en-us On IT, economy, trivia and whatever comes in life and is hopefully useful Sat, 19 May 2012 07:07:23 -0600 Zend_Feed_Writer 1.11.11 (http://framework.zend.com) http://www.lalitbhatt.com/
Why government is finding difficult to deal with Anna? The way the whole Ramlila Maidan event unfolded, it clearly reflected one thing is the inability of the government to manage. Government machinery tried everything. saama,dama, danda, veda but nothing yielded the solution. In fact, on the contrary the movement got strengthened. First government tried saama by engaging them in a joint committee and giving an impression that the government is serious about the demands of the civil society. Unfortunately govt. did not had the intentions and that resulted in the kind of draft that they presented in the parliament. This resulted in civil society hitting back. There might be some dama related activities in some form or other. Even in form on getting the points to standing committee so that more time can be bought. Then came the danda by putting Anna and his team in Tihar jail. Unfortunately that backfired, in a big way. A small gathering, which was going to happen in Ambedkar park, tuned out to be one of the biggest movement after freedom. Now the government machinery is resorting to the veda. It's trying to isolate individual members by getting them embroiled in various controversies. The machinery is trying to target the core vocal members in the anticipation that, this will weaken the sharpness of the movement. It's quite possible that they might be able to get their act done with couple of members. But eventually they will make the core, Anna more stronger with it. Their is a kind of feeling already in the masses that the government is resorting to under hand tactics. Also with these activities, it's making it more popular. From no where, the masses now know about so many members of the movement that they are becoming known faces with the masses. Also the silence of Anna is making him and his team stronger only.

What are the options with the government to deal with this situation? First government will have to show the commitment to the cause, which still does not looks convincing. There are people in government who support it, but it seems there is a section of political class who don't want strong Lokpal for obvious reasons. Unfortunately for the political class, they have to understand that the history is changing tides and they have to heed to it otherwise it will wash many of them. The problem of political class in dealing with this issue is that, they are used to negotiation of give and take with something for everyone. However they are dealing with a movement which is fanatic about it's cause. The history has shown that such movement are usually successful and results in changing the whole political class. The biggest problem of dealing with Gandhiji for Britishers was that, they never knew how to negotiate with him. All other factors of freedom movement were manageable because they were negotiable in some form or other. The same thing is getting repeated now. The problem was compounded further for Britishers because Gandhiji has no personal ambition. He was fanatic (see this word in positive form) about the cause and same thing is getting reflected by Anna.
]]> Sat, 29 Oct 2011 14:58:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost74-Problem-of-government-dealing-with-Anna http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost74-Problem-of-government-dealing-with-Anna lalit lalit
Imagine a movie hall where it has just caught fire, and the people are trying to rush out from every conceivable door and window. At that point, the fire safety officer comes and yells in top of his voice, that he is declaring the movie hall as unsafe from fire. That's how the rating agencies are working now. Fresh from their failure on mortgage backed bonds, and trying to build their reputation back, they are going overboard in the other direction now. In the run up to 2008, the more you rate high the more credibility it brings to you. It is quite looking convincing to me that the rating agencies are not at all forward looking but they are the followers of the street. The mortgage bonds were darling of the street at one time so it would be foolish to say that they are of junk grade. Let's give them the highest grading, and if everyone in the street is rating them high then why should not we.

The wheel has turned completely. Now the rating agencies are running the race in the other direction. Degrading countries and banks one after another and trying to grab more and more headlines. If the competing agency downgrades one country, I will downgrade two. That too after the fact that in the street everyone knows about if for some time now. The rating agencies would have been more impressive if they would have downgraded the things 8-9 months before and actually would have started upgrading the banks and institutions and sovereigns for the effort they are trying to put now to come back.

In fact, I think an important lesson can be that buy when the rating agencies start downgrades and sell when the rating agencies will start upgrading. They are so buys in themselves that they act only when the street is reached in pinnacle in terms of celebrations or gloom.
]]> Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:08:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost73-My-dear-Rating-Agencies http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost73-My-dear-Rating-Agencies lalit lalit
It is quite interesting the way China has shown interest in buying the bonds of countries on the brink of bankruptcy. It's a good step from China's angle to buy the debt, as it takes it a step closed to becoming super power. Once the debt is under China's belt, it will be easy for them to control the different countries. Just make so much economic sense from China's angle. This will also provide ability to China to force the countries to be favorable in importing China's goods. This was US did once, by providing loans to various countries, which in turn countries used to buy weapons from US. It's called Heads I win, Tail you loose.
]]> Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:41:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost72-China-is-buying-bonds http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost72-China-is-buying-bonds lalit lalit
Inflation has been the most important phenomena for Indian economy for last 3 years. It has run like a wild fire and remains uncontrollable. In spite of tightening cycles of RBI, the inflation does not seems to be under control.

Before we venture into the why India is not able to tame, we need to understand the nature of inflation especially from the perspective of demand side and supply side inflation. Both essentially drive the supply demand curve but impact the curve in a different way. A demand side inflation is basically because of high demand of commodity whose supply is still at the same level. However the supply side inflation is because of the issue of supply side constrains itself at the first place.

We saw demand side inflation till 2008-09, till around Lehman collapse. The housing sector was a clear example of demand side inflation at that point of time. Also with an expectation that the housing prices will keep on increasing gave legs to inflation further. Also with the new found prosperity in India, Indians took a bold step in the direction of consumption economics. Similar thing happened in China and two fifth of the population of world is a sure to impact.

To contain the inflation, RBI got into the mode of interest rate hikes. A perfect recipe for containing demand side inflation, perfectly fits into the economics model. However this resulted in lower investments in different areas. This at some point was containing demand side inflation but building up supply side inflation. With no new investment in infrastructure, which in turn constrained the logistics in not working efficiently, the supply side inflation took over. The question is now if the same recipe of hiking interest cycle, would it help containing inflation? I think across the board interest hikes is not a solution for containing supply side inflation. For containing supply side inflation, we need to raise the supply levels. This can only be done if more investment is infused in certain sectors. Again we do not want to do the across the board interest rate relaxation as it can pent up the demand side inflation, especially if the easy money goes in the consumption economics by way of personal loans etc. But we do need to provide easy capital to companies building roads, generating power. We need to invest on companies which are working on alternative energies, as the oil bill is going to be a single big reason for the inflation in the years to come. Also we need to put more capital in whatever can save energy for us. We need to invest on irrigation companies, logistics and transportation. We need to kick start the things so that we can contain the supply side inflation. For example a simple thing to do is to have a fast turnaround at octroi's (or better abolish it), as each extra day a lorry stands there, it's building cost.

]]> Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:27:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost71-Why-India-is-not-able-to-tame-Inflation-3F http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost71-Why-India-is-not-able-to-tame-Inflation-3F lalit lalit
Last couple of days, India has seen some high voltage drama. It's not that India has not seen this kind of momentum in the past. Be it Jessica Lal murder case or winning of world cup, Indian has shown it's moment of grief and joy. But what happened recently is unprecedented.

After independence, the political class and the ruling establishment has become arrogant with time. The unfettered power and no obligation to anyone, made the arrogance just more pronounced. It's true that at individual levels, the arrogance has been pulled down by election defeats, but the replacement was not lesser arrogant. The absence of any credible replacement made things worse. It did not matter, which party is ruling and who sits in opposition. The color of the kurta remained same. However the recent corruption events made things worse. They brought the things at a tipping point. The vacuum created for a creditable representation of sentiments of common man just became stronger.

Anna's first round of anshan showed the taste of power that the common man can yield. First time in a long time, government and the political class was forced to talk to common man. However when Baba Ramdev's anshan was successfully tackled, the political class just became more arrogant. They thought of dealing with Anna's anshan with same high handedness. However they did not realized that now they are playing with the sentiments of people and not recognizing the fact that people are just fed of the mockery that the political class everyday does. With one master stroke, government lost all the movements in the chess. They have to retreat at every step. I am using political class because it's not the relevant names that are important in this context. This would have happened, irrespective of which party or people would have been on the ruling side. What the political class lacks, at the moment is the will to change and good intentions. They are ruling country on the premises of doing political arithmetic. They are not ruling the country for providing good governance.

What the political class has done is going to make them suffer for a long time to come. This is going to reverberate in many elections to come. It has emphasized the fact that the ruling establishment including all its political elements need to respect the ethos of man on street. You can play with it to an extent only. The interesting thing is not what happened, but what is going to unfold in next couple of days and months. It's for sure going to change the flavor of democracy.

Unfortunately the ruling establishment is again running out of time by doing talks on the venue and duration of anshan. They are still not realizing that they need to tackle the bigger issue of the how to handle the Jan Lokpal issue, which they will have to soon handle in next couple of days. And the problem is that the government will be again forced to handle that. A smart government, would immediately start the process of broadning the forum of discussion on the issue of Jan Lokpal. This will give them the political mileage also. But they are so much tired with the recent failures that it seems the thinking power has gone out of them. The ruling establishment should understand that finally they will have to relent to the emotions of people. If they are forced to do it, they loose the political creditability also. If they do it in a manner which shows them as sensitive people, it is going to help them only. Unfortunately the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn anything. The problem with political class is that most of them, who are in power had their last touch with people on street is atleast a decade old. After that they have shielded themselves behind the security cordons and air conditioned rooms. They still think of the common man as someone who can be lured by hollow promises or for a pouch of liquor. Please realize that most of these households have grown up kids, who are educated and also shape the thinking of their parents. They are more analytical and knowledgeable. Accept the change and history will talk about you in good terms. Otherwise, we will repeat the history. The government should also realize that no one is questioning the supremacy of Parliament, not even Anna. I have heard it getting clearly stated by Anna. Do not hide yourself behind vague reasoning and police in uniform. Come forward and tackle it with grace and sensitivity.

In general, we have seen the same trend around the world. The political class has brought the people's patience at tipping points. I think, this is what any mode of governing systems would have done. This happened with autocracy and now happening with democracy. In years to come, we might be seeing democracy changing its forms in some way and hopefully in a better way.
]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:27:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost70-The-rise-of-Anna-and-fall-of-political-class http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost70-The-rise-of-Anna-and-fall-of-political-class lalit lalit
In IT world, if the most debated topic is anything, it's about why projects fail? There is for sure more failures than successes. Many successes which are there, at times are forced successes on end users. The end users are provided with no alternatives, and they are convinced or threatened to use the product, the way they are, the way they work.

Why projects fail? Very difficult to answer because there are so many things involved in it. Unfortunately, with software projects, it's difficult to visualise them and it makes the threshold to understand much higher. If we build a building, it's easy to visualise, as you can see bricks getting laid and the height gaining with time. It's easy to spot that it's going straight up and not becoming the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

One of the major elements that I feel is important is the nature of IT teams and, which decide whether we are going to taste success or failure. It's the focus of the team. Fundamentally, it seems there are three primary focus that drives any team. The focus are:

• Delivery focus
• Technology focus
• Feature focus

Let's assume the team is given the task of making Pizza. Pizza making is easier then software in terms of ability to identify in early stage itself, whether the Pizza is going to be good or not. The steps can be closely watched, before making more investments. If the dough has not come good, we stop right there. Let me also say that, making a good Pizza is still a very skillful art. So coming back to our IT team, let's understand how each team is going to approach it.

Delivery Focus

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The delivery focus teams are fully driven by dates and deadlines. They will deliver on the given date and time, but the problem is what they deliver is most of the time is not in synch with what was intended to be delivered. The way the delivery focus people would read the requirement of Pizza would be as follows:

• Pizza contains a thick dough layer on the bottom and lots of vegetables and sauce and cheese is spread over it.

The requirement engineering would decide that whether the types and quantity of vegetable and other toppings is detailed out to finest details or left to the discretion of the developer. Let's not get into that, as it will be another set of discussion.

We will focus on our guys, trying to deliver the Pizza. OK, so the team gears up to deliver the Pizza. A typical approach is to first calculate how much time the Pizza is going to take. So someone comes with Work breakdown structure. The work breakdown structure looks like

• Making dough of base
• Cutting vegetables
• Getting sauce and cheese
• Baking

A over enthusiastic manager might dissect and bisect these steps to a more details steps and steplets. So we have four major task. Four modules are created and four teams are assembled. A critical path network is defined where baking can take place after the dough is ready. I think this mentality of dividing the work in this fashion is taken from the humans rich and successful experience with the Industrial revolution. We try to apply the concept of Adam Smith's "Division of Labour" everywhere.

Now the team get on to the job. The team starts cranking things. To make sure that the integration happens properly, the diameter of the pizza is decided upon and everyone goes on to their task of building things around that diameter.The fun starts here. The team responsible for baking keeps waiting as they cannot do anything before the dough comes up. Meanwhile the best they do is to work out the oven so that the dough can be fit in to bake. As usual things start slipping up. The dough guys kept contemplating on how to make a dough and try all kind of flours. They get trainings done on various aspects of dough at the expense of burning the currency and hours. Th,e vegetable team cruises easily and they slice and dice vegetables. Still left with currency and hours they slice and dice more vegetables and keep doing that. The panic starts setting into the management as the dough team starts falling behind. The people of vegetable teams are now shifted into the dough team. Also the sauce and cheese team procured the stuff and then procured more and then again procured more till they are also shifted into the dough team. The baking team seeing the urgency of things building on their side decided to reduce the risk. So they started heating vegetables and cheese and sauce and started storing them so that when the dough comes, that's the only thing remaining to do. With so many people on the dough, it becomes a chaos. Luckily one of the guy from the sauce team was knowing about doughs and he helped the dough team to get the things done. It's another fact, that the guy was yelling in the beginning to be put in dough team, but he was placed in the sauce team. He being a new employee, and dough team was considered the critical part of system, the management wanted to rely on the old hands. So finally dough is done, and one of the guys from the Vegetable team walks away with the credit because he focused himself in updating the Management that the dough is coming up now. Finally the dough lands up at the baking team laps. By that time they have heated all the vegetables and the cheese and it has turned cold also. Now it's time to put the dough in the oven. However they realizes that the dough size just fits into the oven tray and no margin on the sides. The size of the dough is reduced and then put inside. Someone noticed that they have to deliver it in next 10 minutes, so the dough has to be baked in 5 minutes and topping and shipping done in next 5 minutes. A quick calculation yielded that the normal time is half an hour, so the over heating was set at 6 times higher. The dough pulled out after 5 minutes. There is no time for testing, to check how it tastes. And no one wants to test, as this will make the bugs to show on the top and no one has time to fix them now. Delivery is all that is important now. The vegetables and cheese and sauce are haphazardly put on the top of burned dough. The packaging team walks in, wraps it in nice packet and ships it off. God save the customer.

The delivery teams thrive on the notion that it is cheaper to say Sorry later on. The delivery focused teams are highly prevalent in the services company. In fact, they live and die around delivery dates. The patience levels are very low here.

Technology Focus

---

So before even learning about that the team has to make pizza, the team is already researching about the new breed of seedless tomatoes, that are successfully grown in the fields of Pithoragarh. There is usually someone at the top in such teams, who has focus towards delivery and understands that finally the currency has to be earned to pay the bills. So he goes to the team, where most of the people are busy with their latest gadgets. He stands in the middle and speaks loudly to get the attention of everyone.
"Hey guys, we need to deliver a Pizza."
It requires him to repeat the things couple of time before he gets the attention of everyone. And he walks away after handing a piece of paper to the team with the specification of the Pizza laid out. Soon the paper is divided into pieces and each piece being taken by individuals having interest in that area. No one talks to each other and everyone goes back in their corners.

The dough guy researches all kind of dough and finally comes with the exact recipe of building the best dough ever build in the history of human. He then goes ahead and bakes it also. The vegetable guy, gets the seedless tomatoes and the best of vegetables and sliced and diced them to the perfect precisions. The same story is repeated with the guys working with sauces and cheese. When everyone finishes the task, they put the thing in the center table and continue with their own work. The Pizza ingredients remain on the table. The guy with delivery focus walks in at the time of delivery and does not notices the Pizza pieces on table. He again calls everyone in the center and inquires about the Pizza. Each of the guy points to their respective work and also defends why it's the best thing that it was ever done in that field.

The technology focus companies are prevalent in start ups and the successful of them tend to become Feature focused in the future.

Feature Focused

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Feature focused team are usually low on technologies and usually do not have a great sense of delivery. The team believes in more and more features, it does not matter whether they are useful or not. These traits can be seen in successful product companies, who are there in market for a while with a successful product. These teams usually start with a heavy technology focus in the beginning and able to survive by delivering something which is adopted in the market. Slowly the environment starts becoming dull and boring in these setups and the initial set of people are replaced with individuals who develop a strong notion of risk aversion with time. Also the technology starts falling behind as no one wants to upgrade and change for something that is working. Also the technology is further wrapped in utilities and tools developed in house, which makes the things much more easier for developers and promote more and more people to get into lazy and risk aversion mode. Also these companies tend to be very good paymasters, so you will find some of the very bright individuals in this environment and getting stuck into it. They soon loose their marketability being not in touch with the latest.

How this team will make a Pizza? So first they will run a lot of surveys and questionnaires to try to understand what Pizza the market wants. Usually for them a customer is a faceless person, who is typecast. They don't care about actual customers because they the customers are in any case invested in them and have no option to go anywhere. Also the surveys are done in such a way that it yields results, which are already decided. You can talk to any statistician to figure out how it is.

If the release cycle of the product is 4 months, then the team keeps discussing about the new features that needs to be added, for 3 months. The list keeps getting longer and developers keep waiting for the actual code to start on. Finally the team decides which features need to go, which is a long list. This list has no relation to what was surveyed and basically created in the corner offices of Product manager, who sits on the other end of the world from their customers. These are self styled product managers who carry an aura with them that they know all about the product. You dig them a little deep, and many of them fall flat. So finally the list goes to developers and the developers hit back saying that the time is not sufficient to develop everything. A round of negotiation happens for next 15 days and the result is a shifting of release date by 2 months and a trimmed list. The features that finally get are primarily more complex UI interactions in the name of usability. Product companies do more usability projects in disguise than any other teams, and still they make it more complex. Finally the product is released with big fan fare and cock tail parties. The customers usually do not have choice as they are fully invested on the product. They even do not need to migrate to latest versions but the licensing models force them to do. The customer still crave for that original taste which gets more and more layered with time.

End Note

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Let me start the end note by saying that the above discussion might have painted a grim picture, but it is also true that there are many good individuals and systems which are successful. One of the primary reason for their success is the awareness to focus on delivery, technology and features at right levels. All said and done, we have a good number of success stories around and as the maturity of industry grows, hopefully we will see more successes. We rarely hear of construction industry failures and hopefully one day we will see the same in IT industry also. The three focuses are like three legs of a stool and each one of them is required to make the stool to stand.
]]> Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:21:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost69-What-kind-of-IT-team-you-have-got-3F http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost69-What-kind-of-IT-team-you-have-got-3F lalit lalit
Why people want to save all the notion of punctuality at traffic light. Jumping before it turns green and pushing way beyond it has become red.

]]> Sat, 30 Jul 2011 03:33:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost68-The-notion-of-punctuality http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost68-The-notion-of-punctuality lalit lalit
We all live with an extreme strong sense of notion of certainty. It seems like, we all know for sure how the things are going to unfold for us. This sense of certainty gets more pronounced, when we are gambling or playing stock market. And this sense of certainty builds expectations in us. These expectations in turn blur the difference between reality and perception. The perception, in fact becomes the reality. This sense of perception is so strong that, we take it for reality and we live in that world. A person investing in a certain stock thinks that this is the only stock which is going to be multi-bagger and there is no alternative outcome to that. A person pulling the slot in a casino, thinks that the next move is going to fetch the jackpot.

Why humans carry such a notion of certainty? I feel, it's because as a human we are exposed to so much uncertainty that we build the notion of certainty out of it. That gives us the sense of comfort and the power to act. If we start getting bogged with all kind of uncertainty, that would simply freeze us from doing anything.

However expectations built out of the notion of certainty, actually leads to more pain in the future as the desire outcomes fails to materialize. The sense that is important, in helping with dealing with unknown out come is to do a journey from a notion of "This is the outcome." to "This is one of the possible outcome.". What it also means that, we keep the notion of certainty which helps us in doing actions and in the same time helps us in getting ready for variability in outcomes. The success is not more so much dependent on positive outcomes in life but the ability to embrace the negative outcomes, accept them and move on. At the same time, be careful of not building the habit of failing again and again. It's fine to fail for a certain new reason but not an acceptable situation to fail for the same reason.
]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:57:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost66-The-notion-of-certainty http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost66-The-notion-of-certainty lalit lalit
To restart skype:

• Stop Skype (Kill it from Task manager also)
• Delete C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Skype\shared.xml
  • and In your case check what kind of profile you have got and replace Roaming accordingly or check where your app data sits.
• If nothing works search for skype and do the above

]]> Thu, 26 May 2011 01:05:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost65-Restarting-Skype http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost65-Restarting-Skype lalit lalit
ecently I had a chance to attend the Indian Product Management Association (IPMA). It was a fresh and encouraging thing for Pune ecosystem. I have been involved in the building of Products in the past and in present but more from the angle of technical executor. However this role has provided an opportunity to work closely with Product owners and Product managers.

I think any product building and managing process has to be looked into four different perspectives. Each perspective has to work in tandem with each other for the success. The perspectives are as follows:

• Functional perspective: This is where the classical product management function sits. Also can be loosely termed as domain expertise, though it is more than domain expertise. Domain expertise is a must to develop a functional perspective, but more than that it requires a strong vision about the future of how things are going to evolve. For example, take the example of a movie. The genre of the movie, or the basic idea is what makes the functional perspective. In the case of software, it's about nailing down the requirements and use cases to last bit. What we are trying to make and for whom we are trying to make?
• Structural perspective: The structural perspective is more about the actual building blocks of the element. It's the mechanics, the engineering behind it. I think it's very important to have a strong structural perspective of how the things will be going to be. In a movie making process, the structural perspective is the script, the story line, the cast and in Hindi movies the songs. In Software, it's about technology choices. Open source vs proprietary. Which platform. To be on cloud or behind firewall.
• Process of building perspective: This is the place where everything starts falling in place. It's where the things start taking shape. It's about choosing locations, arranging junior artist, making sure that the actress mother is kept happy at shooting locations. In software building this is about processes including development, QA. The process of alphas and betas.
• Financial perspective: Many times in the process of product building, this is which gets missed most often. This is true when movie is being made or the software products are being made. The financial perspective here is not so much about cost control, but about whether we can sell the things at the end. This is where finally things make or break.

]]> Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:32:00 -0600 http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost64-Building-and-Managing-a-Product http://www.lalitbhatt.com/blogpost64-Building-and-Managing-a-Product lalit lalit