I just followed Google Reader’s recommendation to Lost Garden. It’s a blog about game development. Some time ago I was interested in the topic, but I consider it frozen for a while, so I didn’t expect to find anything of immediate interest on this blog.

But this article proved I was wrong:

In every project, there are issues that that frighten the bejesus out of the team. They are so frightening that no one wants to talk about them publicly. The schedule might be impossible. There might be the lurking suspicion that Management does not believe in the project. More commonly, there is a major technical flaw that no one is handling.

The article relates to game development, but the issue is relevant for any other project. The urge to keep sensitive issues under the carpet is familiar enough.

Here are some steps I recall from the latest consulting project that helped in management of the “scary” stuff:

• Carefully store and process remarks sent by the client (there is good chance that sensitive issues are among them): store all remarks in one document, color-code them to distinguish difficult ones, dedicate a meeting with a client for walking through the remarks to ensure that they are understood properly and agree the solution
• When sensitive issue is identified, create dedicated approach to solve/mitigate it: brainstorm possible solutions, create issue tree to structure the thinking, identify constraints related to the issue (e.g. define most pessimistic scenario and start from there)
• Dedicate resources to follow the agreed approach to resolve/mitigate the issue

Some issues may really seem scary, but it turned out that solving them (or at least addressing them and mitigating related risk as far as it was possible) raised client’s confidence in the overall direction and justified all the effort that went into sorting them out.

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I might appear to have been living under the rock, because it is only now that I read the famous “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The main idea behind the book is to focus on creating new market space, instead of getting entangled in deadly fight for existing one.

Red oceans are existing markets. Red from competitive blood. Blue oceans are (usually) undiscovered market spaces. No competition there.

It is well described how to operate on red oceans. Strategic positioning, benchmarking, etc. Red ocean strategy is heavily inspired by the military (zero sum game). I’m afraid that we consultants work usually on red oceans.

The book might well be inspiring, even if it simply reuses some concepts supporting individual creativity in the corporate setting. Concepts like “out of the box” thinking, identification of hidden constraints, taking unusual point of view for inspiration etc. is repackaged for use in the enterprises.

Remarks related to improving corporate planning process itself by turning it more into “strategic conversation” remind me of Kees van der Heijden approach, which used scenarios to facilitate uncovering hidden drivers and communicating the strategy.

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I have this rather large file with loan data and I’m playing some statistics on it. During the day it was standard pivoting. But now in the evening I decided to check whether I can get anything by a fancy black-box clustering.

The best thing to get, of course, would be a set of clusters with significantly different loan performance (i.e. share of bad loans) that the others.

I’m using Cluto.

It is not particularly user-friendly. It requires input files that I need to kind of manually generate from Access and then fine-tune. And it is not excel add-in, but a command line program. But thanks to this it can handle my 100k records (my Excel version has 64k rows limit).

So far no results. But wait… just finished computing using the graph method. It took 17 minutes.

Nope. At the moment most distinctive cluster is ca. 6.5% better that the average in case of defaults. And ca. 11% in case of defaults considered fraud. I’m not impressed.

Guess they need to give me more data from the application. Currently I test on 6 variables and some are loan and not customer related so there is a field for improvement.

Or maybe I should read the manual some more and figure what what are the different optimization methods.

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Wow, my company still surprises me sometimes.

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I came back from Lviv yesterday. We were attending jobs fairs in the city.

Key lesson from the event: in Ukraine, technical universities, like one where fairs took place, often do without heating. Inside it is only slightly warmer that outside and people go around in coats.

Result: I am sick and one of my ears have not recovered yet from the pressure stress test on the plane and tomorrow I go to a concert.

On a different topic, even though recruitment potential seems promising, technical people in Lviv have serious problems with English. In fact even linguistics students had problems with English, which is quite ironic.

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It is comforting to see that I’m not the only one skeptical about using MS Project. See here the post by Steve Shu.

He gives all the good reasons not to use this program. Unless really necessary, perhaps. Like implementation project involving army of consultants. For more human-scale business consulting engagements, Excel does just fine IMHO. Simple is better.

Unfortunately, there is one but important reason sometimes people insist on having MS Project deliverable - it looks sophisticated and lots of work. That’s one reason I would never agree with, but this is real life.

Of these MS Project deliverables, once delivered, I never saw any being used by the client (e.g. reviewed and updated) even once.

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A major news shook our small world yesterday, one that might be seen as an end of an era. It’s all related to personal team issues, so I will spare the details.

I could compare my reaction with one of my friend’s, and there was quite a difference. One between “what will happen now” initial mindset (friend) and excitement (mine). There are now more options, not less, and I can’t see it as a downgrade.

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As of introduction:

Gene Zelazny is the Director of Visual Communications for McKinsey & Company and the author of Say It with Charts and Say It with Presentations. Since joining McKinsey in 1961, Zelazny has provided creative advice and assistance to professionals in the design of visual presentations and written reports.

I asked Zelazny his opinions about today?s presentations and how consultants can prepare winning ones.

Interview here. I was referenced to the interview by Guerilla Consulting.

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Best excel trick that I’ve seen for a good while:

These bars are created with in-cell formulas and do not use chart objects. Pretty lightweight and may well be useful.

Take the opportunity to explore the whole blog. Last post deals with Tufte-style charts in Excel.

I was once briefly exploring the topic of Edward Tufte and data visualization theory; if you are somehow into data analysis, you would benefit from doing likewise (so you can create charts and not “chartjunk”). From that time, I found this link to gallery of data visualizations in my bookmarks.

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Yesterday the most awaited Excel arrived, at last, and there was a moment of silence as everyone in the open space started opening it and then burst of comments. Almost everyone that I know and that was eligible made it, so there was much rejoicing. There was only one exception known to me, and an unfortunate one.

So now I am a consultant on a position of Consultant… never really thought it would get this far, when I first came here. Most significant for me: some particular people who positively contributed to the process, rather than its final outcome.

Nevertheless, I’m under a ton of things now and still need to recover from it - but I have a ticket to Hong Kong as well as apartment’s design that I like, and this is a lot already.

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I’m just trying to recover from our yesterday’s outing, which this time took us to Bemowo airport.

Before that, our ever-growing consulting workforce barely found enough space in a cinema theater and took its annual dose of success stories and outstanding results achieved during the last year. Seems that we are doing truly fine, and plan to get even better. (read more…)

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Yesterday I took part in an annual meeting of ConQuest Consulting. For those who may not know, ConQuest is a student consulting association, till recently the only one of kind in Poland. I worked with CQC for something like three years, starting as an IT support, and leaving after serving as a board member.

First of all, congrats to the new Board and Monika, the next President!

(read more…)

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While consumers benefit from the slew of new, user friendly applications delivered by the Web 2.0 companies, business users are stuck in a world where ease of use and aesthetics is hardly considered. This at least in the view of the article by Will Sturgeon:

David Girourard, SVP of enterprise at Google, claimed a major difference is that business software has seldom been designed with an end user in mind, whereas consumer technologies are only as good as the demand they can create by being desirable to end users.

Then:

He added: “Innovation is happening in the consumer world. Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. It is designed for business not for humans.”

However, he added that there is no reason why business apps should not address issues such as simplicity, pleasure or even aesthetics.

Do business users need to enjoy the applications that they are, after all, obliged to use anyway? Would this add value? Answers aside, selling this idea to the system guys might be a different story.

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It was when I tried to complete my ‘About me’ page that I first ran into problem with selecting business books that I could call inspiring. After some thinking I was able to indicate one, a book on strategic scenarios by Kees van der Heijden. Now it seems my ambiguous feelings towards management science found a much better articulated foundation in the article by Matthew Stewart, quoted by Nick Carr:

As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I?d think, like, I?d rather be reading Heidegger!

My grandpa, a technical university professor, used to say that the only things worth studying are the difficult ones, and consequently enticed me to explore mathematics, statistics, and IT related topics. Even if never fully bought into his total contempt for “soft stuff”, like psychology and marketing, I always felt there was so much truth to his view. Again M. Stewart:

(…) the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like ?out-of-the-box thinking,? ?win-win situation,? and ?core competencies.? When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

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I left St. Charles after my first training there, which took the whole last week.

I don?t know how the campuses of Microsoft, Google, etc. look like, but they must be somehow similar to Q Center in St Charles. Away from the city, environment created by spacy buildings and their green surroundings leave little to distract from work. I?m not sure if I would like it, but it seems productive.

In any case, I wouldn?t survive long on the diet they are serving here. I thought I could any amount without any adverse effect, but here I could feel how each bite is taking my slenderness out of me.

I met a nice Brazilian girl on the last day. She was going to visit New York as well, but got scared off by hotel prices. 150$ minimum, she said. How can you go to New York not even knowing where would you sleep? Hey, that’s exactly the way I was going to go there.

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