I have been asking a lot of technocrats around in various verticals on whether they have been successfully tracking benefits realization in one or other format and making sure that they are constantly aligned and in sync with the organizational objectives, the most I get is glares and a few cheeky answers as to how they don’t get any “added/extra” benefit! Benefits realization management, defined in Benefits Realization Management: A practice guide, “BRM encompasses the standard methods and processes that an organization uses for identifying benefits, executing its benefits realization plans, and sustaining the realized benefits facilitated by portfolio, program, and project initiatives. BRM requires alignment with an organization’s strategy, a solid understanding of key principles, and techniques”[1].

One of the important aspects of Digitial Transformation is the introduction of cross-functional teams. A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal[1]. Cross-functional teams include people from various departments with different functional expertise working towards a common organizational goal. This teams also might have people from outside of the organization such as suppliers, key customers, etc.

The purpose of the cross-functional team is to facilitate innovation through creative collaboration leading to higher throughput and quick problem resolution. Another purpose of the cross-functional team is to break the silos that typically happen in big organizations and instead try to build bridges for communication. All the people in a cross-functional team have various levels of expertise so even if the posed problem is not solved, it can easily be taken to an “expert” by the team for doubt resolution and a probable way forward. All in all, cross-functional teams do lead to improved coordination across various functional areas.

According to PMBOK, “The project benefits management plan is the document that describes how and when the benefits of the project will be delivered, and describes the mechanisms that should be in place to measure those benefits. A project benefit is defined as an outcome of actions, behaviors, products, services, or results that provide value to the sponsoring organization as well as to the project’s intended beneficiaries”[1].

This document is a living document and according to me, its life-cycle starts way before any business plan is laid out. Information exists for this but maybe not in a centralized place. Many factors such as business execution environment changes (evolution, devolution or revolution) and/or strategy, management and economy changes are the ones which trigger activities that generate a probably viable business sustenance/execution plan.

Project management has been very much talked about and PMBOK is an excellent resource to get all the relevant information. I think people everywhere in public & private life do understand the value of project management. Simple tasks in everyday life (eg: go for an offsite meeting on Friday evening ;)) are looked upon as projects by parents. Everybody involved (husband, wife & children in this case) needs to be on the same page when it comes to execution.

Before I start writing on Digitization/Digitalization, maybe we should spend a little time in exploring the alternative “Analogization”! Now I have made up that word and probably the more appropriate word might be “Materialization”[1][2] but comparing the past/existing with the upcoming/future will give a perspective and provide a context for my thoughts.

As human beings, we have been generating information right from the start of our existence and materializing it as physical objects. These physical objects were hard to manage, cross-reference, study & derive from. With the new age technologies, we are now at a stage where we can convert all the physical form of materializing information into digital bits & bytes that can be read, stored, coded and decoded by computers (Digitization).

I recently got a Netgear R6220 router, an AC1200 dual-band router with very impressive specs. It was awarded the best router in 2016 and now in 2019, I still think it is a very good router. It has a 2 core Mediatek MT7621 (MIPS) processor with 128 MB RAM & 128 MB ROM i.e. ample space with some good processing power. Below you can see the impressive specs. BTW: I got this for almost 15 USD which was a steal!

My thoughts on why and how metrics/measurements of ongoing tasks should be done.

I will start with the practice. The problems we are trying to tackle is:

1. How to make our team believe in their own estimations?
2. What is our cycle time?
3. How do we project the probability of fulfilling the sprint goals?
4. How do we track the state of the task?
5. How do we ensure continuous development of processes?

For the last 3 questions, I suggest referring to the self-explaining Cumulative Flow Diagrams (http://www.slideshare.net/yyeret/explaining-cumulative-flow-diagrams-cfd). Martin Alaimo writes on measuring sprint progress in the Scrumalliance community blogs (https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2011/may/measuring-sprint-progress). Essential Scrum: A practical guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth S. Rubin (p.357-359) defines how task metrics can be visualized (though in a table formation) (https://books.google.se/books?id=3vGEcOfCkdwC&pg=PA357&lpg=PA357&dq=visualize+tasks+in+scrum+boards&source=bl&ots=-BBbkkfr_l&sig=KqO_9xWDIEM3hVqe-9QSi0IQKQQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZk9ztxurKAhWFs3IKHYioBLE4FBDoAQg9MAU#v=onepage&q=visualize%20tasks%20in%20scrum%20boards&f=false). An electronic task board showing the progress (https://www.targetprocess.com/content/uploads/2013/11/lists-sketch-for-Targetprocess-3.png). A detailed article by MSFT on Task board (of course tailored towards VS Team edition usage but has lots of details) (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vs/alm/work/scrum/task-board). Another article (https://blog.taiga.io/q-id-like-to-measure-the-sprint-progress-through-closed-tasks.html) very good on why sprint progress should be monitored regularly and not at the end of the sprint.

Year 2014 was very interesting for me both professionally and personally. It had its own ups and downs. Today I want to retrospect on 2014 and important things that happened around me!

2014 started with an exciting CES in LA where demos with M7450 and SLSI 44xx were shown. Proud to mention that I had been very heavily involved with the bridge implementation on SLSI 44xx and M7450. And in Feb 2014, I was in Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona with Ericsson modems business showing 5 different demos ranging from global device to carrier aggregation (CA) to CAT4 DL speeds on real live Ericsson back bones. Proud to say again that I was the one who coded all the demos in various technologies.