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MS Software Management Blog
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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. |
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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. |
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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
Introducing Vineet Nair
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.
posted by Vineet Nair @ 10:20 AM
1 comments
The Entrepreneurial Spirit of Software Management
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.
posted by Amin Ariana @ 10:44 AM
1 comments
Orientation Weekend
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!
posted by Amin Ariana @ 10:23 AM
0 comments
A little bit about me
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.
posted by Amin Ariana @ 10:54 AM
0 comments
Project and Process Management - Wrapping it Up!
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.
posted by Rene Newton @ 12:19 PM
0 comments
Project and Process Management - Midway through
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.
posted by Rene Newton @ 3:13 PM
1 comments
- Self-organizing and Learning-By-Doing, do they work?
- Introducing Vineet Nair
- The Entrepreneurial Spirit of Software Management
- Orientation Weekend
- A little bit about me
- Project and Process Management - Wrapping it Up!
- Project and Process Management - Midway through
- Project and Process Management Class
- Finishing Up Metrics for Software Managers
- The Team's Learning Processes
