Saturday, August 29, 2009

Apprehending the Future by Bryan Alexander

I agree with the author about the ever changing trends in Technology. It is almost as though your newly implemented technologies become obsolete as soon as the organization has learned to adapt to them. This constant change creates instabilities in the organization. The Standish Group conducted four subsequent surveys in the United States during the years 1995, 1998, 2004 and 2009. The interviewed executive managers reported the alarming success rate of Information Technology investment projects at sixteen percent, twenty six percent, twenty eight percent and thirty two percent respectively. Success was defined as completing the Information Technology implementation projects within the planned time and budget (Standish Reports: Chaos, 1996, 1998, 2005, 2009). Fortunately we see an improvement in project management, but we still have a long way to declare mastery of Information Technology implementations.
Despite this, Executive Management must constantly keep an eye out for new technologies that will improve their internal efficiencies and hence competitive advantage. To improve the success rate and ROI of their Information Technology projects, management must have a deep understanding of the technical, political and cultural environments in which their new Information Technology investment(s) will be implemented. These technical, political and cultural forces are ubiquitous and powerful. If ignored, these forces impose challenges that may eventually suffocate the life out of the IT investment project, and the people involved. On the other hand if these forces are examined, understood and strategically accommodated during the project planning, the project will most likely succeed (PMBoK, 2004, Mulcahy, 2005, Tichy, 1983, Fombrun et al, 1984). In a nutshell, the technical, political and cultural environments are the waters that investment projects sink or swim, all depending on the management’s expertise in strategically maneuvering through these powerful environments to align them for equilibrium.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Robotics and The Delphi process


I predict that robotics will gain popularity in the average house hold within the next 5-10 years. This is if the pace at which people live their lives today does not slow down. Like many working adults, keeping up with work and life can be a big challenge for me, let alone the family obligations.

Robotic help with the mundane house hold chores would be a great stress releiver as coming back to a clean house and a freshly cooked healthy meal is priceless. It would improve our immune systems which would in turn reduce the related medical bills. Additionally, our time would be freed up to focus on the more important things in life, a purpose driven life.


Discuss the Delphi process and how we can modify it to collaborate and gain consensus. Some of the modifications to the process are anonymous, but anonymity takes time.
The Delphi process dates back to 1944 when General Arnold was forcasting the technological capabilities of interest to the militay. This technique allows the experts to explore ideas or produce relevant information for decision making. The most critical issue is that all participants must be well informed and undertand the goal of the Delphi process so that they do not answer questions inappropriately. The ten most common steps that must be included in the Delphi Method are:
a) Formation of the team of experts to undertake and to monitor the Delphi on the specified subject.
b) Select the panel(s) of participants in the exercise. The panels are the experts in the area to be investigated. Number of participants is dependent on the study design, minimum required is 4.
c) Develop the first round of the Delphi questionnaire.
d) Test the questionaire for proper wording, remove ambiguities.
e) Present this initial questionaire to the panelists.
f) Analyze their first responses.
g) Make the necessary modifications and retest.
h) Present this new version to the panelists.
i) Analyze their responses. Iterate (f) through (i) to achieve reliable and cerdible results.
j) The analysis team prepares a conclusive report of the opinions obtained. The panel view point is statistically summarized.
Other important factors to consider for a successful Delphi process are the communication process, location of the participants, available tools and techniques and a high level idea of the results to be expected from their application.
How can we hasten the process?
We can expedite this process by providing the agenda before hand so that the participants can research for more thorough and informed responses.
Creating templates where applicable from past Delphi techniques would save execution time.
A weighting system based on votes would speed up the evaluations.
How does open or closed collaboration affect the results?
Open collaboration encourages brain storming and group creativity which generates a large quantity of ideas. The closed collaboration and anonymity promotes individual creativity and quality ideas with depth. It prevents group think where individuals try to minimize conflict within the group by reaching a consensus without critically testing, analyzing or evaluating the ideas.
Some concerns about using the Delphi process is the evaluation criteria of the experts ability to forcast, some experts may be poor forecasters, example is forecasting future events without taking into consideration the the holistic view or context of these future events. This makes the forcast less relaible and applicable to the future.
Secondly, the Delphi process can be executed in an unsystematic manner which makes the process and subsequent results questionable. The iterations can also be repeated with the hopes of manipulating the responses in the desired direction.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

MyRobot

Annethepm's channelhttp://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=author&uid=42307MyRobothttp://www.gabcast.com/index.php?a=episodes&id=30989

Planning an innovation, a robot to automate mundane tasks around the house.

Web 2.0 Project Management Tool


Seavus Project Viewer

http://www.seavusprojectviewer.com/HostedTrial.aspx?cid=e105c9f7-7708-45fb-afdc-5b1b55826d19&OVRAW=project%20management%20tool&OVKEY=project%20management%20tool&OVMTC=standard&OVADID=47024381022&OVKWID=233425898522

This Project Management tool is used to plan, manage and track projects and is compatible with the widely used Microsoft Project. It also provides various views for users to organize and manage the organizations' objectives through a Structured Design Process (SDP). This tool helps the project manager to define the problem, designs and plan alternative solutions, evaluates and prioritizes the alternative solutions to select the most favorable solution and then helps to execute the action plan with the help of the staff.

Structured Design Process and Strategic Management

This organization is applying the Structured Design Process to implement its strategic vision through a Collaborative Action Plan. The stake holders in the community will implement this plan in four distinct and interactive stages. Stage one is about definition to build consensus on the problem situation as well as delineate a boundary of relevance. For this hypothetical example, the triggering question is “What are the critical current and anticipated issues to be addressed in order to achieve our strategic vision?” The stake holders generate and clarify ideas in response to a triggering question. The triggering question is prepared by the Inquiry Design Team. The next step is about affinity clustering representation. The stakeholders explore relationships for patterns to classify the issues into four affinity clusters. Then the participants are asked to vote on an individual and subjective basis by selecting the first critical five ideas. Step three is to influence representation, also referred to as problematique. Dialogue is focused on a different generic question to determine the relational pattern.
Stage two designs alternative scenarios for resolution of the problematique. The action alternatives are proposed by the stakeholders and the meanings are detailed. The different options field representation is to resolve the strategic management problematique. The superposition representation makes transparent to the stake holders the options with maximum leverage resolution of the problematique. The deepest level of representation exerts the maximum leverage. In step four the stakeholders design alternative scenarios after revisiting the options field representation.
Stage three evaluates the proposed alternatives for the most viable solution. This is done through a Trade-Off procedure. The stakeholders propose criterion relevant to the evaluation of alternatives presented. The respective priorities are represented and weights are assigned according to the priority structure. The criterion with the highest relative importance is assigned 100 points and the lowest is 30 points.
Stage four is the Action Plan. This is based on the preferred alternative with the highest points. The action plan represents the collective wisdom of the stakeholders. Sometimes the stakeholders prefer that the action plan is detailed into a blue print with role assignments to individuals or specific organizational entities.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela

After much thought, I decided that Nelson Mandela was most influential, especially in Africa. Before becoming the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, Nelson had been imprisoned for twenty seven years for his role in the anti apartheid movement. His strong belief in equality and the reconciliation between races eventually lead to the transition multi racial democracy in South Africa, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.
Africans have since followed in Mandela’s peaceful activist approaches. There are much less racial or tribal related conflicts. The environment has become relatively stable, encouraging more trade and technology advancements. People no longer focus on their most basic essentials, but look toward future planning and innovation because of Mandela’s pioneer work.