Jack in the box

“You are lacking out of the box thinking?”, the statement very common in our white collar profession. The statement mostly used when politicized situation or performance review. Actually what exactly is “out of the box thinking”, as per Wikipedia

“Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking.”

There are several engineers, developers’ gets this feedback regularly but honestly they don’t know what exactly the reviewer meant. Based on my opinion, “out of the box thinking” is something innate ability or one has to go through elite schooling to get that, so who ever lucky to born with that are the best? I think there is something wrong with this notion, we are pushing people who are not really lacking “out of the box”. But there is something they are missing too. What is that? I think the answer is, most of them are “above average but narrow minded”. Narrow minded is not a bad thing; it is just a trait which can be easily changed.

Even a law written by several top-notch lawmakers and reviewed by several pundits, we have loop holes here and there. So are they missing “out of the box thinking”? I don’t think so, law should cover all possible permutation and combination but most of the law lacking this, which is, mainly because some “narrow minded” compromise and some "narrow minded" people genuinely missing to see some big picture. The same applies to software development also, developers miss to big picture due to narrow minded not because “out of the box thinking”. What we need is training to change that character not unnecessary overloaded labels which are unable to change.    

Above & Beyond

Last decade’s most successful NFL organization is without a doubt New England Patriots (Pats). Even though their Super Star is Tom Brady, but Gem of New England Patriots team is Kevin Faulk. First of all, why he is called Gem of Pats?

1.    Loyal to his team, 11 years with Pats.
2.    3,550 rushing yard.
3.    16 rushing TD
4.    424 receiving and 3,667 receiving yard.
5.    Receiving TD 15

Based on his statistics, one can easily jump into conclusion that he is all-round player; hence he is qualified for Gem of Pats title. But the truth is different, Kevin started his career as Running Back, he was an excellent running back. During his tenure with Pats, over a period of time, his coach asked him to do other jobs also like full back, punt return. Those are not glamorous position in NFL, but Kevin took those jobs without any hesitant rather than quit to join other team as Running Back, which made him a Gem of his team with his astonishing all round performance.

Kevin’s success story makes me think something else which is very important to our changing world and lifestyle. Now we are living in a flat world where the luxury of doing one task per one human is gone. We can’t say “my job description is XYZ and you are asking me to do ABC”. The tasks outside of job description also have to be done as long as we can do it with or without some self-learning. 

There is nothing wrong that a developer tests an application, a architect helps developing some small piece of code, a manager runs some test scripts, a QA engineer debugging a code, a store manager checkout customer while sales clerk out for an emergency.

Return on Subscription

Return on investment is most obsessive term in business world. Everyone and every where business managers develops return on investment strategy to win their ideas from top management. It make lot of sense for decision makers,venture capitalists and investment gurus, they need to know what they are investing, how much, what are their return and so on.

Here is an interesting story,a divisional manager at India's well known BPO organization,they are working for a famous telemarketing company based on U.S. Their main job is to call as many as U.S customers to tell them about various new products. Their performance is measured by how many calls they made for any given day. The manager noticed that one side(West facing) of office employes making more phone call than other side(East facing). Both the sides has same level of people, their skills and everything matched but East facing side of employes make less call than West facing side. After several rounds of research, my friend found that there is big clock on the side of high productive employees side, so he decides to buy a clock at other side also.

He wrote an email to top management to ask permission to buy a clock which costs approximately Rs 1000/- ($20). But the decision maker asked him what are the ROI points to spend money for a clock now? All he knows is, there is something with the clock that makes the difference but he doesn't know the reasons. So he dropped the plan but he hired a contractor to monitor carefully on both side of the employees. He set a date to submit the report stragery. Finally the contractor submitted the report, which has many knee jerk reaction findings. intitution

1. Most of the employees of the firm are young and they don't have habit of wearing a watch.
2. All PCs in the firm are set as U.S Eastern time,hence the employees rely on the clock to find local Indian time.
3. The low productive side employees since they don't have a clock at their side, they always uses their mobile to check the time.
4. When they check the time,they are also noticing some text messages and some missed calls.
5. They are spending some time with texting back and call back to missed calls before getting to work.

The divisional manager was happy that his intuition was perfect but he spent Rs 10,000 (~$200) to find out reasons for Return on Investment.Now he sent the email with his ROI points to buy the clock, within 5 mins he got the permission to buy the clock.

The above story is the reality that we are facing nowadays, if we want to know ROI for each and everything,we might end up spending more. But business world is not going to change any time soon. Now we are at level 3 of Return on Investment, that is Return on Subscription. What is ROS? I subscribed for WSJ for last 5 years, how do i measure my return on my subscription? Is it valid for me to find return on a service? I googled the term ROS and Return on Subscription but none were returned useful information. I thought then ROS is already measured within ROI so ROS is a nut idea.But after several thinking and reading i think i'm right, we have to measure our return of our subscription.

For example, i'm a big fan of Quicken Software , I spend yearly $70 to upgrade to next version. How do i measure my ROS for this? My thinking is, i carefully review Quicken software's feature sets, Are they providing me more and more features on each upgrade? When i bought my first Quicken on 2002 it doesn't support online transaction download, now it provides it since i feel very satisfied with my upgrades. But they didn't change anything core within software. The service and purpose remains the same but more and more features on each release made me justify my subscription. What if they didn't provide any features on each release, because Quicken 2002 is more than enough to manage my home,personal expense, why they bother about spending their resource to upgrade Quicken on every release. As i said, Return on Subscription is real, customers always checks it and if there is no upgrade, there is no sale, no profit.