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).

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!

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!

To Docker or to Vagrant, an eternal struggle for a dev-ops / smart people (like me!) who wants to automate stuff is a big life and death question! No seriously, I mean there are just 2 camps of people, one is hardcore docker supporters who want docker everywhere (without realizing that docker is not a full virtualization solution but uses Linux kernel’s namespaces and cgroups functionality. So what does it mean? Well for starters, anything that requires mounting operations inside the docker container, for instance, requires special privileged access and these have the possibility to change your actual host filesystem (eg: mounting filesystems inside the container will mount it indirectly on your host as well and rest is history. It is not just mount operations, simple things like socket access, changes to locale or local-gen will not work inside docker containers without passing special access privilege flags while running the docker container.

Everybody using Python would nowadays be using Anaconda instead of just plain old python installed. And if you aren’t, my recommendation is to use it. Why may you ask? Because with python comes a lot of packages and each such package comes with a host load of dependencies and it is difficult & time-consuming to resolve those dependencies manually. Also, anaconda allows one to create multiple environments (basically environment containers for package isolation). So let’s say you need package1 for some type of work and package2 for some other type of work. But package2 inherently depends on a different version of package1. Now if you have the same environment, you will have conflicts but creating different isolated environment containers helps the use case.