MS Software Management Blog

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

2010-02-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

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.

Introducing Vineet Nair

2010-01-12T10:20:00.000-08:00

Hi, my name is Vineet and I am a first year part time Software management grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. My journey at Carnegie Mellon has been quite eventful so far. So I thought of sharing my musings on this blog. Before I start I want to extend a warm welcome to the readers and want to encourage you to leave your thoughts and ideas.

Let me start with an introduction. I am an explorer by nature and like to learn new things and create synergies with like minded people. In Hindi there is a Pepsi punch line ‘Yeh dil maange more’ which translates to - the heart craves for more. This is what epitomizes me, and the reason I am here at Carnegie Mellon.

I think by now you would have guessed that I am of Indian origin. I was born in a Navy hospital in a south Indian state - Kerala. I grew up travelling across India with my family due to the transferrable nature of my father’s profession. My earliest memories are of exploring new places and meeting new people every few years. When I was growing up the trend was that if you are a good student then you try to become a doctor or an engineer. So being loyal to the trend I graduated as an Engineer and joined the software industry. I graduated from Army Institute of technology, Pune and spent my initial years working in and around Pune. I specialize in packaged applications for ERP. I have the spent majority of my career working for Oracle applications in companies like Cap Gemini, Accenture, Oracle Consulting and NetApp. These companies are very established and process driven, all the same I have worked in start up environments in my past where things can be totally unstructured and one person wears different hats. Most recently such an experience occurred at accenture when we were starting a new account for a US telecom giant and I was the first person the Account manager had recruited. It was a roller coaster ride and within 1-2 months we had expanded the team to about 100 people and were deep into knowledge transition of their existing systems. I find it exciting to work in such environments. At Carnegie Mellon we are constantly exposed to such entrepreneural setup due to the learning by doing teaching methodology. The energy of my classmates is really contagious and Carnegie Mellon really offers me a sandbox where I could try new things without any fear of failure, as we are all here to learn.

I consider hobbies as something you persue in your free time. Being a father of a 1 year old son, a full time professional and a part time student I really do not have any free time to persue any hobby. I love to spend time with my son. I try to be a good mentor but I learn so much from him that sometimes I wonder who the real mentor is J

I love to study the trends happening in the packaged applications. The hottest ones being consolidation and cloud. I think Mark Beinoff at salesforce has created a new market for SaaS application. The ERP industry is going to change drastically over the years due to this trend. I also find the mobile computing a very exciting trend to follow. It is exciting to explore the zillions of iphone applications providing location based services, social networking, etc. to name a few.

I am glad I did not use the word brief before my introduction J. Feel free to leave your comments and thoughts after reading my first blog at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit of Software Management

2009-10-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to report that my Carnegie Mellon teammates and I completed the first course in the Software Management program, the "Elements of Software Management" (ESM).

If you are interested enough to be reading this post, you are probably already familiar with the general overview of the program and are rather looking for insider information. I will try to break down that information from the following perspectives:

1. What you will learn inside your ESM class

Summarized in two words, the ESM course is about "Business characterization". In your first course ever in this program, your goal is to analyze the vitality of a randomly-assigned, publicly-traded software company. You have all the publicly accessible information on the Internet as research material, 4 books and 1 course reader as the means of learning the mechanics of how to research, three other partners in crime to collaborate with (who each are assigned their individual companies), 45 minutes per week of your coach's time to share among your team for seeking guidance, and weekly lectures to discuss readings with the class.

Although you have a team, the work is team-ish. This is only a warm-up course in terms of collaboration, so you are responsible for your own individual research. The team is there to discuss the learning process on a high level, but you produce results individually about your own target companies. The two months for this course are divided across different aspects of business characterization: An executive overview of the company, market analysis and business strategy, financial analysis and business prognosis. Most of those concepts were foreign to me before I had to dive into them. I found myself reading an average of 1.5 hours a day, writing 1 hour a day (mostly deferred till the end of the week) and spending 3 hours a week on collaboration.

Every week, or sometimes every two weeks, an analysis paper is due. The very last assignment was an 8-minute oral presentation of the researched company to imaginary executives, that is, the class instructors.

2. How your roles outside school might cope with the new load

Let me begin this subject by mentioning that I started writing this post 15 days ago. Balancing your family role, your job or career and your role as a part time student are not easy feats. In the last two months I have at times had to switch to damage-control gear and concretely demonstrate to those both at work and at home that I am still fully committed to them. I've had to skim chapter summaries instead of reading them in detail. I've traded some of my sleep for a well-researched late analysis submission on a Sunday night, a four hour commute on Monday morning from my girlfriend's place and showing up to work at 8:30am to show my team at work that they can still count on me.

Despite those moments of pressure, and without incentives, I like to write. I write because, to recite an anonymous quote framed on my girlfriend's wall, "life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain." I signed up for this program not to trade jobs, but to trade confusion for leadership. For two years I've contemplated that there must be a more direct and powerful way to make a change along the path I have chosen. I chose management because it would give me a leverage from a higher level to effect that change. A part of my commitment is to lead, and I know that there are hundreds of people like me out there who feel confused about what to do with their engineering careers. I write despite the pressure for time, because I chose to follow the passion for freedom of personal and social expression. I'm seeking my passion through learning to direct software development; and I know there are leaders out there without their wings. My fourth role is one that I have assumed individually: to be the seductive call, in the ears of the undiscovered software leaders of tomorrow, to the fulfillment of their true purpose.

Those are big words two months into a program, but I have thought them for 10 years. You know how sometimes you look at your agenda and there isn't much there besides work, yet you feel a huge burden? That's the burden of not meeting your potential. I still have as much free time as before the program. How? I learned to cut loose some of the heavy weights holding me down in the middle of this course. Instead of trying to fulfill my dreams in solitude, I now include my family and coworkers in my progress. Pointy-haired bosses call this finding "synergy". I call it becoming whole again. I distinctly remember the similar pleasure I experienced as a child when I discovered that, when painting with water-color, the yellow rays of the sun and the blue horizon of your ocean form a green color when they finally meet. My set didn't come with the color green, so discovering how colors reacted to each other opened up my eyes to new possibilities of painting endless forests and leaves. When you mix up the few colors you have, you get a whole set to paint with. To read more about the mysterious way software engineers relate to paint in particular, read "Hackers and Painters" by Paul Graham.

3. Whether you need to reconcile your identity

My typical week right now is very different from what it was in the past few years. I used to work for 8 hours, then come home and work up to another 8 hours on a start-up prototype. Nowadays I work up to 9 hours a day, reserve 3 hours for school work, and spend the rest of the time with my girlfriend. The main difference is that at school I try to learn about what might help my work, at work I pay attention to what might be a good case study at school, and at home I share most of my experiences with my girlfriend. You don't realize how fractured your identity is until its incompatible parts start to compete with each other for time. One reason I left Seattle for the Bay Area was to leave behind a lifestyle built around a fractured sense of identity and start a new one as a whole person. So far I feel I've been successful at that.

As an engineer, nowadays I look at my company from a new perspective. I used to look at my sphere of influence from a short-sighted point of view. I used to either want to integrate against cool platforms, optimize things that were functioning terribly but were not broken, and generally make life better for engineers. Since understanding the concept of branding, market segmentation and market-driven development, I have completely revised my system of "importance" evaluation. In my career so far I have never seen someone on the engineering side of a software company reason based on the impact of a decision on the balance sheet, income statement or cash. I have never heard of a developer point out how a cool project doesn't fall within the current strategy of the company, or suggest that a new application is too generic to be branded as something purposeful.

I now understand why several of my boot-strapped startup attempts have ended in failure: The first one attempted to compete with a large company (Facebook) in their own turf without hiding in a niche spot; and the second idea had no customer, purpose or branding strategy in mind - it was just a very cool idea waiting to be recognized. I now understand what turns off a VC and whether to run away when I hear "we want to become the next API consolidating XYZ data and we're launching our first app in two weeks. We're just looking for a rock-star engineer to scale it." (read: nobody recognizes us, but we want to become the standard that the currently recognized companies should follow, and we want you to spend 4% of your life time on this idea.) I kindly declined one such flattering invitation thanks to my new learnings just from this course, and several weeks later I'm helping some of the founders find work.

If I sound like my entrepreneurial spirit is defecting to the managerial world of conservatism and pessimism, it isn't. On one end of the spectrum, I look at people such as Dr. Stuart Evans, my coach this semester. As part of his research area, he studies the behavior of software companies of various sizes in different environments. While he has been involved with several software start-ups, he has not focused on the actual writing of software. On the other end, there are people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Peter Norton, Mark Zuckerberg, Jimmy Wales and Craig Newmark, who knew most things about writing software and not as much about business when they ventured to change the world.

There is no knowledge or merit you can acquire that will make you a wise Wizard or an experienced King overnight. Most good engineers I know have a similar personality to Aragorn, the lone ranger of the Middle Earth: anonymous, wise enough to listen and potent enough to move the world. And yet, they wait for the day when a higher power restores their confidence, the broken Sword of Elendil. As long as there are dark forces in this world, there is a place for those who embrace ingenuity: those who are neither all-wise nor all-knowing, but both ambitious and sympathetic, to put meritocracy aside and become a leader. There are problems to be solved, while the status quo of the world are solving problems that don't need solving. I call doing the right thing, in its technological contexts such as in this one, the "entrepreneurial spirit of software management".

Sometimes the only evidence that you are is what you feel when you stand against the wind.

Orientation Weekend

2009-09-22T10:23:00.001-07:00

Its already been one month since school started, but I want to tell you about Orientation Weekend, which kick-started my program at Carnegie Mellon.

It started Friday morning, at NASA Research Park in Mountain View, California, where I met my new classmates, faculty and team in Carnegie Mellon. The collaborative experience of being a part of a team-building process was exciting beyond my expectations.

Abby, my girlfriend, wished me luck as I left home Friday morning for an early drive down to CMU. After a 40 minute drive from San Bruno to Mountain View, I was ready to show the NASA security my passport. They said I only needed a driver's license. Inside, I expected things to look a little more impressive. Besides a gigantic hangar bay, everything else as far as I could see looked like a suburban university campus.

I pulled up at the Building 23 and went inside. About 50 other students had already arrived, sipping on coffee and having breakfast. It felt like a new company info session. The agenda was funny: A few talks here and there, followed by playing with Legos and some catered lunches. I could already sense where some of the pricey tuition was being spent.

A few hours later, something magical had happened. After a few conversations encouraged among the students, there was a very positive air filling the room. We were still slowly discovering our purpose in that room, but we all knew we were going to leave with something more than we came with at the end of that weekend.

Overall, we spent about 24 hours together that weekend. About 30% of the students were remote and had to fly back to their homes and families on Sunday. The part-time program allows remote collaboration as a way of participating in the program. The Lego game had been a way of discovering our own weaknesses when acting as a part of a team: things slow down, but end well after a few tries.

The events of those 24 hours were way too many for me to talk about in this blog post. Bill Portelli, the CEO of CollabNet gave us a talk. Dr. Martin Griss, the director of the Silicon Valley campus, had us playing with Legos. We went out to the Castro street of Mountain View for dinner with the faculty. I ended up having a few pints of beer with Dr. Stuart Evans, when our group went to the Tied House Brewery to celebrate the first night. He had just returned from England and I started chatting with him about my brief trip in London and Edinburgh. To my surprise, he was very knowledgeable about Persian culture, even compared to the average Iranian. Just when I was fascinated by his friendliness, charming English accent and exciting background with entrepreneurship and high-tech startups, he started talking about Hassanloo village, an archeologically significant site in Iran. He seemed to know a lot about the food and culture, and a few things about the language as well. I know that my family and most of my friends would describe running into someone that knowledgeable quite a rare experience. At the end of the night, I couldn't be any happier to be looking forward to my first course that he teaches: Elements of Software Management.

The experiences of this weekend were too overwhelming for me to reflect on in just a few paragraphs. But the big observation I made when it comes to your personal growth is that no matter what the cost is in time and money, just do it. You live only once!

A little bit about me

2009-09-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Hi, and welcome to my blog. My name is Amin. I'm hoping to share some of my experiences here at Carnegie Mellon with you through my future writing.

More about me: I'm an Iranian-Canadian. I immigrated to Canada when I was 17 with a strong background in Math and programming. I received my bachelors in Computer Science with a minor in Psychology from University of Waterloo. Very early on, in my first year of college, I found myself to be somewhat of an entrepreneur. I learned how to write database and UI code from the scattered knowledge of a few friends. I wrote a Social Networking that I named "darxtudio.com" back in 1999. It had forums, photo sharing and user profiles. I signed up 150 of my friends, but didn't have enough skills at the time to scale it.

Since graduation I have worked at various companies either as a consultant or a software engineer. Two months before I started my graduate program in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, I was still a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft in Redmond. I was thinking about taking the next step in my career, but wasn't quite sure what it would look like. I contacted a few universities, such as Harvard, Stanford, CMU and Berkeley, for more information about their programs. About 30 days before the very last admission deadline, Dr. Jim Morris from Carnegie Mellon called me on the phone. I was very pleasantly surprised to be contacted by someone whose textbook-standard search algorithm I had studied in college. He encouraged me to apply, and my mind was already set.

I got over my procrastination and finally wrote the GMAT exam, very successfully despite my apprehention and the very short notice. My advice: "Don't be nervous. Just do it. Now! Start with the online practice exam."

At the same time, I started listening to the other voices in my head. I applied to a few startups in Silicon Valley and before hearing back from Carnegie Mellon, had an offer from Adify. Moving to California isn't a requirement of the program, but I wanted to make the commitment an integral part of my next two years. You may be wondering if everybody in this program is financially supported by their employer. I'm not, because of the transition. And I'm proud of the fact that I'm supporting myself in my personal and career growth. I'm a firm believer that if you put growth first, success will follow.

I have a lot more to share with you, but I need to manage my time to attend to my job and studying duties as well. One major skill you learn in this program is how to be successful at playing multiple roles. On that note, please come back to read more of my writings later.

Just remember: You start going forward only when you take the first step.

-Amin

Project and Process Management - Wrapping it Up!

2009-05-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

For our final assignment in the Project and Process Management class, our team was called on to consider our response to a scenario in which the fictional company described in the second assignment had started down the project execution path and had encountered some difficulties. We assessed the project status, revised the resource, cost and schedule estimates, and recommended actions to improve the project’s chances of success.

Key elements of this assignment including recognizing the project issues and their impact, determining their cause, considering the lessons learned, and formulating recommendations. Among the lessons we learned were that hiring and getting a new project team up and running can take longer than expected.

Much of our learning and in-depth analysis on this assignment came near the end of the week in which it was due. We had to get to the point of fully characterizing the whole set of issues in order to craft a response that tied together. Building on the collaborative strengths we developed on the second assignment, team members could comfortably ask each other for help and benefit from the various perspectives that each one of us offered. The report went through multiple stages of refinement before we were satisfied with it. This project incorporated significant contributions from each team member and reinforced both our learning to work as a team and our application of the course’s core principles in a business setting.

Project and Process Management - Midway through

2009-04-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

For the next assignment in our Project and Process Management class, our team delivered a presentation recommending a specific software methodology to the Vice President of Engineering of a fictional company. Included in the presentation were the evaluation method for selecting the methodology, refinements to the process, estimates of schedule, budget and resource, assessment of risks, and recommended action.

Our team worked on the underlying content for this presentation over several weeks. We allocated the work among ourselves in order to work in parallel and provide opportunity for in-depth research. We explored alternative approaches and collaborated through frequent meetings and shared documents. In this period, our coach offered valuable insights about effectively positioning our content for senior management. In the third week of this assignment, we organized our conclusions into slides. Finally, we presented our findings to the senior management of this fictional company.

During this period, our team members learned from each other. Our team meetings gradually became more effective, and we leveraged each others’ strengths to organize a high quality presentation. The learning that took place on this task came from our growing as a team, from applying the academic principles in a business setting, and from framing our findings for a senior management audience.

Project and Process Management Class

2009-02-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

The third course in the Software Management program is the Project and Process Management class. This course addresses software development processes in the context of Agile and traditional methods.

In the first three weeks, each team in the class researched and reported on a different process within the software development lifecycle. The teams then shared their conclusions with the other teams and responded to questions.

Learning was enabled in many ways. As individuals, students researched their designated areas, provided input to their team’s report, and shared in the authorship of the final deliverable. Within a given team, the process of collaborative research and writing created the environment in which team members learned from each other about the various aspects of the software process about which the team was writing. The sharing of conclusions across the teams enabled all of the teams to understand the end-to-end software development lifecycle. The feedback cycle of questions and answers among the teams allowed all of us to see how others viewed our work.

Our next assignment called on teams to apply the newly gained software development process knowledge in the context of the needs of a specific company’s development opportunity. I’ll discuss that in my next entry.

Finishing Up Metrics for Software Managers

2009-01-23T11:47:00.001-08:00

In this entry, I’ll explain my reflections on the Metrics for Software Managers class.

The Masters in Software Management Program is built on the principles of problem-based learning. In the Metrics for Software Managers class, teams apply these principles by using academic concepts to address business problems. Through this experience, we learn to work as a team.

In the process of developing multiple team deliverables, team members begin to recognize that we bring in different perspectives and need to work out approaches for creating a unified deliverable. We are called on to utilize listening and communication skills in order to ensure that each team member’s ideas are considered.

When we give feedback on the proposals of other teams, and when we receive their feedback, we often learn that we have characterized the problems and solutions in very different ways. Similarly, our formal presentations of our proposals may differ significantly and represent a diverse set of approaches. The lessons learned from the experiences of working both as a team and across teams enable us to reframe our approach to problem solving.

Finally, the principles of change management that form the foundation of the final major assignment are directly applicable to many aspects of our work now and in the future. In the dynamic workplaces of today, change is the norm. A thoughtful understanding of change management principles will enable us to help our organization respond to the evolving context.

The Team's Learning Processes

2009-01-07T11:05:00.000-08:00

In this entry, I’ll explain our team’s learning processes in the Metrics for Software Managers class.

The primary course deliverables were developed in the context of our assigned teams. Early in the course our team learned to build on each others’ strengths, while also establishing a structure that enabled a rotation of key roles among team members for the various tasks. To complete our team deliverables required that we learn about team problem solving. This involved developing a shared understanding of both the stated problems and the associated principles of metrics, software management and change management.

Each of us had an opportunity to formally present part of our team’s proposal to our class. In some cases these presentations encompassed independent research that provided additional insight into core principles. Attending and discussing the presentations gave all of us the opportunity to learn from other teams’ approaches to the assignment and to hear other teams’ reactions to our proposals.

One aspect of the feedback loop entailed each student providing written feedback on the proposals of two other teams for each major assignment. This was a new experience for some of us and called on us to characterize these proposals in ways that would help the other teams learn. We also learned from the feedback given to us.

In my final entry, I’ll share my own learning reflections on this class.

Metrics for Software Managers - First Impressions

2008-12-19T13:33:00.000-08:00

In this entry I will explain my initial impressions of the Metrics for Software Managers class. This course addresses software metrics initiatives, fundamentals of certain software management approaches and high-performing team practices.

We discovered in our first week that the students in the class brought a variety of experience levels to this content. Some were new either to the principles underlying software metrics initiatives or to the software management approaches being discussed, while others had direct experience in these areas. We quickly started to broaden our knowledge base through assigned readings and outside research.

The main assignments in this course entailed developing software metrics initiatives for two different fictional companies. The second of these assignments included an in-depth exploration of multiple change management frameworks and identification of a specific framework to provide the foundation for the team’s metrics proposal. Additional assignments involved identifying measurable learning objectives and subsequently reflecting on what was learned.

In my next entry, I’ll explain more about our team’s learning processes.

Wrapping up Elements of Software Management

2008-10-23T11:54:00.001-07:00

In this entry I will discuss the last two weeks of the 7-week Elements of Software Management class. Our final assignment called on us to make a presentation about the software business prognosis of our assigned companies. This would draw on different skill sets. We needed to work with our teams to agree on a common approach to assessing the prognosis for each of our companies. We then needed to synthesize the key points from all of our earlier assignments, especially drawing on the market analysis, business strategy and financial analysis, and to determine where we believed our companies would be at a time in the future.

The task required that we organize our findings in a coherent presentation format suitable for communication in a short amount of time. We presented our findings to faculty and other students, fielding questions that called on more in-depth knowledge. These presentations gave us the opportunity to get feedback from faculty on our content and presentation styles as well as to observe our classmates and to learn from their characterizations of their own companies.

Reflecting on the entirety of the course, I have discovered how to work within the framework of the program, including team collaboration and learning by doing, while also considering my longer-term learning plan and how the current assignments relate to that plan. I better understand the larger software industry that is the subject of this course and of others that are coming later in the program. I have also
become an active member of the Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley community, and look forward to the learning opportunities to come.

I will return soon to share experiences related to the second class in the program.

Elements of Software Management

2008-10-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

In this entry I will explain the middle weeks of the Elements of Software Management class. The major assignment in this class is to study a company and get to know it inside an out, each week focusing on different aspects of the company. The focus of Weeks Two and Three is on market analysis and business strategy assessment. We explored these subjects in the class sessions by reflecting on the readings and understanding the perspectives of the faculty facilitators and of the students in the class.

It became clear that a key principle of this class was for us to understand the industry context in which our assigned company was operating. Following that principle, we were called on to consider whether the strategy our company was following was the right strategy given the company's external opportunities and threats and internal strengths and weaknesses. Our team meetings during these weeks provided the opportunity for more exploration of the market analysis and business strategy principles as well as for sharing research and reference approaches.

Weeks Four and Five took our learning to a new level. Our task assignment called for an extensive financial analysis of the companies we had been researching. The curriculum associated with these weeks included material related to financial statement analysis,
considerations of company growth, and alternative ways to determine how well a company is performing. For many of us, completing this assignment entailed both absorbing a large set of financial analysis and management concepts as well as embarking on a more finely tuned research effort. We needed to grasp the financial health of our companies as well as to understand the customer perspective and the company's internal capabilities and ability to innovate.

Our team meetings were particularly enlightening for this assignment. We had the opportunity to learn from each other about our research and analytical approaches and to benefit from discussion of the questions that each of us brought in. Our coach provided insights regarding the importance of various financial indicators as well as specific considerations for each of our companies.

By this time, all of us were deeply immersed in the background and strategy of our research companies. This knowledge would be essential for the final assignment that I'll discuss in my next entry.

Orientation and First Week of Classes!

2008-10-13T14:47:00.001-07:00

In this entry I will explain my experiences in the Software Management
program Orientation and the first week of class.

The Orientation brought together all of the students entering Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley this fall. Key points explained in an opening session included the concepts of a learning community, learn-by-doing methodology, student collaboration in small teams, and a project-based curriculum. We would be learning in a curriculum that does not include lectures and is instead based on participation in facilitated plenary sessions and team meetings, absorption of assigned readings and outside research, and completion of individual and team-based assignments. We were encouraged to take responsibility for our experience by creating our own learning plan.

Several team-based activities during the orientation enabled us to get to know other students and to work on our leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. We attended a presentation by the CEO of a well-known software company in which we came to appreciate the contextual leadership style of the presenter. A workshop on
presentation skills gave us feedback on how to communicate more effectively. I emerged from the orientation feeling grounded in the principles of the program and eager to connect with my new classmates and team members.

The first class for our Software Management cohort is a 7-week course called Elements of Software Management. The structure of the course includes a weekly facilitated plenary session encompassing discussion of readings and explanation of that week's assignment. In the first plenary we learned that our class was geographically distributed, with many students attending from other places in the United States and one from outside of the US. We discovered that while our motivations for attending the program had some common elements relating to understanding the business of software, additional reasons included the desire to understand different business models and approaches to
business analysis.

An Introduction to Rene

2008-09-15T14:17:00.001-07:00

Hello, I welcome you to my blog and look forward to sharing with you my experiences at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley.

I work in Cisco's software development organization as a manager of operations and program manager. My Cisco experience includes people management, software and hardware program management, manufacturing program management and finance. Prior experience includes finance roles at Apple and Northern Telecom. I have a Bachelor in Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master's in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.

I have two daughters, one in college in Portland, Oregon and one in high school in San Jose, California. My daughters have been active in performing arts, and a favorite pastime of our family's is attending both regional and school performing arts events.

I decided to join CMU's Software Management master's degree program in order to move ahead in my career by taking on roles that require technical, strategic and business leadership. My intent is to broaden my understanding of both the software industry and the business and technology context in which software companies are operating. CMU was my first choice for a technical graduate school program because of the strength of the institution, faculty, and academic offering, the nature of the learning experience, and the flexible structure. I was particular interested in the team orientation and project and simulation-based curriculum.

I initially learned about CMU's Silicon Valley-based software engineering programs at a business strategy presentation by a CMU faculty member at a Women in Technology International (WITI) conference several years ago. When the time became right in my life and career a year ago to explore this type of program, I started by attending an on-campus admissions open house held last winter. Almost immediately, I felt a connection with the faculty, staff, alumni and current students as they welcomed me to the open house and made presentations about the program. I started the process of organizing the admissions materials such as transcripts, letters of recommendation, and essays. I attended a second admissions open house two months later to validate my initial impression and at that time, made my final decision to apply.

After my application was complete, one of the CMU faculty members interviewed me for the program. This was a valuable two-way exchange about both my interest in the program and the evolution of the program since its inception several years ago. When CMU offered me admission, I felt that a door was opening to a new set of opportunities and challenges. As it turned out, I was right. I'll share more on what I am discovering in my next entry.

Summertime at CMU

2008-06-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

Greetings friends,

It’s been some time since I’ve written and quite a bit has happened! First off, Spring semester ended and I’m now some weeks into the Summer semester. I’m taking two elective courses this summer - Introduction to Open Source, and Human Computer Interaction. See, during the summer, our schedule shifts a bit, instead of taking one course at a time for 7 weeks each, we take two classes at the same time, but for 12 weeks (the whole summer semester). This allows for a much more leisurely pace, along with a week-long break in the middle of the semester.

Both are going terrific so far, with research projects kicking up steam at the moment. In Introduction to Open Source, I’m on a team of 6 people from all over the spectrum, and we’re evaluating proprietary & open source operating systems for mobile devices, in order to determine which is the easiest to develop software. So far we’ve only had a couple meetings, but the level of talent on the team is tremendous! We have someone working on the Google “Android” operating system, someone working in mobile computing from HP, someone that worked on developing the Java language at Sun, and a couple other folks like myself that work in the Aerospace industry representing the “customer” perspective.

During class, our professor, Dr. Tony Wasserman, has had various speakers in the open source industry come in and talk to us about open source from various perspectives. It’s been terrific to get a hands-on feel for where things are, from the very people I read about in the field.

In Human Computer Interaction, we’re studying usability engineering and learning about how user interfaces should be codified by doing a mock-up of an actual interface, then evaluating it as if we were actual Usability Engineers. It really is fascinating, what goes into designing interfaces for users, and will no doubt come in handy for me in the future.

Speaking of future, I’ve recently got on board the brand new “research” option for MS students, which will allow me to do research on top of my course load and produce a paper at the end of my degree instead of a practicum, allowing me to pursue a PhD afterwards! It’s amazing how many opportunities this degree has provided, before I’m even halfway through.

Well folks, I’m outta here, hope to be writing more frequently now that class has kicked in and things have somewhat normalized. As is the case with any college course, the first few weeks you have to spend time getting your bearings, but once you settle in things go pretty smoothly.

Thanks,

Daniel Maycock

Product Marketing and Human-Computer Interaction Courses

2007-12-17T14:05:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We concluded our course on Product marketing this week with a little get-together for the local students after the final presentation at the plenary session. Students from India, North Carolina, Washington, and Southern California missed a lively conversation and some excellent food and drinks.

But that was all they missed. This semester was exciting and the students, regardless of their location, shared in these experiences. This was our semester to choose an elective course. The reasons for choosing the electives ranged from wanting to learn a new subject area to improving in an area that would have an immediate impact on their career. However, whatever the reason for their choice of elective, they were unanimous in their feedback – they learned new ways of looking at problems and challenges when dealing with a product requirement, product design, or business strategy and launch.

The Product Marketing course and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course together provided a foundation for successful design and launch of products and the critical process we need to follow and controls we have to keep in place. The course challenged us to bring our focus back to customer needs and to design and deliver a solution to the customer problem. Too many a times as engineers we get engrossed in our view of the world and completely miss the voice of the customer in our products and then in the delivery of these products.

We had some excellent guest speakers for the product marketing session which provided us a pragmatic view of customer-focused marketing and a perspective from sales, product management, marketing operations, marketing communication, product launch, and strategy functions. They reinforced the customer as the most critical cog of the business. This augmented the learning from the excellent mandatory reading and optional reading assignments.

I can summarize this course as well as the learning so far – “Its all about the customer”.

We have a three-week break before the start of the next semester. I am really looking forward to spending some quality time with my family. The next semester will have to wait.

A piece of advice for the season based on a personal experience, I highly recommend you test for carbon monoxide detectors in your homes or install new ones in case they are not working. Please have a safe holiday season.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all of you … I will see all of you on the bright side of year 2008.

It's paying off already!

2007-12-07T10:37:00.000-08:00

Well it’s been some time since I’ve written. A lot has gone on! Though my coursework in Metrics has kept me quite busy, it’s sure paid off at work. In only 14 weeks, I’ve already been promoted and asked to be on an enterprise-wide committee. It hasn’t come really, from people hearing about me being in a master’s program, so much as it’s come from the skills I’ve been learning being turned right around and used at work to gain some very valuable visibility.

I’ve often heard it said that the measure of a man is not measured in the length of his knowledge, but the width of his actions. I’ve certainly found that to be true, especially at Carnegie Mellon West. A lot of masters degrees I think, are geared towards knowledge collection, be it preparation for a PhD or more of an intellectual pursuit of sorts. But Carnegie Mellon West in contrast is very much geared towards knowledge through application. One does become a great academic, going through some interesting material, but it’s all things that can be directly applied to your work the next day! This isn’t a masters where you can read a book and call it a day, oh no my friend, much is expected and in turn a whole lot is learned.

This isn’t ground school you might say, it’s more like the actual flight lessons. “Learn by doing” is no doubt an unofficial motto, because I’ve seen it throughout the program so far. A lot of my classmates have become friends as well, which naturally comes from spending 5-10 hrs a week in sessions with 3-4 people. I have no doubt these connections will last me far beyond the program, and getting this kind of insight has been great as well. I very much look forward to seeing what the final presentations look like, and how my classmates take what they’re learning in the work force and apply to the material we’ve been given. It’ll not only give me an insight into the minds people at companies like Yahoo, and Google but will also help me hone my own skills here at Boeing.

Until next time,

Daniel Maycock

Soup's On - Join the fun at Carnegie Mellon West!

2007-10-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

My name is Daniel Maycock, and I’m a Masters of Science in Software Management student at Carnegie Mellon West. I’m also a Project Manager at Boeing in Everett, Washington. I recently just completed my first course, and boy did it stretch me! I thought having just left my undergraduate experience a mere two years ago, this graduate program would be a slam dunk, but it really stretched me. Not in a bad way of course, rather, a very very good way, a way in which I grew along with my team. And though it took some hard work, I could tell I was a stronger person at the end of the course. This is something people of all ages can benefit from too, in all stages of their careers, because Carnegie Mellon West is geared to grow you in the place you’re weakest while fine-tuning your strengths.

One of the best things about this program is the fact that I have such diverse classmates and teammates. They come from all different industries, experiences (both personal and professional), and a huge part of the learning experience is being able to utilize each others’ strengths and help each other through our weaknesses. For example, one of my classmates was struggling to devote enough time to the assigned reading material, while another of my classmates did have the time to spare. We divvied up responsibilities, and that teammate was able to do the in-depth reading and research and share with us his findings, while my time-strapped classmate was able to interpret and provide great insight because of his professional experiences.

The time-strapped student learned how to do more with less time, whereas the other student learned new insights beyond what he was able to get from the reading material. Both students lacked something, but grew in different areas working together – this is Carnegie Mellon West at its core!

And the conversations that came out of the class, my gosh! You couldn’t get this anywhere else, learning from so many backgrounds and experiences simultaneously – it’s like cooking a fine stew with a bunch of ingredients, coming together to make an amazing meal. Sure you might have access to some salt, or paprika, maybe even some cayenne – but parsley? Forget about it! You’d need to sign up for a week long seminar on gardening just to get a taste of parsley! But at Carnegie Mellon West, your classmate is the parsley and you just happen to the garlic they were looking for. You mesh together, along with your other classmates, and before you know it – you’re entering your minestrone recipe in the county fair and getting first place! Yes my friends, you too can win the county fair – but you have to jump in the Carnegie Mellon West pot and see what’s cooking.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t like minestrone and I’m doing fine on my own.” Here’s the thing though, not only are corporate folks in these classes, but entrepreneurs too! And the faculty come from backgrounds in VC’s, start-ups, established corporations, etc – it’s like the ultimate knowledge bank, waiting for you to make withdrawals (or soups). Plus my degree has been turning heads, not only because there’s lots of CMU alumni where I work at Boeing, but also because Carnegie Mellon is so well respected. (#2 in Computer Engineering by US News & World Report, and #7 in business and engineering).

My experience so far has been an amazing one, and it’s only been seven weeks. The books are all books I’d buy anyways for my IT career, but now I have an excuse to spend money on them and get my wife to go along with it. Who doesn’t need an excuse to buy more books though! And the time commitment fits great, people with kids & families study and participate right along with yours truly (who has no kids at the moment, *knock on wood*).

The best way I can end this first blog is, if you imagine the coolest thing in the world – it may cause you to pass out which is a health risk and is not suggested. Well, think of the coolest thing you can WITHOUT passing out, and you’ll probably be thinking about pizza or a beach, but after seven weeks in this program you’ll be thinking about Carnegie Mellon West (not on a beach though, sand gets in the computer, it’s bad news). If you don’t believe me, just ask the hundreds of students that have made Carnegie Mellon West their graduate education choice!

The soup’s just right, so pull up a chair! We could use whatever fun flavors you can contribute, and hopefully you’ll be able to take some new recipes with you as well.

Back to School and the Electives

2007-10-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

I cannot deny that the 3 weeks break after the first year of the MS in Software Management was timely and needed.

The start of the second year required us to choose between the various courses offered as electives. For example, this semester we were offered a choice of four courses, each one running as a mini-semester of 7 weeks. Typically the semester is 14 weeks long, and if the semester is broken into two, you would have a mini-semester of 7 weeks each. In either case you do get a week off after the first 7 weeks of the mini-semester.

We had excellent choices for electives this semester. We had to choose between Business Strategy and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) for the first mini and Product Marketing and Open Source for the second mini.

I elected to take the course on HCI and Product Marketing for this semester.

There are six of us in the HCI course and this contributes to a very interactive session. Instead of breaking into two groups of three each, we decided to work as a single team. This gives us twice the time with the coaches and the faculty as well as the experience of dealing with a larger team.

The initial three weeks of this course have been extremely hectic for me, as I had to travel for work. I did not miss a lot of designated coach facilitated meetings or plenary sessions, however, I did miss a few ad-hoc team meetings and reading sessions. This brings me to the topic of traveling for business or pleasure while at school. I think it can be managed but it does put undue pressure on your team members especially if you are traveling overseas or to the east coast from the west coast as connectivity while traveling is still an issue and is compounded by the time difference.

I don’t know the solution to this issue except to minimize traveling as much as possible. Luckily, the meetings remain flexible, so I can continue to keep up with my course assignments and not put all the burden on my teammates.

I am really enjoying and learning a lot in this course. Next week I will discuss HCI.

Family Matters

2007-06-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

In this blog, I am going to share some personal background and how I strive to bring balance between family, work, and school.

Family time was one of the main concerns that I had before starting the MS in Software Management. At that time, my wife was about to join work again after her maternity leave. I started the course after bargaining with my wife and promising on making radical changes related to my working habits. My wife works for a non-profit organization and we have two kids – My daughter ‘Angelica’ is 5 years old and my son ‘Arjun’ is 18 months old.

Work-study-life balance is one of the main questions that I get asked by students who are joining the software management program.

One year into the program, I am not going to pretend that it was easy; or that the tips I am sharing with you were straightforward to implement. However, I have reaped many benefits since I made changes in my life to embark on this journey and accommodate the demands of school. Some highlights of the changes include:

Special time for my family: Sunday is our family day. We try to finish all weekly chores before Sunday. We plan the day so that most of the day is spent outdoors. We finish the day early (usually by 6:00 pm), as the kids get tired out from the day’s activity. I do not typically compromise on this time. This gives me more than enough time in the evening to catch up on weekly readings, planning my schedule for the week, and an occasional series on TV.
Work and the commute: I live in South San Jose and work in San Mateo. The commute is close to 40 miles each way. I used to drive to and from work everyday and I can tell you that it was extremely stressful, especially now that I can compare that to my experience of carpooling/vanpooling for the last 3 months. This has helped me start and end my day in a very planed and predictable manner. I typically sleep or read a book and find myself refreshed when I reach the office or arrive back home in the evening.
Spread the schoolwork evenly: Fridays and Saturdays are typically reserved for completing pending school assignments that I could not finish over the week. However, I usually reserve the reading assignments for the early part of the week, starting on Sunday nights. I find that reading earlier in the week is more beneficial, since the plenary sessions at Carnegie Mellon West reinforces the ideas from the reading. These sessions are run typically on Tuesday or Wednesday for about 2 hours.

Listed below are some of the rules that have helped me make the changes that I have listed above. They might work for you as well:

I make sure that family comes first. Grades at school or a minor snafu at work can be fixed. You will be surprised that if you do not follow this rule, you will push your family pretty hard and into a corner.
I do not try to do everything at work or at school. The art is to divide and conquer as a team. I know we live in an era of sports and entertainment where a lot of credit is given to “megastars,” who can do everything on their own. I am not saying, “don’t shine or showcase your abilities”; on the contrary, I believe that it is more important to “choose wisely and execute to the best of your abilities”.
Plan your time well in advance for family time, work, and school. Work can always throw a curve ball at you in terms of last minute fire-drills and deadlines. Don’t be afraid to ask about the relevance and timeline of the task. Push back on schedules or re-assign to others in case it deviates and messes up your weekly plan or larger career or educational goal. Give enough time to yourself for preparing and planning for each task.
Be true to yourself and your family, your peers at work, and school. Do not over-extend yourself and over-promise. If you do, you will find yourself giving more excuses and reasons for why you are behind on a task or you might find an unhappy family.
Start the day early at work and complete the day on time. You will be surprised that this small change can actually help your family plan better as well. When I get home now each day at 6:15 pm, my daughter is done with her school-work and reading and the dinner is always ready. This gives us time to spend with the kids before they go to sleep. My wife and I make sure that the kids are in bed by 8:30 pm. I work on my job or school related tasks through midnight. This was not the case before I joined the program. Earlier, I would come home any time from 8:00 pm through 10:00 pm.

Embarking on this journey through grad school (especially at Carnegie Mellon West where you learn by doing) puts the responsibility on you to manage your time well so that you can do justice to the task at hand and to your peers. Carnegie Mellon West courses are designed to accomodate the busy professional with family obligations, however its still up to you to make changes to your daily routine to include special times for family, work, and school because family matters.

Winding Down One Class and Gearing Up for Another

2007-05-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

In this blog, I am going to spend some time summarizing the key learnings from the Systems and Requirements course before sharing my experience from the kickoff of the Business of Software course.

Conclusion of Systems and Requirements Course

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, this semester was focused on “Systems and Requirements.” The second half of the course was dedicated to creating a requirements document and a product roadmap, and “pitching” both to the CEO and VP of Marketing (roles played by two of our professors). Our team completed the presentation to the senior management on Saturday, April 21. It was well received, however, in my humble opinion, our team underestimated the business case and the investment plan aspect of our proposal. Though it did not impact the final grade (team consensus regarding the business plan was not part of the grading rubric), we should have done a better job articulating and mitigating the risk related to the new project. It goes to show you that especially when getting into a room with senior management, one not only needs to “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” on the details but also have clarity on the big picture.

There was consensus among all my classmates that the contextual design and the use case as a means of capturing business requirements was the key learning everyone came away with.

It will take me a while to digest some of the nuances of the use case approach to gathering requirements. But I am completely convinced that it is a far better tool to convey the requirements to all the internal and external stakeholders in most situations.

Well-earned rest

We had a one-week break before the start of the next course – The Business of Software. It gave me some time to start a Vanpool from San Jose to San Mateo along with three colleagues at work. The vanpool gives me time to catch up on reading to and from work and, gauging the gas price trend, this makes fiscal sense as well. Additionally, it has helped me tremendously in my calendar and task management at work and gives me more time to spend with my family. However, using vanpool through this semester means that I will be attending all the plenary sessions and team meetings remotely, even though I’m a local student. In the coming weeks I will write more on the ‘remote attendance’ experience.

New Software Industry Conference

Carnegie Mellon West and UC Berkeley organized a daylong conference on the “New Software Industry,” last Monday, April 30th. I took time off from work to attend the conference, which was made up of various sessions and had the opportunity to hear Silicon Valley leaders talk about the future of software companies and its trends. The conference provided their perspective from both technology trends and investment trends into technology. Some of the speakers at the conference included Ray Lane, Timothy Chou, Prof. Michael Cusumano, and Prof. Tony Wasserman (who also happens to be one of our own professors). The conference was free for the Carnegie Mellon West students – one of the perks of being a student at a leading software university!

Business Of Software

The general structure of each semester is that each course starts with a “kick-off.” The kick-off sets the tone for the entire semester, and gives the professor the opportunity to introduce the subject matter, introduce new student teams, go over the syllabus, the goals for the class, and the deliverables required of us as students. As part of the course kick-off, Professor Tony Wasserman had invited Professor Michael Cusumano to deliver a presentation on the trends in software management. Prof. Cusumano shared his research on the software industry and a portion of this extends to his writings in his book, The Business of Software.

We have already started working on “Task 1” for this course. As I’ve mentioned before, each course builds upon the learnings from the last course. A great example of this is in the first task itself. Task 1 requires the new teams to select one proposal out of the various proposals given by the different teams during the previous course, “Systems and Requirements.” As we all have new teams now, each of our teams has a representative from one of the previous semester’s teams – an advocate for each of the proposals presented last semester. So in the first two weeks, we will need to choose one of the proposals as the final proposal for which all the teams will create a business plan. Our team has honed in on two proposals at this time and we have about a week to select the proposal that we will work on for the rest of this semester. It will be difficult to choose which proposal to work on, as we all have an attachment to our own proposal we created last semester. But this discussion is forcing us to collaborate, both inter- and intra-team, to make the best decision regarding the business viability of the proposal.

This course is going to be very interesting and should help all of us get into the business side of software and understand it better.

Method and Process of Learning at Carnegie Mellon West

2007-04-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be helpful to give you some of the methods and processes I've seen employed so far at Carnegie Mellon West, and some of the "take-aways" I've gathered from it:

You are only as good as your team and vice versa
CMU West provides a holistic learning experience by providing a team-oriented and learn-by-doing approach. What this means is that most of the tasks are completed as part of a team. The faculty, at the start of the semester, create the teams for each course. The team members work together to accomplish both team and individual tasks as well as manage team and individual learning. For each of the courses so far, I have had a new set of team members. Typical teams so far have ranged from about 3 students to 5 students.

As you divide the task and create roles amongst the team to accomplish a particular task, you begin to improve your team management skills, communication skills, and learn from each other in a collaborative environment.

In each task through the first 2 semesters, I tried to take up different roles; from editor to researcher to team lead. My recommendation to students is to try and take up roles that they are not comfortable with and fulfill those roles to the best of their abilities while utilizing the help of your peers and faculty. As a student, you should avoid always taking roles that you are already comfortable with. Don’t be afraid to be the weak link. This is the opportunity for you to learn in a controlled atmosphere and your team members are there to help you.

And then there is the Coach
Ensuring that the team is performing to its highest potential is the job of the coach. A coach is a faculty member that observes and oversees the team dynamics as they accomplish the task, and her or she will provide suggestions and tips for improvements. The coach also helps the team avoid traps. Unlike a game of basketball or baseball, the coaches are not the ones calling the play-by-play strategy. I can draw closer comparison to a golf coach who provides tips on improving your swing.

By working in small teams under the supervision of the coach you acquire knowledge related to the course together as a team. At the same time you are going through team formation and dynamics, project management, improving people management skills, leadership skills, and communication skills.

Role-playing
As part of the learn-by-doing philosophy, in some courses team members and faculty are role-playing as part of a fictitious company. The tasks themselves mimic a real-world business problem where faculty members act as senior managers of the company and you and your team members are working on critical assignments and projects for the company. For example, in the current course for Systems and Requirements, we are working to create vision of a new product and present it to the CEO and VP of Marketing for their approval to start product development.

The plenary session
Every week there is a two-hour plenary session. The session is run more like a round-table discussion on most occasions except when the faculty wants to present something specific or we have visiting faculty. The topic of each session relates to suggested and optional reading material that are used to help in the completion of the task. These sessions provide a forum to learn from the larger class as we discuss relevant experience, and from the faculty as they share their expertise and experience.

The suggested and optional reading material
The required readings take about 3-4 hours a week, but if you read all of the optional readings too, you could double that. It is always good to plan your week such that the readings are completed before the start of the week. Considering earlier assignments are completed by Saturday, one should be done with their reading on Sunday or latest by Monday.

The ad-hoc team meetings
Not all assignments can be accomplished through designated team meetings, wiki, or emails. There are times that you need to get on brainstorming sessions that are not supervised by faculty or the coaches but are instead self-regulated by the team. These sessions improve the individual members’ communication skills.

The office hours
The faculty has open office hours to discuss any assignment related issues. But these times also function as a great opportunity for the students to speak to the faculty and take their advice on work or school-related issues. I have had the opportunity to speak to a few of the faculty members as part of their office hours and have learned a lot from them. They have been very helpful and encouraging to my inquiries and questions.

The deliverables
Each course has multiple tasks and each task could have more than one deliverable. The deliverables are typically reports that need to be submitted before a deadline that is set by the faculty or a deadline that you as a team have determined. When the team is working on a deadline set by the team members, the team acquires project management skills. One lesson I learned quickly through this process is to start thinking of the intended reader and audience of the report as each report initially has a maximum page limit that we had to adhere to.

Most courses also have at least one presentation as a deliverable. In this case you deliver the presentation to your peers or to the “senior management” (aka the faculty) of the fictitious company. The goal of the presentation could be to announce a decision related to the project, analyze a particular problem and provide solutions, or sell a new idea. The faculty as well as your peers critiques these presentations for both the style and content of the presentation.

And then to know how you did in the course
Obviously there are grades that go with each course but at Carnegie Mellon West there are other indicators that tell you how well you did.

Each member of the team goes through a detailed analysis of the accomplishments and contributions of every member as well as a self-appraisal. The team members share positive contributions and qualities as well as areas for improvement as part of a team meeting.
The coach and the faculty’s formal and informal assessment of your deliverables provide you with a running assessment of an individual as well as the teams abilities.

In summary
My grades could always be a lot better and there is room for more personal improvements but the MS in Software Management is turning out to be the best personal investment I have made in a long time.

Systems and Requirements - I

2007-03-22T10:55:00.000-07:00

“The relevance of gathering and generating software requirements to a software project and a software company are well documented. Nevertheless, it does surprise me that 40% of defects of software projects and products are attributed directly to software requirements.”

- Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig, Managing Software Requirements

This statement, taken from one of the books we are studying currently, struck me profoundly, that there really is such a high failure rate in the requirements-gathering process related to software projects and products.

Is it possible that as engineers, we jump to solutions before really having spent adequate time on identifying the users and understanding the needs of these end users? Is it true that, as noted author Alan Cooper puts it, the inmates really are running the asylum?[1]

These are some of the issues that have been brought up and discussed during my current class. Systems and Requirements is a 14-week course which goes through the various methodologies for managing software requirements. In this course, I have been placed on a team with four other members. As a team, our goal is to gather and document product vision, requirements, and a product roadmap.

This course is broken up into two “mini-semesters,” each seven weeks long. We’ve just concluded the first mini-semester, in which we met with various corporate representatives from the hi-tech industry. Each of these representatives deal with project and portfolio management in their respective firms, and gather requirements using contextual design techniques. Our team was able to interview software professionals from Oracle, Boeing, and Market2lead. We interviewed them on their daily routines and work habits. These interview and requirement-gathering sessions gave us insight on how to balance current needs vs. existing solutions within the project management space. We were pleasantly surprised with the tools that the users were using.

Most of the time in the mini-semester was spent in:
1. Reading course material and research material
2. Analyzing the interviews
3. Documenting and modeling the user needs and requirements.

In each team-based project, each team member takes on different roles. For this course, I took on the role of being editor for the initial set of deliverables. Apart from the time I spent incorporating feedback from my team members, I noticed that I spent less time working on the assignment and readings compared to the previous semester. However, that time was re-allocated to time spent thinking about a product vision or in discussion with my team members and peers during brain-storming sessions.

In the next mini-semester, we will focus on creating a requirements document and a product roadmap. A big part of the Carnegie Mellon West learning style is to teach students using a learn-by-doing philosophy. In that vein, classes are usually conducted as if we are working for a fictitious company, in which our professors play the executive roles of CEO, VP of Marketing, etc. So once we create the requirements document and product roadmap, we will be expected to successfully pitch both to the CEO and VP of Marketing. I feel fairly confident that our product vision is on target. But even though I think our product vision is cool, the thrust of the course is not about the product idea, but about defining the target user of the solution and capturing the business requirements.

A note on infrastructure and technology

Carnegie Mellon West provides a truly remote learning experience that is suited for the global economy. About 30% of my classmates are remote and attend the classes through web and voice conferences. They are located predominantly in the west coast, however, we also have classmates throughout the U.S. and even overseas in Korea, India and other countries.

What’s great about having a remote program like this one is that you can be traveling, for work or pleasure, and still participate in the program. One of our team members was on a personal visit to India and did have some trouble connecting to us during the initial sessions and team meetings, even though he had brought his VOIP router with him to India. I think he was dialing in from Delhi. He did mention a major power outage as one of the reasons why VOIP did not work for him. At the same time, however, another classmate who was in India was more successful when connecting through Yahoo voice and IM chat for a few weeks.

Next Time: With one-third of the program completed so far, I intend to dedicate the next blog to the method and process of learning at CMU-West.

[1] Alan Cooper. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition). Sams 2004

Metrics Class - Collaboration and Teamwork

2007-03-07T16:42:00.000-08:00

This really was an eye-opening course. The purpose of this course was to learn how to design metrics in general, and then recommend metrics for projects and large portfolios of projects. In the past, I’ve had to collect data or present existing metrics to the management team at my company. However, I never thought of questioning or refining the metric itself; let alone think about actionable items or worry about leading vs. trailing metrics.

Another twist to the design of metrics was the introduction of agile and hybrid software methodologies. Part of my assignment was to read and understand the various software methodologies in a relatively short duration to successfully submit the deliverables on time. My team had earlier worked on Extreme Programming as part of their software development projects and helped me get up to speed.

What was really neat about this course was the fact that our class merged with students from Carnegie Mellon West’s other degree program, the MS Software Engineering Development Management track. This made for an interesting experiment as people with varying backgrounds were grouped. These were second-year students who had on average 5 years of industry experience and had already mastered the art of collaboration and planning for the task.
It was an amazing experience to work as part of this team. In this course, I did not have to spend more than 12 to 15 hours each week. We were able to form a cohesive and high performing team rather quickly, ensuring that the work load was fairly distributed.

In the second week of class, during our second plenary session, we had the privilege of hearing from Dr. Sunita Chulani, IBM, who spoke on "IT Governance”.

Observations

I realize that the use of wiki as a learning and collaboration tool at Carnegie Mellon West is one of the things that sets itself apart from other universities. It encourages the use of modern collaborative tools as part of the curriculum. Hopefully, students will encourage and implement these tools in their respective organizations for creating collaborative environment for structured and unstructured data.

Overall, I experienced team and problem-based learning, collaboration tools, project and portfolio management, software engineering concepts for agile and hybrid projects, persuasive communication – written and oral, and metrics design all brought together in this seven-week course.

The First Course - Introduction to Software Management

2007-02-21T09:58:00.000-08:00

At orientation, like everyone else, I picked two companies – one private and one public – to research for the Foundations of Software Management course. The companies I picked were SOA Software and TIBCO.

The Foundations course was devoted to concepts such as marketing, strategy, managing teams, managing meetings, and finance, primarily as they applied to the companies we were researching. It was fast paced as each week covered a different topic.

We formed study groups of four students and shared the results of our research, which gave us deeper insight into eight more companies. By the end of the semester, our class of 20 students had fully analyzed close to 40 companies in seven weeks.

There are two things that stand out from this mini semester:

1. The most interesting session was the week-long session on managing meetings. After running meetings for over ten years the wrong way and facilitating successful meetings “only by chance,” learning the do's and don't s of facilitating a meeting was the highlight. I can already see the emphasis I make on preparing and planning to run a meeting at work. I still have a long way to go, but I think it is a change in the right direction.

2. Eric Daimler, our instructor for Finance, invited Dan Saccani of Ravix Corporation to present at the plenary session on finance. I was surprised by the services provided by this firm. Ravix Corporation provides consulting and outsourced services for finance, human resources, and facilities to early-stage startups. This talk inspired me to research and understand a bit more about the Venture Capitalist ecosystem.

In the first few weeks, I spent close to 20 hours each week on the course (we take one course per semester). It was mostly front loading the reading over the earlier part of the week and completing the tasks “just-in-time.” In retrospect, the “just-in-time” nature of my work was really because I was excited to start formal education/training again after more than ten years and did not know what to expect. Once I started to focus on the learning rather than the task and on the important things rather than on trying to do everything, the course seemed more manageable and I began to learn.

The program over the next two years provides additional opportunities to learn and refine topics such as strategy, marketing, and software business finance and budgeting. This helps me plan my learning as I can choose to go deeper on some subjects and skim through other concepts that can be developed in the later courses. My focus is more on the strategic marketing and business strategy that will come in handy at work now. I plan to look for opportunities to take more of the finance-related tasks for the future deliverables.

Around the same time, Steve Wozniak presented a session on “Engineering as an Art Form.” This session was free for Carnegie Mellon West students. Unfortunately, I could not attend the session.

Is Carnegie Mellon West Right for You?

2007-02-08T09:55:00.000-08:00

I work as a Product Strategy Manager for Oracle in its applications division. I have over ten years of experience in software applications implementation and product development for supply chain management solutions.

With a background in Production and Industrial Engineering, I was looking to learn best practices in software engineering and software business management – concepts for software strategy that would help me immediately in my day-to-day work. At the same time, it was very important for me to balance my work, school, and family lives.

CMU West offers a degree in Software Management. It seemed like the course was tailor-made for my needs. The ability to interact with an accomplished and amazing faculty and to work with industry peers was exciting. My only concern was “Time.” Would I be able to devote the time and make the commitment required to transform my career?

I spoke to current students to get their perspectives, and I also spoke to Professor Martin Griss before I started my application to the program. Professor Griss told me that the degree was meant for busy professionals, and the individual courses and tasks were designed to take no more than 15 to 20 hours each week. The tasks typically required collaboration within and across various student teams.

In summary, these were the important points that I considered when exploring the possibility of attending a graduate program on a part-time basis:

1. A Software Engineering Management program offered by Carnegie Mellon University in the Silicon Valley that suited my career aspirations;

2. Networking opportunities with exceptional students, faculty, and alumni.

3. A course designed for busy professionals.

I made a good choice. And it may be the right choice for you, too!