Archive for July, 2006
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 03 Jul 2006, 8:43 PM - Leave Comment
Note: In government-owned Indian schools, it is common for an Inspector (from Department of Education) to visit and check how things are going.
An Inspector goes to a primary school. The teacher there was teaching kids mathematics – specifically multiplication. The teacher welcomes the Inspector and after the pleasantries, the Inspector takes over. He picks a student and asks him -
“Son, can you tell me what is 12 times 5?”
The boy thinks for a second and says “I think it is 900.”
The Inspector is shocked and puzzled and asks the same question again to another student. The second one is more confident than the first one and he replies – “Sir, it is 980″
The Inspector does not know what to say. The drama continues. The other students respond with numbers anywhere from 900 to 1000. The Inspector is now more angry than being annoyed. He turns to the teacher who is surprisingly calm throughout this exercise. In fact, he is smiling a bit. The Inspector now asks the teacher with a frown on his face -
“Can you explain what’s happening here?”
The teacher responded calmly “Sir, I don’t see any major problem. For the same question, they were answering in the 9,000 to 10,000 range when I came in. I have worked hard to bring them down…”
Posted under Smile Please.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 03 Jul 2006, 10:38 AM - 1 Comment
A few months ago, I was in Dallas airport at the Hertz counter waiting for my turn. The gentleman in front of me seemed to have a problem with his car reservation. The Hertz folks were telling him that they have run out of GPS navigators for the rental cars and next time the gentleman should book one in advance. The gentleman was insisting that he did reserve it and was confused why it didn’t come up on the reservation. The gentleman was saying that he would be happy to pay twice or thrice the amount if Hertz could find a GPS Navigator as there was NO way of him to drive without a GPS Navigator.
The rest of the story is not important but it made me think. Obviously, GPS is something that became commonplace only in the last few years. Before that we still got around to where we wanted to go. GPS is convenient but if it induces dependency problems, it may be stretching it too much.
Of course, there are many more cases where the line between “just convenience” and “thinking outsourcing” blurs. Here are a few of them:
* You can’t remember the phone numbers of your close friends. You got to look up your PDA or phone book.
* You can’t remember the URLs of the ten of your favorite websites. Why remember? you can look at your favorites or just search on Google.
* You don’t remember the email addresses of half of your colleagues in the company. It’s on your address book.
* You don’t remember your schedule for TODAY. It’s on your calendar on the computer.
* You don’t remember birthdays of your close friends and family members. You have set reminders for them on your calendar or some web based service.
I am sure you have observed yourself or others become slaves of convenience. Catch yourself when this is taken to an extreme. We all want conveniences but we never want it to reach a level where our thinking is outsourced.
Have a great week ahead!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 01 Jul 2006, 5:24 PM - Leave Comment
I have got three emails in two days asking how to subscribe to my blog. Although the subscription links are on the left, I thought of including a link here to make it easy.
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Thank you.
Have a happy weekend!
Posted under Endorsements.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 01 Jul 2006, 12:16 AM - 3 Comments
Earlier, I have written about:
What is also important and often overlooked is the art of conducting a criteria audit. It is a simple exercise (but requires great practice) where you learn to elicit the underlying criteria to satisfy someone’s need. For us in the technology profession, it is the criteria that our customer uses to judge that we provided an “above average” service. The litmus test for this is a repeat order from the same customer.
For starters, how about asking questions something like this:
“What should happen or what should you see if this project is to be considered a big success?”
“When do you consider this project a success?”
“How do you know that we succeeded big time on this project?”
The above questions might work or you might have to invent your own that work. The key is to get the other person outline his or her criteria clearly. Now where is the audit part? It is obvious that a reasonably sized project will have multiple stakeholders and as you might guess every person involved may have a slightly different set of criteria to judge the success of the project. It is our job to get the key stakeholders to elicit their criteria. Then we can collate the results and come up with an action plan. A side-benefit of that exercise will be that you will have enough insight to deal with expectations mismatches or early warning signs of “internal politics.”
Once you practice this in your current engagements, you will notice that you will start getting to this almost unconsciously. Your clients will love it and you will feel that you have greater control on the project.
Note: For other articles in the same series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic.
Link: Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
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