Seminar 10 Review

The seminar this week covered Business Planning and Storytelling.

According to me, storytelling is actually something everybody should care about and try to improve. It is very important for a human being to convey his thoughts and views to others as effectively as possible to be successful. The presentation on Storytelling covered how best to tell your 'story'. It is said that the human animal is a narrative animal and I feel it is true.

Story and storytelling are tools like any other - a pencil, a computer. An increasing number of professionals are discovering the power and applicability of story proficiency for business management, knowledge management, organizational development, coaching, sales, and software interface design. In large and small corporations, storytelling is not just for the marketing and legal departments anymore. (Source: MIT Media Lab)

"A big part of a CEO's job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that, he or she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story."
-- Robert McKee, Harvard Business Review, June 2003

Storytelling can be used not only for communication purposes but also for effective leadership, changing organizational behavior, power and influence, public relations, and sales and marketing.

According to Steve Denning, author of the book "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling", "At a time when corporate survival often entails disruptive change, leadership is about moving and inspiring people often to do things that they are not by habit or by predisposition inclined to do: just giving people a reason simply does not work."

I feel a good storyteller can make people listen and agree to what he/she says gets people to listen and implement the ideas and suggestions.

For more resources on Storytelling visit: National Storytelling Network

BUSINESS PLANNING:

Business Planning is something else we discussed in the seminar. We discussed about the various types of small businesses including Limited Liability Partnerships or LLPs.

Definition of Small Business - A business which is independently owned and operated, with close control over operations and decisions held by the owners. Business equity is not publicly traded and business financing is personally guaranteed by the owners. The business will have less than twenty employees.

The only criteria different from micro business here is that a micro business consist of less than 10 employees.

We discussed about the LLPs which was interesting since for my Business Law module I had done a lot of case based questions regarding liabilities of companies. So it was interesting to touch up on that again and also understand what the reasoning behind forming such a partnership is from both perspectives, legal and the owners'.

I was happy to see some statistics on the success and failure of these small businesses. I was not sure about what percentage of the small businesses survives to actually reach the stage where they are able to generate enough revenue to achieve profit. The presentation also listed some of the factors why the businesses fail. I was surprised to see that the largest percentage of failures was due to incompetence. I had always thought that a business might fail largely due to insufficient funds and capital. This presentation was very informative regarding the state of small business and their lifecycle.

Seminar 9 Review

The seminar this week was dedicated to Scenario Planning. Prof Gilbert started off by telling us how scenario planning was introduced in the corporate sector and was basically derived from the tools and method used in military planning and intelligence.

So what Scenario Planning? "Scenario planning is a model for learning about the future in which a corporate strategy is formed by drawing a small number of scenarios, stories how the future may unfold, and how this may affect an issue that confronts the corporation." It is something which is often used by organizations to make flexible long-term plans.

It is a tool specifically designed to deal with major, uncertain shifts in the firm's environment. It shines where other models might fail. It allows the organization or company to analyze the firm's external environment and how it will affect the opportunities and threats presented to the company in the future.

The model is not about predicting the future. Rather, it attempts to describe what is possible. The result of a scenario analysis is a group of distinct futures, all of which are plausible. The challenge then is how to deal with each of the possible scenarios.

The scenario planning method works by understanding the nature and impact of the most uncertain and important driving forces affecting the future. It is a group process which encourages knowledge exchange and development of mutual deeper understanding of central issues important to the future of your business. The goal is to craft a number of diverging stories by extrapolating uncertain and heavily influencing driving forces. The stories together with the work getting there has the dual purpose of increasing the knowledge of the business environment and widen both the receiver's and participant's perception of possible future events. The method is most widely used as a strategic management tool, but it is also used for enabling group discussion about a common future.

The professor showed us a presentation he had made on the telecommunication industry long time ago. To be honest, I wasn't able to comprehend most of the content of that presentation. But I did observe the generic structure on which the presentation was based on. I realized that using this model it was easier to include the unknown factors of the world market into a single design on the basis of which certain observations could be made easily about the strategy of the company for the future. After researching a bit on the topic I found out a very simple design for the scenario matrix which the professor had used in his presentation.

The matrix design is shown below:

To analyze the interaction between the variables, a matrix of scenarios is developed using the two most important variables and their possible values. Each cell in the matrix then represents a single scenario. For easy reference it is better to give each scenario a descriptive name. If there are more than two critical factors, a multidimensional matrix can be created to handle them but would be difficult to visualize beyond 2 or 3 dimensions. Alternatively, factors can be taken in pairs to generate several two-dimensional matrices. (Source: NetMBA)

We did make a scenario matrix during the seminar for a company that wanted to enter the Singapore market and provide free Wi-Fi Hotspots. It wasn't very clear to me then how exactly to choose the variables but after some extra reading I think I can do a better job next time if such a matrix is required.

The scenario planning process consists of the following steps:

1. Identify people who will contribute a wide range of perspectives

2. Comprehensive interviews/workshop about how participants see big shifts coming in society, economics, politics, technology, etc.

3. Cluster or group these views into connected patterns

4. Group draws a list of priorities (the best ideas)

5. Sketch out rough pictures of the future based on these priorities (stories, rough scenarios)

6. Further work out to detailed impact scenarios (determine in what way each scenario will affect the corporation)

7. Identify early warning signals (things that are indicative for a particular scenario to unfold)

8. Monitor, evaluate and review scenarios

Some don’ts for Scenario Planning:

1. treating scenarios as forecasts

2. constructing scenarios based on too simplistic a difference, such as optimistic and pessimistic

3. failing to make scenario global enough in scope

4. failing to focus scenarios in areas of potential impact on the business

5. treating scenarios as an informational or instructional tool rather than for participative learning / strategy formation

6. not having an adequate process for engaging executive teams in the scenario planning process

7. failing to put enough imaginative stimulus into the scenario design

8. not using an experienced facilitator

Some of the benefits of scenario planning include:

• Managers are forced to break out of their standard world view, exposing blind spots that might otherwise be overlooked in the generally accepted forecast.
• Decision-makers are better able to recognize a scenario in its early stages, should it actually be the one that unfolds.
• Managers are better able to understand the source of disagreements that often occur when they are envisioning different scenarios without realizing it.

Something else I puzzled over during the seminar was the term "Zero-Sum". The professor had used it in his presentation but I didn't remember to ask during the seminar. So I thought of finding some more about it on the internet. This is what Wikipedia had to offer on the term:

"Zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero."
So it’s a situation where it is impossible for all the players to win.

Other Sources:

Wikipedia- Scenario Planning

Value Based Management

Proof of Concept Presentation

Here is our group's presentation that we presented last week:



Uploaded on: Slideshare

Seminar 8 Review

I wouldn't have been able to write this review had my interview not been postponed. I am glad I was able to attend this seminar. It was really interesting and I really enjoyed giving the presentation on the proof of concept for our project.

In this seminar we learnt mostly about design issues and how use cases can help us walk-through the problems and dilemmas that might be faced by the user while using the designed software or interface. It was fascinating and surprising to me to find out that design is not just an abstract concept but a structured process of a business model. I had not known of use cases and UML before this seminar.

What is UML? Well, the exact definition says, "The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems."

What is used for these representations are UML diagrams. "Each UML diagram is designed to let developers and customers view a software system from a different perspective and in varying degrees of abstraction."

Before this class, I had never heard of Use Cases. After the class though, I was very interested in knowing more about them as I realized after introduction to the concept, that not only they would help our team design a much better and more interactive interface for the users, but also help me think in a methodical way while designing a system in the future if ever needed.

"A use case is a set of scenarios that describes an interaction between a user and a system. Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function."

A use case UML Diagram would summarize the aspects of the use case into a structured from that can then be easily analyzed and worked upon to improve the model further. This way, UML diagrams for use cases help a designer or a company judge and improve their interface or strategies which relate to interaction with users. UML is a tool by which it becomes very convenient to include the effects of the abstract human behaviour into the logical approach that needs to be taken when analyzing a business model or strategy.

A Use Case Diagram has the following elements:

Actors: An actor portrays any entity that performs certain roles in a given system. The different roles the actor represents are the actual business roles of users in a given system. An actor in a use case diagram interacts with a use case.

Use case: A use case is a visual representation of a distinct business functionality in a system. To choose a business process as a likely candidate for modeling as a use case, you need to ensure that the business process is discrete in nature. Each of the business functions can be classified as a potential use case.

System boundary: A system boundary defines the scope of what a system will be. A system cannot have infinite functionality. So, it follows that use cases also need to have definitive limits defined. A system boundary of a use case diagram defines the limits of the system.

I am confident that after using use cases for our project, we will be able to remove any gaps that may be preventing our interface/ model to fully appeal to the targeted customers or users.

Sources:

Wikipedia

CSIS 4650 Object Oriented Analysis and Design Team Website

Developer.com