TechAvial

Explainer video

2015-02-24T03:53:00.001-08:00

Our first attempt/s in creating an explainer video for TestBudha - tool for creating online exams and WiseMirror - the feedback gathering tool. We used Powtoons- an excellent tool which helps in creating explainer videos in a couple of hours.

Please do write to me in person about your thoughts and comments about the video...

-Manoj

PMP online mock exam

2014-08-29T04:53:00.000-07:00

“PMI” and “PMP” are registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc

Here is a PMP mock test that I prepared. It has 25 questions and it focus on questions based on formulas. So practicing this online mock PMP test should help you get couple of questions correct during the actual exam.

Please do let me know if you find this useful.

You can access the test by clicking the this link.

-Manoj

Agile testing - Reducing time to market

2014-02-03T21:42:00.001-08:00

I did a presentation for TechGig on Agile Testing. Sharing the presentation here.

Agile testing - Reducing time to Market from Manoj Kg

TDD Training in Bangalore

2014-01-18T04:50:00.000-08:00

I am conducting a 3 TDD workshop for Java Developers in Bangalore. It's organized by Kens Communications. You can use REF2004 as a discount code to get further 15% discount on early bird offer( limited offer). You can block the seats here

Meghraj - Cloud computing for governance in India

2014-01-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Picture is for representational purpose only. Not related to actual project

Photo courtesy - http://cloudcomputingnews.in

The cloud is definitely catching up as a preferred choice for taking government e-services to people. There is a lot of interest in cloud by many governments administration across the globe due to the low capital costs and high scalability. One significant shift in this way was the “Cloud First Policy” by Obama. Even though there are concerns especially regarding data security, this trend is definitely picking up. The Govt of India is also putting efforts to tap the power of cloud for governance. National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) by Indian government was the first step in that direction.

NeGP was an ambitions plan to make all government services accessible to citizens in their own locality, through common service delivery outlets at affordable costs. But this plan was not able to realize its full potential due to the inherent challenges in implementation. But what it did was creating the infrastructure which is forming the basis for adoption of cloud computing for the governance and in way accelerating accomplishment of goals of NeGP.

Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) of Government of India has announced a project named as ‘Meghraj - GI Cloud’. The ‘GI Cloud’ is the Government of India’s cloud computing environment that will be used by government departments and agencies at the centre and states. The vision of this project is to accelerate delivery of e-services provided by the government and to optimize ICT spending of the government.

GI Cloud Architecture

Source :White paper GI Cloud (Meghraj) Adoption and Implementation Roadmap, Department of Electronics and Information Technology

As per the Government of India’s GI Cloud (Meghraj) Strategic Direction paper published in their website, the GI Cloud is envisaged to be established initially on national and state data centre assets (adapted for the cloud through virtualization) and connected through existing network infrastructure such as the SWANs, NKN, as well as the internet. Based on demand assessment and taking into account security related considerations, government may also engage the services of private cloud providers.

Reference

http://deity.gov.in

Accomplishing your goals – Power of Fantasy realization technique

2014-01-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

Source:Sheldon/good-wallpapers.com

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

-Paulo Coelho

We talked about the Regulatory Focus theory by E. Tory Higgins and the importance of identifying the regulatory fit of a person when setting the goals here. It’s interesting to go further on this topic and explore what else makes us commit to some goal whereas at the same time being non-committal to some other. Fantasy realization theory (Oettingen, 2000) states that perceiving future as desirable and feasible is the only prerequisite for strong goal commitment.

Accomplishing a goal involves a present state and a desired end state. Moving from the present state to desired end state requires strong commitment towards the goal. It’ mentioned that perceiving future as desirable and feasible is the only prerequisite for strong goal commitment. If it is that easy, then why many of us are failing to meet our goals. Our ability to not meet our goals is so high that industries like fitness industry make more money from the dropouts than the regular visitors.

The answer might lie on how you are regulating your thoughts. Fantasy realization differentiates three modes of self-regulatory thoughts – dwelling, indulging and mental contrasting. Which mode of self-regulated thought we are using plays a key role in gaining the commitment towards the goal. Let’s take an example of a person struck with a job. The goal of the person is to move out of the job in search of better future.

Now the problem has two factors in the objective problem space. The desirability of the end state and tasks that need to be accomplished to enable the transition from the present state to the desired state. Assume the person is focusing on the present state. She/he finds that the job is not able to meet his/her aspiration due to the challenges with the organization or any other reason. The person is here focusing on the negative aspect of the current reality. You are dwelling when you are focusing on the negative aspect of the present reality without having an understanding of the desirability of the future state.

The reverse in the thought process is called indulging. You are focusing on the future job and find everything about the job desirable. You would definitely like to land on that dream job. But you are comfortable with the current status quo in the present state – the status quo created by the environment. You fail to see the need to act on the current status quo to enable transition to the desired state. In both dwelling and indulging, your commitment towards the goal is going to be less.

The third mode of self-regulatory thought is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting helps people to selectively decide on the goals and commit to it. Mental contrasting does this by visualizing on the desired future and then by reflecting on the present reality that stands in the way of accomplishing the future. It takes care of both the desirability and feasibility part of the goals.

Goals are usually more desirable when they are promoting positive outcome (provide outstanding customer experience), helps in acquiring competence (help you to become the best programmer) and provides internal rewards (personal satisfaction of helping a customer) against preventing negative outcome (avoid customer complaints), demonstrating competence (you are good in programming, you can solve this problem) and provides external rewards (employee of the month). So when the goals are in alignment with personal desirability, the chances of commitment goes up.

Identifying the desirability of goal is only the first part. Individuals also has to view the negative aspect of the present reality as obstacles for attainment of desired future and prepare for potential impediments by planning in advance on how to tackle them. This increases the expectation of success from the goals. The desirability combined with the feasibility (expectation of success) enables people to be sensitive to which goals are attainable. As the expectation of success increases, the level of commitment further goes up towards that goal.

So visualizing the desirability of future state, treating the current state as obstacle to reach there and identifying if –then conditions to tackle the roadblocks for the transition considerably increases your commitment towards that goal. So I would suggest dedicating at least half an hour per week to think about the desirability of the goal and thinking about if-then conditions to remove the roadblocks. You would start seeing yourself moving more and more towards that desired end state. You can do the same exercise as a team also.

But why should this work? As per Oettinger and Gollwitzer, the conjoint elaboration of future and present reality makes both simultaneously accessible and link them together in the sense that the reality stands in the way of realizing the desired state. This leads to greater activity in brain areas associated with episodic memory. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events. Events recorded in episodic memory may trigger episodic learning – behavior changes that occur as a result of an event.

Source

Gabriele Oettingen and Peter M Gollwitzer - Strategies for setting and implementing goals.
Gabriele Oettingen - Free fantasies about the future and the emergence of developmental
Episodic memory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory

Integrating Spring MVC with Google App Engine - Part 2

2013-12-23T23:22:00.003-08:00

The first part of this blog is available here.

We already talked about the environment setup for SpringMVC and GAE integration in the last post. This post covers the steps to create a sample application using GAE and SpringMVC. The objective of this sample application is to accept user name and password of a user and persist it to a data store. The application then provides the user back a unique "user id". The key for the user in data store will be used as the "user id" in this sample application.

1. First let’s update the web.xml with the information regarding the first page of the application.

<welcome-file-list>

<welcome-file>jsp\LogIn.jsp</welcome-file>

</welcome-file-list>

2. We will now create the LogIn.jsp which captures the user name and password of the new user which needs to be persisted.

<html>
<body>
<h1 id="banner">Create new user</h1>
<form action="authenticate.do" method="POST">
<table>
<tr>
<td>Username:</td>
<td><input type='text' name='username' /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Password:</td>
<td><input type='password' name='password'></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan='2'><input name="submit" type="submit"> <input name="reset" type="reset"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
</body>
</html>

3. Update Web.xml with Spring Servlet information and URL mapping to trap the request from LogIn.jsp. The requests with URL pattern .do will be sent to DispatcherServlet from Spring.

<servlet>
<servlet-name>SpringServlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet
</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/spring-controller-mapping.xml</param-value>
</init-param>
<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>SpringServlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

4. Create the spring configuration XML which maps your Controllers to URLS. I have mentioned the name as spring-controller-mapping.xml which is created in the same folder as web.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beanshttp://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd"><bean name="/authenticate.do" class="com.example.myproject.contoller.MyController"/></beans>

5. Now we need to create the controller for serving the request coming up with name “authenticate.do”. The controller shown in this example is a simple class which implements Controller interface and use Google App Engine to persist username and password to data store. It then return the key id back to the UI.

public class MyController implements Controller {

public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
throws ServletException, IOException {
try {
Long userCreated = createUser(request.getParameter("username"), request.getParameter("password"));
return new ModelAndView("jsp/Home.jsp", "id", userCreated);
} catch (EntityNotFoundException e) {
throw new IOException("User not created");
}

}

private Long createUser(String userName, String password) throws EntityNotFoundException {
DatastoreService dataStoreService =DatastoreServiceFactory.getDatastoreService();
Entity user = new Entity("user");
user.setProperty("username", userName);
user.setProperty("password", password);
Key key = dataStoreService.put(user);
Entity entity = dataStoreService.get(key);
return entity.getKey().getId();
}
}

6. We need to now create the “Home.jsp” to display the result of update operation. We will create simple JSP file.

<html><head><title>User creation</title></head><body><h1>user created </h1><p>User ID : ${id}</p></body></html>

7. Start the GAE server and launch the application (Please see the steps in last post). See pictures to understand the steps.

8. Go to GAE admin console to validate the user information has been created in data store.

The console logs tells you the URL for admin console

Our application is ready and successfully persisting data to data store using GAE interface.

-Manoj

Integrating Spring MVC with Google App Engine - Part 1

2013-12-23T22:55:00.003-08:00

This is a step by step tutorial on using Spring MVC with Google App Engine (GAE). The tutorial is intended only to act as a starting guide on the topic. But you should be able to figure out the details once you get started.

Environment

GAE setup

JDK7. You can down load JDK from here.
Eclipse Kepler service version. You can down load the same from here.
After Eclipse setup, configure Google plugin for Eclipse. Detailed instructions can be found here

Project setup

1. Create the Google App Engine project by selecting File->New->Dynamic Web Project.
2. Provide project name. Select Target run time as “Google App Engine” and configuration as “Default Configuration for Google App Engine”.

3. Continue clicking on “Next” button till you reach the “Google App Engine” configuration window.

4. Provide application ID and module name. I have provided the same name as the project. Click on finish.

5. Test the configuration by clicking on Run->Run as ->Run on server.

6. Select the existing server and finish.

7. You should be able to view following page once server is started.

Google App Engine environment is now ready. Now let’s configure Spring MVC which will be used for front end.

Spring setup

1. Download Spring from here.

2. Download AOP alliance jar from here.
3. Download Commons Logging jar from here.
4. Add the following files shown in the picture to your lib folder under WEB-INF. The selected files in the picture comes from Spring distribution downloaded.

The integration of Spring MVC with GAE is now complete. Now we will try to create simple project using Spring MVC and GAE in the next post.

-Manoj

Google Zeitgeist - What the world searched in 2013?

2013-12-18T04:28:00.003-08:00

Curious to know what made the biggest news in 2013 in internet? Google has published Google Zeitgeist 2013 which tells you not only the top 100 searches in the world, but also what you searched in 2013. But what I found interesting is the Trend Globe which displays the top 5 searches for major cities around the world all through the year.

Zeitgeist means spirit of the age or spirit of the time and shows the influences of the culture of a particular period in time. Please find the information on the top 100 searches on Google here .

The following are the people who has been searched most in the internet

The events which got most attention in last are

-Manoj

Introduction to Cloud deployment models - Cloud computing tutorial 2

2013-12-09T17:13:00.002-08:00

You can read first part of the tutorial here

Based on the target users of a cloud services, physical placement and management of cloud infrastructure, NIST has defined four cloud deployment services namely public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and community cloud, the major being the first three.

Private Cloud

The cloud infrastructure is for the sole use of a single entity. This could be an organization or an administration. Here the services are provisioned, managed, and operated by the organization or a third party with whom the organization has signed a contract or some combination of them.

Characteristics of Private Cloud

The private cloud could be hosted inside office premises or outside.
Private Cloud is fully dedicated for an entity. Private Cloud could be managed by the entity which owns it or by a vendor by contractual agreement with an entity.
Private Cloud usually requires high investment compared to other cloud deployment models

When to go for Private Cloud?

When the information stored in the cloud is sensitive and it requires high control and security.
When performance of service is critical for the organization

Public Cloud

The public cloud is available to all. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a cloud service provider and the user can avail the service for pay per use cost.

Characteristics of Public Cloud

Public Cloud don't require initial upfront investment. Users pay for usage.
It lives on the premises of the cloud provider. It’s always off-site for cloud users

When to go for public cloud?

When the focus is on reducing capital expenses.
When the data is not really critical
When the processing requires high scalability and flexibility in terms of computing power

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability

(Source: The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing)

An introduction to cloud computing - Cloud computing tutorial

2013-12-04T22:37:00.004-08:00

Cloud has now emerged as the solution for all who is looking for reducing the high IT operational costs. But the awareness about cloud, the benefits it brings and challenges associated with cloud is still not understood by many. This tutorial is intended to introduce you to the cloud.

What is Cloud computing?

Even though the word cloud is familiar to all of us, what is referred as cloud computing is not clear to many of us. On top of that, we interchange cloud computing with cloud services in many contexts. Even though they are closely related, they are not the same. So let’s get to the root of this first.

Cloud computing consists of all that is part of the environment through which cloud services can be delivered wherever and whenever you need. Providing a cloud service requires a combination of hardware, networks, storage and services. The hardware is required for the service to be processed; storage is required for storing the data in the cloud, network to access cloud services from anywhere. In short the goal of cloud computing is to enable cloud services.

The advent of the internet has played a key role in establishing the environment for cloud computing. Internet connects billions of user access devices like computers, mobiles and various other devices and huge number of networks with high infrastructure capabilities in terms of storage, processing power belonging to millions of public, private, government and academic networks establishing the largest medium for building cloud services. So for a cloud service provider, internet provided a network which is connected literally to everyone.

What is Cloud Service?

Cloud services include the delivery of software, platform and infrastructure over the Internet based on user demand using cloud computing infrastructure. A user based on the need may opt for one service or combination of multiple services.

Delivery of software as service in cloud is known by the name SaaS (Software as Service). Google Docs is an example of Software as a Service. Google Docs provides users ability to use software for managing Documents, spreadsheets, presentations as a service over the internet avoiding the need to install this software on your personal computer. The other advantage is the ability to access these documents from anywhere as long as you are connected to the internet.

Delivery of Platform as service for hosting your applications in the cloud is known by the name PaaS (Platform as Service). In Paas, the users own the software application. They build their own application based on their organizational needs. But the complexity of managing the environment in which their application is hosted in removed from them by a set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications quick and efficient.

This enables software application developers to focus on building applications to solve the business problems without worrying about storage, memory etc. Google App Engine is an example for PaaS where Google provides its world class infrastructure for deploying your application. You need to pay for this service based on your usage only.

Infrastructure as service is providing hardware and software that powers it all – servers, storage, networks, operating systems as a cloud service. IaaS has the lowest level of abstraction and requires knowledge for managing the underlying complexity.

Amazon EC2 is an example for IaaS.

Cloud services are characterized by its capabilities for pay for use, rapid elasticity, location transparency, the network access from anywhere and on demand self service

Based the definition by NIST, Cloud computing should possess the following characteristics.

Google App Engine's Admin console

On Demand Self Service

A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Broad network access

Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

Resource pooling

The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand bringing in a sense of location independence. Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.

Rapid elasticity

Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand.

Measured service

Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

You can read second part of tutorial here.

(Source: The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing)

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How to restrict what people see on facebook?

2013-11-12T19:26:00.005-08:00

Some of us, if not most of us use facebook as a broadcasting medium. This is not ideal and sometime not desirable due to the amount of important information you disclose on your walls and timeline. Hackers connected to you through false identities or apps can use this information destructively. You can read more about that here.

But you might be able to prevent most of it by following few simple steps.

Don’t accept friend request from applications you don’t trust or users you don’t know
Ensure right level of access for each person who is connected to you. Many banks or credit cards use your personal information to validate you. Make sure that it’s not freely available in your facebook account.

You can follow the following steps to restrict access to your account

First click on your name in blue ribbon on top to go to your home page
Click on the friends link
Now comes the hardest part especially if you are connected to lot of people. Assign each of your friends to appropriate group. You can create a new group also. By default, facebook uses smart grouping. So all the friends who are working on the same company will be already grouped together. Personally I would recommend to group people based on the kind of information you want to share and discuss with them.
No go back to your home page. Click on the extreme right symbol on the blue bar (marked in pic) and select the Privacy setting.
Now you can create the default setting about who can see your post, who can contact you and who can find you in facebook. You can also decide who can see the content you are posting at the time of the post also. See step 7.
Now click on “timeline and tagging” on your left. This provides you some powerful capabilities to decide what should be seen especially by friends or friend’s friend when they tag you. By default it’s off. So when friends tag you, it becomes visible to all.
As mentioned in 5, you can also decide who should see you content when you are posting it by targeting it to a group also.

-Manoj

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Trends in Cloud Computing - The second wave

2013-11-07T19:57:00.003-08:00

I am a believer in cloud and the power it brings to the world. But it’s important to know who else believes in cloud computing. As per Gartner’s Hype analysis, some of the cloud models have already crossed the “Trough of Disillusionment” and is moving towards “Plateau of productivity”. There has been a drastic increase in the number of applications getting released in a SaaS model. In 2014, based on Forrester Research, this techcrunch article predicts a market size of $75 billion. There are still a lot in the Peak of inflated expectations and some may even not cross the Trough of Disillusionment. But it’s a fact that cloud has arrived.

But there is an interesting trend that’s emerging in the background. The following shows the search volume in Google for cloud in 2008.

Indiais on the top of the list. But let’s shift the focus to cities as this might give us a better picture. As you could see in the below list, the top cities in the list are also the cities where the first wave of technology starts.

Now fast forward to 2013 and the focus shifts to Asia and Africa.

Now India being an outsourcing destination and one with one of the largest IT workforce, this might not be a surprise. But what is interesting is the emergence of Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa to the top. But on second thoughts, it is expected as the way these two continent uses web is different from the rest of the world. As you could see in following picture, most of the web traffic in these continents comes from mobile. Not only that, but it’s increasing at a rapid speed.

Source : royal.pingdom.com

This brings a new opportunity for all the small and medium enterprises. All this mobile phone users have started getting the taste of the web. The cloud provides the entrepreneurs a platform to create apps and roll out to these users. Cloud removes the large upfront costs needed in the past. All you need is an idea and the world is a click away. Most of these countries also have localized problems which are crying for attention. Removal of the entry barrier by the cloud and access to customers by mobile now should allow the entrepreneurs a good chance to solve many of these problems.
-Manoj

Zero down time with Blue Green Deployments and Why I hate Google App Engine

2013-10-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

For the uninitiated, Blue Green deployment is having two production environments, blue and green which are identical. It needs to cut across all your layers as shown in above picture. Your blue environment will be your live environment. The next version of software will be released to green environment and tested before made available to your users (you may expose your green environment to a set of privileged users). Once the software is ready in green environment, you switch your URL to green server instead of pushing the code from green to blue.

This helps you in accomplishing almost zero down time. The chance of having a post production issue is almost nil as you have verified the new version already in green environment. Even if you find an issue, the only thing you need to do is to switch back to the blue environment. Even though this technique was there from the beginning of development, it required a post from Martin Fowler to make the concept popular.

Now let me explain my whining about Google App Engine (GAE). Don’t get misled by the title. There is still a lot of love between us. GAE has made us really fast in feature development. But what frustrates me is why Google missed to provide Blue Green deployments to GAE. They are so close to the mark. GAE has an option to have versions in code layer but not in data store.

It worked like a charm for us in first two releases. We will be having one version in production say 2.test.appspot.com. All user requests to our URL say www.testurl.com will be routed to the above URL. We will be continuously deploying new code to production creating new versions like 3.test.appspot.com, 4.test.appsot.com etc. When we are ready to switch to the new version, we just reroute the traffic from the main URL to the new version. As this builds are already tested, all you need for the release is a click.

But that’s history now as we had to do some changes in data structure it self – Had to switch data type from String to Text. Sadly versions in GAE is limited to code layer. So we could have the blue – green separation only till code layer and at data layer both point to same data store. It needed tweaking in code to accomplish zero down time for this release. So Google, if you are listening, please provide versions at data store also.

-Manoj

Personal Kanban – Get more from life by managing less

2013-10-21T01:00:00.001-07:00

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”

― Herb Kelleher

Personal Kanban is one productivity tool which offers you the capability to manage your work packages by using the concept of visualizing the workflow and managing your work in progress limit. We discussed the importance of managing the work packages instead of managing time in an earlier post. This post covers steps to create your own Personal Kanban board.

I have slightly modified my board from what Jim Benson suggested in his book. Creation of board consist of two steps. The only thing you need to create the board is sticky notes and a place to stick them. Keep the board in a place where you get to see then often in a day.

1. Visualization of work flow

When you transform work packages in to sticky notes in your board, it’s becomes more than an amorphous concept. It no more needs to transform into a crisis to get your attention. Once you define the flow which creates value, your focus shift from managing time to helping a work package to achieve the final state of the flow.

In Personal Kanban, the flow is as simple as personal Kanban it self. In my board, the flow looks like this.

The focus now is to bring the work package from backlog to done state as fast as possible. But before that we need to fill in our backlog with the list of items that need our time. If you have a work package that would take months for completion (like publishing a book), add only the smallest next logical steps to your Kanban Board. If you want to ensure that you have continuous focus on this goal, add a dedicated lane for this on your Kanban board.

2. Limit your WIP ( Work In Progress )

WIP is the upper limit on the number of work packages you can have on each state at a time. This helps you in accomplishing an optimized flow of work from backlog to the done state in shortest cycle time. WIP is also acts as an information radiator of potential bottlenecks in the flow. This forces you to stop the flow of work and fix the bottleneck.

We have already discussed about the myth called multitasking here and here. There is a limit on the number of activities you can work in parallel without impacting the flow. Taking up multiple tasks in parallel leads to increased cycle time for the completion of an activity. Unfinished work packages have no value. Also the context switching drains you mentally. Understanding your personal work in progress limit by trial and error is important to get into the flow.

I also have defined a WIP limit for my backlog. This helps me to pick the most valuable work packages. I add items looking at only a week as time horizon. It helps to continually prioritize and make my board clutter free. The same applies to “Pause” state also. There will be some activities which you will have to pause due to external dependencies. But you have to keep a control over it and ensure that a block is not forming there.

Ref: Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life by Jim Benson, Tonianne DeMaria Barry

-Manoj

Secrets of leading by influence

2013-10-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

Guest post by Prashantha Kumar and Seema

In leading Software company works Mr. Ramanath Rao, as a Delivery Manager. He has about 10 people reporting to him. In spite of his position, when he approaches his team for any work, the team members are often seen procrastinating or agreeing to do it quite reluctantly. Mr. Sushil Kumar works in the same team as a project manager. But he seems to wield more influence on the team members. I.e. when he approaches the team members for any work, they seem to agree more amiably.

This got Mr. Rao thinking, as to what was it Mr. Kumar did different, that though he did not have a higher position, the team members did actually look up to him. Mr. Rao kept on losing his sleep over it. Finally he decided to have an honest conversation with Sushil regarding his concern. They had a lunch meeting and had a candid discussion around this concern.

Here are some of key message Sushil gave to Mr. Rao. Though driving business results is our key focus, we should remember that we are working people. They are unique and have their own way of responding to situations. Sushil explained to Ram about personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness; which are the tools of the trade today.”

During this discussion Mr. Rao identified that he needs to focus on his people sills. Mr. Rao decided to go back and observe how Sushil dealt with his teammates. Mr. Rao was able to see how Sushil was interacting with his teammates. He observed that Sushil seemed more approachable and showed genuine concern in resolving challenges his people are facing.

During this process the biggest advantage for Mr. Rao is “Self-awareness”. This is the first step to developing oneself. He was able to see how the most powerful forms of communication contain no words and take place at a much faster rate than speech. The adhesive that holds the communication process together is an emotional exchange triggered by primary biological emotions that include anger, sadness, fear, and joy. As a result Mr. Rao set out to try and accommodate changes he perceived as necessary. Here are some key learnings Mr.Rao has noted down.

Preparing for Change

· Leadership starts with “Trust”

· Don’t forget that we are dealing with people made of emotions

· Listen to people and understand true concern

· Carve out some quality time for acquiring new skills.

· Motivate yourself every day.

· Leadership is as much about defeat as it is about success

· Always remember, there Are Incredibly Smart People around Who Will Help if we ask

The above post is a guest blog by Prashantha Kumar and Seema.

Prashantha Kumar leads Global Services and Support organization for a multinational company. He has 14+ years of industry experience in information technology.His interests are aligning people strengths to deliver value to the organization and collaborate with people from different culture.You can connect with him by mail or LinkedIn

Seema, is a soft skills trainer and a Lecturer in Healthcare Management. She has 6 years of industry experience. She has regularly presented courses and training workshops for private and public sectors as well as students and teachers in India. Her main interests are reading, writing, painting and "People"!

Why managing time is not a good idea?

2013-10-09T02:23:00.002-07:00

There are enough self help books on effective time management techniques. But this still remains a big challenge for most of us. Steven Covey’s time management matrix (pictured below) is a great tool to pick the right activities which brings maximum value. But it still fails in taking you to the state of flow. One of the major reasons for this is our skewed understanding about time.

Everyday we commit to complete many activities. Some of them might not be even explicit. I have tried taking up coding, responding to a customer’s request, catching up on news and updating the face book all at the same time. The causality usually will be high value activity. The activity moves from Important-Not Urgent quadrant to Important - Urgent quadrant transforming itself to a crisis and requiring immediate attention.

The research at Stanforduniversity shows that multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. In all the tests conducted, multitaskers failed miserably.

The problem here is with the way we handle time. Most of us treat time as discrete units which fill up to form a day. It’s like having a big carton which then you fill with small boxes. You can continue adding small boxes into the carton till there is a space. If a carton is your day, then smaller boxes are time units you have planned for each activity. But the way events evolve in a day don’t follow that rule. You may receive calls anytime from your son’s school or you might need to help a friend with an emergency. Unplanned events are triggered all the time.

A more apt example is that of a highway (courtesy: Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Toniann). Assume you keep on adding vehicles to a highway. There is a limit beyond which the flow of vehicle gets impacted. As you move towards 100% capacity utilization, the chances are you might never be able to travel from one point to another. Now the question is which is most important? - Utilizing the full capacity of a highway or the ability of a vehicle to travel from point A to point B.

It’s important for you to know the maximum number of vehicles that can be allowed in a highway to have the most effective flow. The same is true for your day also. Instead of managing your time, you should manage your work in progress (WIP) items. Once you reach your WIP limit, you shouldn’t take any more work items till you finish the work package you have committed. You need to know your work in progress limit for a day. Few of the advantages you get by managing your WIP are
You focus on your throughput. You will be having more valuable results than a lot of “in progress” activities
Forces you to prioritize and say No to low high priority – low importance activities.
Your focus shifts to getting items to DONE state.
Prevents context switching
You can tie it up with Covey’s time quadrant to get maximum value. So if you don’t know your WIP limit, I would suggest starting with three. You can then calibrate based on your experience.
-Manoj

How you can make Google find and index your AJAX/GWT site

2013-10-01T06:02:00.003-07:00

Post by Manoj and Rakesh
The better user experience an AJAX/GWT website provides comes with a cost – a cost so high that many web developers stay away from this awesome technology. Java script produces dynamic content which is not seen by the crawlers. So what humans and search engines see on this website is not the same. Search engines are blind to all the content produced by AJAX. This is like opening a state of the art showroom in the most remote location in the world. You might have the best content, but nobody knows where to find you.

If you look at the following flow, you can understand the difference in communication with an AJAX website and non AJAX website. Google provides an awesome tool-"Google Web Masters tool" to help you understand how search engines see your content. You can use the option “Fetch as Google” under Crawl in Google Web Masters tools.

Click here to see the picture source

Till search engines come up with a way of identifying and indexing the content in an AJAX website, you need to use a hack. The following are the steps that need to be done. This works with Google now.

Assume the following is your URL for an AJAX call

http://techbudha.com/home.html#userinf

Change the URL to

http://techbudha.com/home.html#!userinfo

This is called pretty URL :-)

Crawlers on reaching this URL understands that it contains dynamic information and translate this URL to

http://techbudha.com/home.html? _escaped_fragment_=userinfo

This is called an Ugly URL.

Crawler then makes a call to the web server with this URL. You webapp should be made ready to handle this call by creating a filter.

<filter-name>CrawlerFilter</filter-name>

<filter-class>com.testbaboon.server.servlet.CrawlServlet</filter-class>

</filter>

<filter-mapping>

<filter-name>CrawlerFilter</filter-name>

<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>

</filter-mapping>

Trap the call comes from an Ugly URL in your servlet.

HttpServletRequest req = (HttpServletRequest) request;
StringBuffer requestURL = req.getRequestURL();
if ((requestURL != null) && (requestURL.toString().contains("_escaped_fragment_"))) {
--Hey, i know you are a web crawler
}

You can return static content which represents your actual content to the crawler. Google indexes this static content. Whenever there is a query matching your static content, the pages show up in the search result. The user by clicking the link is directed to the actual dynamic content.

In case your home page has dynamic content, you can add the following code under the <head> tag of your html file

Rakesh is a java programmer with special interest in social media. His expertise is in Java and GWT.

Hummingbird – New search algorithm from Google

2013-09-26T20:21:00.001-07:00

Picture Source: Wikipedia

Google introduced a new search algorithm called “HummingBird” to handle more complex questions in search. The update happened almost a month ago but announced officially to the reporters recently.

The new algorithm “Hummingword” is expected to take search from key word search to semantic search. In a key word search, search engine usually try to match the keyword the user typed to content available with the keyword based on the ranking. With the new algorithm, Google tries to look at the intent of the query or the meaning of the query and try to provide the best answer.

Now if I try to search in Google "What is Ruppe?". The algorithm try to understand the intent here and provide an answer before the first link itself. As you could see in the picture, it didn't try to match the keyword, The answer was more an attempt to understand the intent and answer it.

The biggest impact of this might be on the voice search as keyword search is not effective there. So this shift might help a lot in displaying quality content both in text search as well as voice search. You can read more about this in a post by Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google search here.

-Manoj

Can a good tester be a good developer?

2013-09-25T23:43:00.000-07:00

I want to clarify first that this question can be the other way around also- Whether a good developer can be a good tester? With the formation of more and more cross functional teams, the line between a developer and tester is disappearing. More and more developers are now taking the ownership of testing the functionality. There have been a lot of discussions whether this will be successful. A quick search on the internet shows that most testers believe that the developers cannot do a good quality job with testing and developers believe the other way.

I have seen developers who are good testers as well as testers who are awesome developers. But that’s a minority. The question is if few can do this, can’t we do the same with others also? Personally I think that’s a stupid move. By default, we are not wired in that way. Before even getting into why I think so, I want to call out that I don’t consider programming as synonymous with development. You can “program to make” or “program to break”. It’s just a tool. The intent is the question here.

Have you ever thought of what differentiates a good developer from a good tester?

No, it's not the analytical mind.

No, it’s neither the ability to think about the big picture.

No, it's not the ability to work in a team or being able to think from a user perspective.

These skills are required for any profession (In case you are wondering where all this is coming from, I suggest you search Google with key words “qualities of a good developer or tester”). A good developer is a person who can translate an idea into a working product in the most effective manner. It’s a creative process filled with hope. A good developer has always approached even the most difficult problem with the hope of conquering it. They are wired to think about the solutions and not the problems.

Where development requires a creative mindset, the testing requires a preventive mindset. A person with a preventive mindset always tries to reach a state of security. The goal for both developers and testers are the same. But the way a tester tries to accomplish that goal is by identifying and eliminating the risks in accomplishing that goal. By doing so, he/she is looking for a state of security.

Most of us have one of these natural orientations as a behavioral trait in us. Either we are promotion oriented where the approach is filled with hope and eagerness or prevention oriented where the driving force is the urge to reach the state of security. The famous Psychologist E. Tory Higgins explains the importance of understanding this natural orientation when pursuing goals in his famous regulatory focus theory (I have explained about regulatory theory in my previous article here).

As per the regulatory theory, successful goal accomplishment is decided by the value of the goal and the engagement in pursuing the goal. The regulatory fit of a person plays a critical role in determining the engagement. People experience regulatory fit when the manner in which they engage in an activity sustains their current orientation. The increased strength of engagement produced by fit is experienced as feeling right about what one is doing, including feeling right about one’s evaluative reactions to objects and events in the world. Fit makes people feel right about both their positive responses to things and their negative responses to things. Moreover, it does this not only for the activity that itself produced the fit, but also for later, separate activities.

So you will be moving closer to your goal, when you have aligned a person with his/her natural orientation. So when you take a person with high a promotional orientation and ask him/her to test, the person might not be able to go much beyond what’s defined by the organizational environment. It’s not his/her fault; he/she is not a person who is motivated by identifying what can go wrong. Any continued attempt to force the person to go in that direction might actually backfire and will result in disengagement.

-Manoj

Integrating facebook login from your GWT application using OAuth 2.0 protocol - Java based

2013-09-18T22:58:00.001-07:00

Guest post by Rakesh

With over 1.11 billion monthly active users as of 2013 Quarter 1, facebook is an ideal candidate to authorize the identity of users of a website. From a web site user's perspective, it saves the time people need to put into an app before they are logged in and using it. It transforms login to an easy process and avoids the pain of keeping a tab of all the passwords.

Once facebookLogin is integrated with the website, the Open Graph API from Facebook can be used to make the web application more personal and social. In this article, we are going to share with you the steps required for your GWT web application to leverage Facebook login using OAuth 2.0 protocol (You can read more about OAuth protocol here). We are going to assume you know how to create a GWT web application. In case you don't, this might be a good starting point.

1. Sign in as a facebook developer at https://developers.facebook.com/using your facebook credentials.

2. Create a facebook app by clicking on “app” and then on “create app”.

3. Provide the name of your application by which facebookshould recognize you. facebook will assign you an App ID and App Secret. Note it.

4. Provide your website URL at “Website with Facebook Login”. facebook will redirect tothis URL after login.

You are done configuring your application details on facebook. Now let’s look at what need to be done on your web application side. We will be using OAuth 2.0 protocol to leverage the facebook login functionality to authenticate users on the website.

5. Download oauth2-0.1-alpha.jar and add it to your project setting.

6. Add the following line to your <project>.gwt.xml file

<inheritsname="com.google.api.gwt.oauth2.OAuth2" />

7. Create the following constant

private static final String FACEBOOK_AUTH_URL = "https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth"; private static final String FACEBOOK_CLIENT_ID = "<facebook applicationClient ID>";

8. Request for authorization with the scope required. Here the Web application is requesting for additional access to emails and birthday information.

final AuthRequest req = new AuthRequest(FACEBOOK_AUTH_URL,
FACEBOOK_CLIENT_ID).withScopes(“email”,
“user_birthday”).withScopeDelimiter(",");
AUTH.clearAllTokens();
AUTH.login(req, new Callback<String, Throwable>() {
@Override
public void onSuccess(String token) {
requestInformation(token);
}
@Override
publicvoid onFailure(Throwable caught) {
-Log in decliend or failed
}

});

If the user is logged successfully, the onSuccess callback method called. The OAuth2 token is passed as a parameter to the onSuccess method. You can use this token to make authenticated requests for assessing granted information in scope. If user declines assess or login is failed, on failure is called.

9. You can assess further information from Facebook using RequestBuilder.

Stringurl = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=" + token;

RequestBuilderbuilder = new RequestBuilder(RequestBuilder.GET,
URL.encode(url));
try{
Request request = builder.sendRequest(null, new RequestCallback() {
publicvoid onError(Request request, Throwable exception) {

-- Call failed

}
publicvoid onResponseReceived(Request request, Response response) {
if(Response.SC_OK == response.getStatusCode()) {
--- Retrieve details from a JSON string.

} else if (Response.SC_BAD_REQUEST == response .getStatusCode()) {

} else {

}
}
});

10. The Graph API from facebook is Restful JSON service. Find a sample data returned from a sample query which had two permissions. You can then parse this date and use it in your app.

{
"id": "XXXXXXXXXXX",
"name": "XXXX",
"first_name": "XXXX",
"last_name": "XXXX",
"link": "https://www.facebook.com/XXXXX",
"username": "XXXX",
"location": {
    "id": "106377336067638",
    "name": "Bangalore, India"
},
"work": [
    {
      "employer": {
        "id": "XXXXXX",
        "name": "XXXXXXX"
      }
    }
],
"education": [
    {
      "school": {
        "id": "XXXXXX",
        "name": "XXXXXXXXXXX"
      },
      "type": "College",
      "with": [
        {
          "id": "XXXXXXXX",
          "name": "XXXXXXX"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "school": {
        "id": "106237056074793",
        "name": "Government Engineering College, Thrissur"
      },
      "type": "Graduate School"
    }
],
"gender": "male",
"email": "XXXXXX",
"timezone": 5.5,
"locale": "en_US",
"verified": true,
"updated_time": "2013-08-28T07:16:55+

We will look at how we can integrate facebook login from a servlet in the next article.

Rakesh is a java programmer with special interest in social media. His expertise is in Java and GWT. R\

What is OAuth 2.0 protocol?

2013-09-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

Most of us are active users of multiple applications on the Net. One challenge for us is to remember the username and password for all these Applications. Wouldn't it be great if we can use the same User name and Password of our email accounts for logging into a different application, Say a tax submission website? But the question is how much we are ready to allow The tax submission web site to access other e-mail service resources like ours Friends list, send mail, received mails etc. This can be tricky and has the following challenges associated with it.

Third-party Applications will gain access to all your resources and not to subset of services which you would like share.
Revoking access by changing the password to one third party application will remove access to all the other third party applications which uses the services you shared.

This is where OAuth 2.0 protocol comes in place. OAuth 2.0 allows you to share limited Access to yours resources without the need to share your passwords with third party application. So you can provide access to your friends list to a third Party application without providing access to your mails. The OAuth 2.0 authorization framework enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service. Following is the sequence of activities involved.

The client requests the Service of a third party application.
Third party application redirects client to authorization server of the resource provider.
The resource provider validates the user's Identity, and often requests their permission to access the resources, third party application is interested in.
The resource provider redirects client back to the third party application with a success or failure message. The resource provider also provides an authorization Token to the third party application if a success message is returned.
The third party application requests resource provider for an access token in exchange of authorization code.
The third party application can now make requests to the resource provider on behalf of the user by passing the access token for the subset of service it has received permission.

-Manoj

Being successful in Matrix oragnizations

2013-09-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

[photo courtesy Marko Vallius]

Guest post by Prashantha Kumar and Seema

Mr. Ram is part of IT leadership team in a leading MNC. He leads a team in India and interacts with multiple stakeholders both in region and global. He is expected to get alignment from them to drive result in his area. He is part of a matrix organization. The matrix model came from the recognition that companies not only have vertical chains of command but that people also work horizontally, across their functional specialization This network of interfaces is the matrix and has been seen as an ideal structure in which fast moving businesses can operate. It may be that matrix structures are exciting, dynamic and innovative but they require people to be able and willing to collaborate with more than one decision maker.

One fine day Mr. Ram receives a call from Ms.Andrea who wants to set up new technology group in their Delhi office. Ram gets excited with this opportunity and puts together a clear proposal with approach/investment and milestones. Ms.Paula who is the other lead Ram collaborates with, gets to know about this. She is also a decision maker who has a totally different opinion and does not want Ram to continue with this. This is just one situation out of many which Ram keeps facing. He has to deal with multiple personalities, preferences, styles every day.

Some positives of this structure are:

You have scope to align with multiple groups and people. This can bring new opportunities for individuals to grow and take challenging assignments. This can also enable team to think out of the box, resulting in team becoming more dynamic and is able to think creatively
As each person collaborates with multiple stakeholders’ managers will get more feedback. This avoids biased views about people performance and career opportunities
As people are empowered to drive decisions in a collaborative way it is easy to create shared need for everyone and get commitment

Here are the few challenges you will face being in Matrix organization.

Overlapping management roles can result in turf wars or lack of accountability, which can erode organizational cultures

Multiple reporting lines can reflect the interests of functions, geographical regions and product lines, but they can also cause conflict, stress and confusion among staff if managers' interests are not aligned
Matrix systems are vulnerable to constant reorganization, which can disrupt the relationships that make them work: knowledge, experience and organizational know-how can be lost easily

Here are the top 10 points which can help you to be successful in a matrix organization.

Get things done through influence – use authority if it is absolutely needed: requires entering into their map of the world, because today, Dictatorial Leadership is looked down upon.
Keep value delivery in mind – Keep the organization goals in mind in conversation and interrupt if there is a deviation. Usually workplace values are very different from those of your team, and from the values of your organization as a whole.
Feedback – Build an environment where people are comfortable in giving and receiving feedback. Feedback should be given in a manner that will best help improve performance. Since people respond better to information presented in a positive way, feedback should be expressed in a positive manner. This is not to say that information should be sugar-coated. It must be accurate, factual, and complete.
Transparency in communication – When there is a critical decision to be made, conduct common meetings between all stakeholders. Transparency is Consistency. For any company to be successful today, it must ensure that all of the organization’s stakeholders- from employees, to customers, to investors- have a clear line of sight into the company’s strategy and performance, good or bad.
Don’t hesitate to communicate bad news to matrix managers – Make sure that tone and intention is clear. An ideal method of delivery would be the “Sandwich method”- Good news- Bad news- Good news. First, identify the good news; find something relating to the bad news that was going well. Then present the facts, lead to the bad news. Once you have stated exactly what has happened, outline the positive results. Avoid excuses and finally avoid finger-pointing or the “blame game”.
Develop genuine relationship – Let us appreciate and realize we are human beings not machines. Regardless of status or fame, people are people. And the 7 pillars of making a connection with another person are always the same — whether applied to your next-door neighbor relatives or colleagues: be genuine, provide help, pay attention, and connect with people close to them, persistence, making real friends and creating the right impact.
Constant update to the team – Let the team know all the time what is important, what is new and what the changes in the expectation are.
Set up regular time for project review – Send the clear status to all the stakeholders after each discussion. So that people who did not attend are updated of the progress.
Perseverance – there will be occasions when things don’t quite go to plan and so you need to have the drive and determination to get your ideas across and to ensure that your projects go ahead. Or in simple terms- Constant follow up until the right responses are received.
Ask right questions – it is productive, positive, creative, and helps in clear communication. You should not accept NO with out a solid reason.

The above post is a guest blog by Prashantha Kumar and Seema.

Seema, is a soft skills trainer and a Lecturer in Healthcare Management. She has 6 years of industry experience.

She has regularly presented courses and training workshops for private and public sectors as well as students and teachers in India. Her main interests are reading, writing, painting and "People"!

Being successful in global teams - Role of cultural dimensions

2013-08-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

Raj was a hardworking kid from one of the small towns in India. He was a bright kid and consistently used to come top in his class. He joined one of the prestigious engineering colleges after his school. He scored high marks there also. He had a keen interest in programming and got selected in a multi national software company starting their operations in India.

Raj was very happy on the day he was first assigned on a project. It was one of the flagship products of the company and he is going to work on a distributed virtual team along with their US and Europe teams. The only concern he had was being the only member from India in the team. But he was clear that he don’t want to let that opportunity pass.

Things started going wrong for Raj from the first team meeting itself. First a roadblock on his way to office delayed joining the conference call with his team by five minutes. Raj had checked in some code the night before on request from a senior developer which broke the entire build. To make things worse, there was a product demo on the same day which had to be delayed as the build was failing. He called out in the meeting that he was not aware of the demo and he checked in because the senior developer asked him. To his disappointment, his lead didn’t agree with him and told his very clearly that it was he who is owner of that part and he shouldn’t shy away from taking the ownership.

From there, it was a downward journey for Raj. One issue after another popped up. In six months, Raj who was once a hard working, motivated person became a demotivated soul who was scared to make any contribution to the project.

It's interesting to see what went wrong here? Even though every one in the team wanted to do the right thing, the perception of what is the right thing was completely different from person to person. For Raj, the right thing was to follow what a more experienced person asks him to do, for his lead it was Raj’s responsibility to say no to his senior developer if he was not sure of the changes. So if you are working on a global team, how would you know what behavious is valued by your global team members? Interestingly there are not many organizations which teaches about this cultural aspect when they form global teams.

One tool that might help you to know how the values of team member affect their behavior is Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory. Geert Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions explains how society's culture decides the values of its members and in turn their behavior. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory proposed four dimensions to measure this: individualism-collectivism; uncertainty avoidance; power distance (strength of social hierarchy) and masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation). He later added a fifth dimension, long-term orientation, to this.

Now let’s look at how Raj’s team get rated against the dimensions of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory

In the above graph,

Power distance indicates the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organizations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Higher the power distance, more hierarchical the society is.

Individualism is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. Lower the individualistic score, more closely knit the society is.

Masculinity / Femininity: A high score (masculine) on this dimension indicates that the society will be driven by competition, achievement and success, with success being defined by the winner / best in field – a value system that starts in school and continues throughout organizational behaviour. A low score (feminine) on the dimension means that the dominant values in society are caring for others and quality of life. A feminine society is one where quality of life is the sign of success and standing out from the crowd is not admirable.

Uncertainty avoidance indicates the way a society deals with the fact that the future can never be known: should we try to control the future or just let it happen? The higher the score, the lesser will be the acceptance towards imperfection.

Long term orientation indicates the extent to which a society shows a pragmatic future-oriented perspective rather than a conventional historical short-term point of view.

[source - http://geert-hofstede.com/india.html ]

As you can see when India scores high on power distance, Denmark from where Raj’s lead was have a low power distance score. So Raj expects every thing to be told to him clearly by his leads and have high respect for power that comes from seniority or role. But his lead believes in employee autonomy and each person taking the ownership of what he/she needs to deliver. If you look at the second dimension on individualism, we can understand why Raj is not able to understand the expectation his lead is having in taking the ownership of the issue

It’s impossible to avoid cultural conflicts when you are forming global teams. The way a person value his team member will vary from person to person in global teams depending up on the culture you are from. Many organizations try to overcome this by having a uniform organizational philosophies or principles across the globe. This helps the employees to understand what behavior is valued in that organization and helps to build a uniform culture across the globe. One thing that definitely helps in global team is the awareness about what your team member’s value as behaviors from you. As team members become more aware of this, they start putting focus on transferring the message more effectively by using the right wrappers reducing potential conflicts. So wearing the other cap and making decisions based on that might change the game in favor of you.

-Manoj

Managing team - Are you an Adult conversationalist?

2013-08-04T02:25:00.000-07:00

When Joe knocked the door, Jay was in the middle of responding to a query from one of the important customers. The day hasn’t started on a great note for Jay. A potential customer identified an issue in one of the flagship product, which Jay’s company is trying to sell. To top it all, he had just finished a meeting with his leads and there seems to have definite risk with an upcoming product release. So Jay was not very excited to see Joe at this hour.

Joe: Good Morning Jay. Can I take ten minutes of your time?

Jay: Hmmm... Can this wait? I am in the middle of something.

Joe: I think you might want to hear this first. It's regarding “trend reporting” module I am working on.

Jay: Now what Joe? Are we going to miss the timelines again?

Joe becomes silent for a minute. From the way he was standing, it was evident that his entire body had become stiff.

Joe: Why do you always think it’s my mistake? I do all that’s expected of my job. I ...

I am sure all of us realize that this conversation has become a disaster even before it started. There is very little chance of the actual issue being resolved without any collateral damage. There is a lot written about how to handle people conversation effectively. But something that stands out due to its sheer simplicity and practical value is Transactional Analysis.

Transactional Analysis is developed by Dr. Eric Berne. He studied interactions between individuals and identified that there are three ego states which each person can experience during a conversation. He also observed that the ego state of a second person changes based on the state of first person. He classified these states as Parent, Adult and Child (starts with capital letter).

Transactions in Parent state are learned by experiences from a Parent or Parent like figure. These events are imposed by external factors in the early ages of an individual. Some of the examples are

“Never miss your class”

“Don’t talk loudly”

Contrast to Parent state, child state is driven by internal stimulus. It's influenced by emotions. When you make following statements, you are in the ego state of Child.

I kept laughing watching the movie

Why are you criticizing me?

The third state is of Adult. In an adult state, the person uses validated communication. Here people communicate based on analyzed information. So when a parent talks what is taught, a child talks what is felt, and an adult talks what’s learned.

Even though it’s important for a manager to transact from on all the three ego states, having a strong handle on communication as an adult is very important. Mostly this is one state in which many managers struggle to communicate. Let’s look at some examples where a manager needs to communicate from each of this three states.

Parent: Any communication regarding integrity, compliance falls under this.

“There will be zero tolerance to integrity issues.”

Child: When you want to inspire others, you may need to communicate from a child ego state.

“Let’s beat the XYZ Company in this market”

Adult: You need to be in Adult ego state when managing conflicts, assessing performance, making selection.

“All students who attend the class regularly have scored high marks last year. So it might not be good idea to miss the class.”

“We have consistently failed to get market share when Advt cost is negligible. Considering other factors remained constant, we need to invest on Advt if we need to increase our market share. “

Dr. Eric Berne further talks about the games people play based on the ego state they are in and the complimentary or contradictory transaction that happens.

[The contents of this post are based on concept from the books Games People Play and Transactional Analysis by Dr. Eric Berne. I would recommend these books if you want to learn more about Transactional Analysis]

-Manoj