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MS Software Management Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read along as our students chronicle their journey through the MS in Software Management program.

Amin is a second year grad student in the MS Software Management program, a former Software Design Engineer from Microsoft and a current Software Engineer at Adify, a Silicon Valley startup. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, software and traveling. He would love to start a software company someday.
Vineet is a second year part-time software management student, currently working @NetApp also nominated as the best place to work in North America recently. His area of expertise is Oracle ERP solutions. Other professional areas of interest are SaaS markets both technologically and business wise. @CMU he wants to grow his knowledge to manage software products and businesses. He is interested in work on start up ideas. On the personal side he loves to spend time with his family and travel.
Rene is a recent alum, a manager of operations and program manager in Cisco's software development organization, the mother of two daughters and a performing arts fan.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Self-organizing and Learning-By-Doing, do they work?


I am currently enrolled in the Software Management “Project and Process Management” (PPM) course. Last Saturday morning was the famous process party that happens to all PPM batches where we self-organize, meet at a time and place decided by us, structure the meeting as we like and make our own choices. The goal was to provide a forum to ask questions and seek answers on the team processes in an organized manner. I had some apprehensions going into the meeting about such self-organized events; and one of the obvious outcomes I thought would be that there would be chaos and we would do everything except what we were supposed to do. Or that we overshoot our time and people would just start walking out due to other commitments. Or the whole group would have different ideas about what we were here to achieve and we would go on a tangential path of debating the goal rather than working towards the goal.

I was in for a surprise!

We exchanged some well-thought-out emails within the group about the course of action. There were some disagreements as always and I was beginning to think to myself, “Welcome chaos, you are our uninvited guest!” But to my surprise the team resolved the differences effortlessly in a respectful and amiable manner. Adam was kind enough to volunteer for the role of the facilitator. Shabbir agreed to keep the time using his iPhone that everyone seems to love and own. And I volunteered to be the technology operator who arrived 15 mins late to pleasantly notice that self-organizing indeed works with a new technology operator managing the job smoothly. Things went quite well except for our pizza order which we cancelled due to SLA violation. :-)

We achieved our goal in the planned time, with no oversight and had a lot of fun too. The moral of the story is that self-organizing does work provided we respect each other and are aligned to the same goal of learning. Another observation I want to make here is that this is a special kind of learning. We are not reading any books on how to self organize nor there are any lectures. It’s just the ideas that we have about self-organizing that we are implementing using the learning-by-doing methodology. That brings us to the second question of, “Does learning-by-doing work?”

After the process party was over a few of us teamed up for lunch in downtown. We started with sharing our experiences at work and CMU. Amidst the jokes and laughter came an interesting question. So how is this learning-by-doing working for you? And then we went around the table sharing our experiences. Typically the class is divided into groups of four to five students and we work together to complete the assignments within the deadline. The teams are given a goal, i.e. “what” needs to be achieved. The “how” do we do it is a team decision. It is up to the team, with the guidance of a faculty coach, to agree on the best approach to take to achieve the task, the roles to setup within the team, the internal milestones, the processes to follow and how to present it, etc. By the time we hit the deadline all the teams are ready with their deliverables. Every team figured out the answer to the “how”. We figured out how to achieve the goal and how to effectively work as a team to achieve it. And that to me is the learning-by-doing. We are not just studying the subjects but also applying them to our assignments in a team environment. I think this is an integral part of any innovation - a good idea and a team of motivated people. I think this methodology is very powerful in the sense it challenges us to think how we can do the task better and how we can excel as a team. It is an excellent way to learn and understand team dynamics. My favorite part in this whole exercise is that while we are “norming, storming, forming and performing” as a team we are also establishing excellent rapport, getting to know and learn from each other and forming a strong network of high performing professionals. I consider that a big asset.

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from my friends that they shared a similar opinion. And then we immersed ourselves back into speculating what is the next big thing to hit the technology horizon and how are we going to change the world.

I am happy to hear your views on the topic and your thoughts in general about the blog. Please feel free to mail me or add your comments.

posted by Vineet Nair @ 1:59 PM  8 comments

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