software systems needs to be changed to be more cross organisational engagement and most cases cross country to get it done outside organisation boundaries. The skills this situation demands can not be produced in factories or educational institutions. It needs to be gained out of experience in multi supplier environments, targeted training and coaching from senior management . Organisations are struggling to cope with the demand for this multi skilled robots with human minds.. they are so less to find and so difficult to train upon in quick time. MMs are storages of organisational experience (where you have outsourced competencies and retained the most distilled understanding), they are interfaces to the wide number of suppliers in the function they operate (need tact and discipline to engage them). They create relationship chemistry with suppliers and they also protect the organisation interests and obligations at the same time.
They need to be good at
Delivery competency sees the supplier providing a cost-effective, improved service performance against contractual terms and conditions and metrics.
Transformation competency is needed where a supplier has agreed to deliver radically improved services in terms of cost and quality.
Relationship competency is essential. A customer wants to engage the supplier‟s capacity and expects the supplier to align itself with the customer's values, goals and needs to support long-term, critical business direction and change.
Middle managers need to work with suppliers to ensure that the vision behind the outsourcing initiative comes true and business case potenital is reached. This demands middle mangers not just in clients but also suppliers. Both sides need to work in collaboration,understand the priority set by management and compromise / adapt on situation where conflicts exist. The bed rock of outsourcing engagement success are these fellas who takes management calls far from the 'top'
management especially on multi year deals.
Accroding to the paper published by Professor Leslie Willcocksis Professor of Technology Work and Globalization at London School of Economics and Political Science, the middle managers need to be capable of specialising in some areas and general skills in most areas. he organises them into 9 key areas,
1. Leader–identifies and delivers success. In practice, leadership is required at middle as well as top management levels because modern outsourcing is full of adaptive challenges requiring experiments, discoveries, adjustments and innovations from many different parts of the organizations involved.
2.Business manager –delivers in line with service agreements and business plans.
3.Domain expert –retains and applies professional knowledge. Needs experience and knowledge not just of call centre work, but also of the industrial sector e.g. insurance, and the specific client organization e.g. Allianz, Royal Insurance.
4. Behaviour manager –motivates and inspires people to deliver high-level service. Responsible for transitioning staff to the supplier and recruiting and retaining new staff.
5. Sourcing Specialist –accesses resources, for example technology, people, other suppliers as needed.
6. Process engineer –designs and incorporates improvements to client processes and procedures.
7. Technology exploiter –swiftly and effectively deploys new technology on the client‟s behalf.
8. Programme manager –delivers a series of interrelated projects.Customer developer –helps customers make informed decisions.Planner & contractor –delivers „win/win‟ results for customer and supplierOrganizational designer –designs and implements successful organizational arrangements.
9. Governance specialist –tracks and measures performance.
So many outsourcing deals dont realise the potential or original goals because of the human element that need to implement these changes and keep the origanisation gears meshing and moving. Look at the plethora of skills.. this is not just about a 'knowledge worker' and special expertise. Its more that we need the deal makers needed. I dont think lot of managers will be required, but so diverse are the skills market will always be ready to pay premium for them.
So com'on middle managers life is just changing for you, dont be so broody, just wake and spread your eyes its all opportunities everywhere :-)
The original paper from Leslie Willcock in the below link.
http://www.purplecowmedia.net/download-files/middle_manager_essay_1278944295.pdf.
As per Collins dictionary; Middle Managers have been described as ‘executives or senior supervisory staff in charge of the detailed running of an organization or business and reporting to top management.
Why middle manager so important suddenly.. this was a role which was vulnerable to all the offshoring discussions, all the recession stories and eventually to younger generation who will do it at half the cost what the experienced middle manager will do stories?. It certainly wasnt a group which was positioned as powerful or seemed to be achieving bargaining power in todays market place.
Things seems to be changing. The arche-typal portrayal of middle managers as fathers struggling to keep up with the increasing costs of young family and ever threatened by prospects of losing his middle class jobs seems to be changing for a more favourable image. This is not just in developed countries, but also in the relatively under developed countries like india, philippines and Brazil.
The increasing outsourcing engagements require people who make the contractual terms and the financial commitments come to life day by day. The traditional jobs which deal with design / develop / implement of software systems needs to be changed to be more cross organisational engagement and most cases cross country to get it done outside organisation boundaries. The skills this situation demands can not be produced in factories or educational institutions. It needs to be gained out of experience in multi supplier environments, targeted training and coaching from senior management . Organisations are struggling to cope with the demand for this multi skilled robots with human minds.. they are so less to find and so difficult to train upon in quick time. MMs are storages of organisational experience (where you have outsourced competencies and retained the most distilled understanding), they are interfaces to the wide number of suppliers in the function they operate (need tact and discipline to engage them). They create relationship chemistry with suppliers and they also protect the organisation interests and obligations at the same time.
They need to be good at
Delivery competency sees the supplier providing a cost-effective, improved service performance against contractual terms and conditions and metrics.
Transformation competency is needed where a supplier has agreed to deliver radically improved services in terms of cost and quality.
Relationship competency is essential. A customer wants to engage the supplier‟s capacity and expects the supplier to align itself with the customer's values, goals and needs to support long-term, critical business direction and change.
Middle managers need to work with suppliers to ensure that the vision behind the outsourcing initiative comes true and business case potenital is reached. This demands middle mangers not just in clients but also suppliers. Both sides need to work in collaboration,understand the priority set by management and compromise / adapt on situation where conflicts exist. The bed rock of outsourcing engagement success are these fellas who takes management calls far from the 'top'
management especially on multi year deals.
Accroding to the paper published by Professor Leslie Willcocksis Professor of Technology Work and Globalization at London School of Economics and Political Science, the middle managers need to be capable of specialising in some areas and general skills in most areas. he organises them into 9 key areas,
1. Leader–identifies and delivers success. In practice, leadership is required at middle as well as top management levels because modern outsourcing is full of adaptive challenges requiring experiments, discoveries, adjustments and innovations from many different parts of the organizations involved.
2.Business manager –delivers in line with service agreements and business plans.
3.Domain expert –retains and applies professional knowledge. Needs experience and knowledge not just of call centre work, but also of the industrial sector e.g. insurance, and the specific client organization e.g. Allianz, Royal Insurance.
4. Behaviour manager –motivates and inspires people to deliver high-level service. Responsible for transitioning staff to the supplier and recruiting and retaining new staff.
5. Sourcing Specialist –accesses resources, for example technology, people, other suppliers as needed.
6. Process engineer –designs and incorporates improvements to client processes and procedures.
7. Technology exploiter –swiftly and effectively deploys new technology on the client‟s behalf.
8. Programme manager –delivers a series of interrelated projects.Customer developer –helps customers make informed decisions.Planner & contractor –delivers „win/win‟ results for customer and supplierOrganizational designer –designs and implements successful organizational arrangements.
9. Governance specialist –tracks and measures performance.
So many outsourcing deals dont realise the potential or original goals because of the human element that need to implement these changes and keep the origanisation gears meshing and moving. Look at the plethora of skills.. this is not just about a 'knowledge worker' and special expertise. Its more that we need the deal makers needed. I dont think lot of managers will be required, but so diverse are the skills market will always be ready to pay premium for them.
So com'on middle managers life is just changing for you, dont be so broody, just wake and spread your eyes its all opportunities everywhere :-)
The original paper from Leslie Willcock in the below link.
http://www.purplecowmedia.net/download-files/middle_manager_essay_1278944295.pdf.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Cognizant Tech Services Growth Story
Just look at the single statistics on growth in the past decade+ - A $100,000 investment in its IPO held through May 4, 2010 would be worth $10,298,202.60 for a compound annual return of 47.9%. (more than 100 times that is !!). An equal $100,000 investment in the S&P 500 over the same period would be worth $103,276.80 for a compound annual return of 0.30% (three-tenths of one percent). I wish I had subscribed to it. if indications are right, its still not too late to get invested in CTS.
How many Indian players would have the conviction to play on the margins to reinvest in the business.. while being a 'price' play CTS realised the importance building long term competencies.. which even after decades of existence several other Indian competitors are still hoping to build and some of them will find it ever harder to build.
First one is deep client relationships: the operating model is the 2 in 1 box principle which simply implies that each client will have 2 dedicated leads to reach out to - client account lead and delivery lead.. CTS made the priority on building the client relationship over short term margins. The client relationship is not left to the delivery manager or country sales director....its a role more than just sales.. now this is now further enhanced with sprinkling the consulting resources across the accounts, thus making the model to be 3 in 1 box model. The strong emphasise on the value add is perhaps picked up from the Accenture who has played the 'packaged' consulting services a key differentiator.
Second is the focus on few growing verticals and building strong expertise in those areas and thus fending off the competition. While this is always very familiar principle, so few people follow it. For example the Health vertical is the second biggest for CTS by revenue (first is finance). Not just that, it makes CTS the biggest player in this vertical, commendable achievement for CTS against much bigger players such as Accenture and IBM. In finance CTS possess good assets to the extent that deliverables are predone even before they go to the client. Credentials built so far are so specific to the client products and the process that CTS doesn struggle as much to break into new clients and areas.
Third would be the deep focus on partnership is the other key differentiators - Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft - CTS has got privileged gold / premuim certifications and access to best in class support.Important for its 'go to' market strategies and client perception.
All this is possible because of its willingness or the 'strategic choice' to reinvest its profits back into the game. In an industry where 30%+ margins were norm, CTS decided to play with ~20% margin, leaving the remaining for price play if needed or strengthening of their onshore / account management organisations. This long term investment proven to be crtical in winning rates and thus the revenu growth.
As CTS look forward, its trying to spread forward into newer geographies (from too narrowed focus on North America). It has initited global delivery centers outside India. The key account management principle is further enhanced (its 30% of revenue comes from top 10 clients). The story still looks stronger for CTS, more on that as it comes by.
How many Indian players would have the conviction to play on the margins to reinvest in the business.. while being a 'price' play CTS realised the importance building long term competencies.. which even after decades of existence several other Indian competitors are still hoping to build and some of them will find it ever harder to build.
First one is deep client relationships: the operating model is the 2 in 1 box principle which simply implies that each client will have 2 dedicated leads to reach out to - client account lead and delivery lead.. CTS made the priority on building the client relationship over short term margins. The client relationship is not left to the delivery manager or country sales director....its a role more than just sales.. now this is now further enhanced with sprinkling the consulting resources across the accounts, thus making the model to be 3 in 1 box model. The strong emphasise on the value add is perhaps picked up from the Accenture who has played the 'packaged' consulting services a key differentiator.
Second is the focus on few growing verticals and building strong expertise in those areas and thus fending off the competition. While this is always very familiar principle, so few people follow it. For example the Health vertical is the second biggest for CTS by revenue (first is finance). Not just that, it makes CTS the biggest player in this vertical, commendable achievement for CTS against much bigger players such as Accenture and IBM. In finance CTS possess good assets to the extent that deliverables are predone even before they go to the client. Credentials built so far are so specific to the client products and the process that CTS doesn struggle as much to break into new clients and areas.
Third would be the deep focus on partnership is the other key differentiators - Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft - CTS has got privileged gold / premuim certifications and access to best in class support.Important for its 'go to' market strategies and client perception.
All this is possible because of its willingness or the 'strategic choice' to reinvest its profits back into the game. In an industry where 30%+ margins were norm, CTS decided to play with ~20% margin, leaving the remaining for price play if needed or strengthening of their onshore / account management organisations. This long term investment proven to be crtical in winning rates and thus the revenu growth.
As CTS look forward, its trying to spread forward into newer geographies (from too narrowed focus on North America). It has initited global delivery centers outside India. The key account management principle is further enhanced (its 30% of revenue comes from top 10 clients). The story still looks stronger for CTS, more on that as it comes by.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Agile manifesto - from the signatories
Agile methodology is at the heart of today's iterative product evolution that is so much important for winning the customers and selling the services which customer never knew they needed. We needed to deliver features in drops to limited groups and understand the customer’s responses before building on further. The intuition improved into solid evidence of what customers are looking for directly from the behaviour observed from the initial versions of the software.
We needed a development process which is fast enough to respond to this changing scene of our understanding of customer needs.. we couldn’t have waited for months to bring the changes we needed today..
Yes. This is the best calibrated response software engineers can make to the evolving market space.. Agile process and the attitude which comes with it.. here is the manifesto of agile process. To me; those sound to be the key principles of winning not just in software industry, but pretty much every industry we can think of. Even better, they are in essence the success principles for professionals – to imbibe in their core practices and responses, practice them into work life and then epitomise that as the new age principles to new generation.
On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground�and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile Software Development Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.
here below is the statement which emerged...
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
I think nothing can be more apt than those 4 bullets.. nothing can be better governing in helping organisations and individuals succeed in understanding the secret essence they need to develop for themselves.. below link for an initial read on the subject..
http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
We needed a development process which is fast enough to respond to this changing scene of our understanding of customer needs.. we couldn’t have waited for months to bring the changes we needed today..
Yes. This is the best calibrated response software engineers can make to the evolving market space.. Agile process and the attitude which comes with it.. here is the manifesto of agile process. To me; those sound to be the key principles of winning not just in software industry, but pretty much every industry we can think of. Even better, they are in essence the success principles for professionals – to imbibe in their core practices and responses, practice them into work life and then epitomise that as the new age principles to new generation.
On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground�and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile Software Development Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.
here below is the statement which emerged...
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
I think nothing can be more apt than those 4 bullets.. nothing can be better governing in helping organisations and individuals succeed in understanding the secret essence they need to develop for themselves.. below link for an initial read on the subject..
http://www.agilemanifesto.org/
Sunday, October 2, 2011
SCRUM - my initial days and where to use it
I think; as an agile development methodology this is well understood by now, or at least people have their own versions of it and by now comfortable with the overall benefits of it.. and perhaps the patrons have reached a level of maturity where they can teach someone on how tos or give an orientation of where it will be ... in the short note below I will summarise my experience and how much we have benefited from and its applicability to multitude of situations.
To be honest; its one of the most simple set of concepts to learn; still then the implementations becomes one of the most difficult aspects of the journey. We went through such a story way back in 2008 when as a project ours were going through a very difficult phase. Our service had no direct link with product development (at least in an operational sense), ours were no where a product company, but a hard core services / consulting company. Our success depended on what efficiencies we bring in day to day basis to the operation and less on type of innovations which SCRUM envisages or at least gives a perception about (dynamic products - googles and face books?). Our success came from how fast we can scale our teams and skill the team to run the operations.. still the talk about Agile SCRUM as a methodolgy of great efficiency led us to explore this methodology.
How did we start with it
So we started with doing some preparatory readings of the SCRUM methodology. People read the circulated material and came back to the meetings to share their ideas. And soon we understood that everyone had different ideas about how this should be done and whether its relevant for us... even worse it was one point in time thought to be an anti-authoritarian process which made people insecure..
We for our satisfaction got to some level of form to do this. Everyone agreed that getting started is more important than debating endlessly. Our senior executive was quoted to say that we were trying to understand that secret sauce to win.. once understood it will need much less thought but just practice.. how true that was in hindsight. I probably will take that advice for any new initiative which is prescriptive; we need to invent our secret sauce before we can say we understand that..
Implementation Approach
We started with daily SCRUM meetings. After going through the experience, I think the practice of SCRUM meetings brought a rigour in the team, a much more cohesive organisation, better reporting of the situation etc. probably it meant a day to day improvement in people's ability to perform. When you have a very dynamic set of requirements and the prioritisation is changing on daily basis i think the scrum meetings becomes very beneficial for you. It is perceived to be less heirarchical and less directed. But in our experience this was still to be lot 'managed' and lot 'told to be done' etc. But never the less the mechanism of reporting what happened yesterday and what is planned today was exciting to start with. Lot of people started thinking about how differently the same thing can be stated day on day (smile)..
The learning for us is that this is implemented at various parts of the organisation differently. Some cases 15 minute daily meeting ran for hours, but we did have success with some of the scrum of scrum meetings where we did that with 30 min window.. the audience was much more mature, the authority of the scrum master was tremendous..
Where we were dealing with direct customer groups and where we did have evolving requirements backlog formed a very useful tool for ongoing prioritisation and people's common agreement of sprint scope. Having been through that process and seeing the complex world of software product requirements I cant think of any other way of operating to improve upon organisations product and services description. It also brought variety of groups into the same platform - development / test teams with definite amount of capacity to offer into sprint, design members who can change the architecture or tweak the requirements in discussion with the product owners (in case there are too many competing requirements) , the product owners who can change the business case by going back to the sponsors (or budget proved insufficent) and finally people who will see things gets done end to end.
So in summary I would say, SCRUM is an excellent mechanism for fast paced organisations. Organisations need to learn to manage the demands put on the time to market scenarios and cross functional nature of teams - there are some very simple concepts involved to run teams and organisations in the methodology (to the extent that you wonder if they were new at all). The newness of SCRUM comes from sprint planning and backlog concepts of the process, which I think is must haves in the current multi stakeholder / evolving markets.
more information can be found in the wiki link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
To be honest; its one of the most simple set of concepts to learn; still then the implementations becomes one of the most difficult aspects of the journey. We went through such a story way back in 2008 when as a project ours were going through a very difficult phase. Our service had no direct link with product development (at least in an operational sense), ours were no where a product company, but a hard core services / consulting company. Our success depended on what efficiencies we bring in day to day basis to the operation and less on type of innovations which SCRUM envisages or at least gives a perception about (dynamic products - googles and face books?). Our success came from how fast we can scale our teams and skill the team to run the operations.. still the talk about Agile SCRUM as a methodolgy of great efficiency led us to explore this methodology.
How did we start with it
So we started with doing some preparatory readings of the SCRUM methodology. People read the circulated material and came back to the meetings to share their ideas. And soon we understood that everyone had different ideas about how this should be done and whether its relevant for us... even worse it was one point in time thought to be an anti-authoritarian process which made people insecure..
We for our satisfaction got to some level of form to do this. Everyone agreed that getting started is more important than debating endlessly. Our senior executive was quoted to say that we were trying to understand that secret sauce to win.. once understood it will need much less thought but just practice.. how true that was in hindsight. I probably will take that advice for any new initiative which is prescriptive; we need to invent our secret sauce before we can say we understand that..
Implementation Approach
We started with daily SCRUM meetings. After going through the experience, I think the practice of SCRUM meetings brought a rigour in the team, a much more cohesive organisation, better reporting of the situation etc. probably it meant a day to day improvement in people's ability to perform. When you have a very dynamic set of requirements and the prioritisation is changing on daily basis i think the scrum meetings becomes very beneficial for you. It is perceived to be less heirarchical and less directed. But in our experience this was still to be lot 'managed' and lot 'told to be done' etc. But never the less the mechanism of reporting what happened yesterday and what is planned today was exciting to start with. Lot of people started thinking about how differently the same thing can be stated day on day (smile)..
The learning for us is that this is implemented at various parts of the organisation differently. Some cases 15 minute daily meeting ran for hours, but we did have success with some of the scrum of scrum meetings where we did that with 30 min window.. the audience was much more mature, the authority of the scrum master was tremendous..
Where we were dealing with direct customer groups and where we did have evolving requirements backlog formed a very useful tool for ongoing prioritisation and people's common agreement of sprint scope. Having been through that process and seeing the complex world of software product requirements I cant think of any other way of operating to improve upon organisations product and services description. It also brought variety of groups into the same platform - development / test teams with definite amount of capacity to offer into sprint, design members who can change the architecture or tweak the requirements in discussion with the product owners (in case there are too many competing requirements) , the product owners who can change the business case by going back to the sponsors (or budget proved insufficent) and finally people who will see things gets done end to end.
So in summary I would say, SCRUM is an excellent mechanism for fast paced organisations. Organisations need to learn to manage the demands put on the time to market scenarios and cross functional nature of teams - there are some very simple concepts involved to run teams and organisations in the methodology (to the extent that you wonder if they were new at all). The newness of SCRUM comes from sprint planning and backlog concepts of the process, which I think is must haves in the current multi stakeholder / evolving markets.
more information can be found in the wiki link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
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