Taking ref from GigaOm articles, Dash Navigation has got it right and done a great job of bring two fantastic services together, namely GPS and Web 2.0. For me, Dash Express is an Internet enabled GPS (Global Positing System). As in past, we all gone heard from major like Google, Yahoo, etc tried to show us the dream but could not get it in reality. Dash Express is loaded to fascinate us with on the go telling us;

• Better routes to get destination considering the traffic flow.
• Better ways to get destination by giving us specific options to shop, eat and drink.
• Better options to explore locality of route.

Features which I admire most,

• MyDash: Allows me to create button and upload to Dash device through Internet.
• Send2Car: Allows me to talk to car from my laptop to updates like addresses.

I am a dreamer and dream of “Total Recall” for features like,

• Dash Express could interface the Robotic steering wheel and guide car on the road using traffic/motion sensors and live satellite images. Also it could also feel me for all my mood and just take me preferred beer bar or my type of restaurant (spicy Indian) while I am sleeping in backseat of my car.

What do you think?? I am sure, it is not very far fetched dreams and surely an inspiration for Dash and Delphi to come together.

“Entrepreneurship” remains a fascinating word for many MBA graduates and working folks (non MBA yet, including me. But there are few who could “Just do it”. Here I like to highlight my take on it.

I think there are more ‘born’ entrepreneurs than ‘made’. Considering, Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Dell and many more. Some suggest that entrepreneurship can be thought, my vote to this statement is somewhat to limited degree.
I think college can

• Get you in a lab.
• Get domain knowledge on historical data basis.
• Teach you unique way of logical thinking.
• Teach you problem solving and analytical skills.
• Teach you set of belief about humans.

But it fails to recognize and educate about sightings the future, which is a core attribute to an entrepreneur personality.

Even, MBA program for entrepreneurs, can teaches you, only.

1. How to evaluate an idea or an opportunity?
2. How to make business plan?
3. How to recognize and mitigate risks?

Inversely, Entrepreneurship has three core aspects.

1. Exploiting and defining opportunity, careful.
2. Understanding and marshallings the required resources.
3. Negotiating and harvesting these resources, effectively.

College can teach you “science of entrepreneurship”. But the art, “application of principals of science”, is very much individual attitude. This is where the difference lies between management graduate and street smart entrepreneur. Why?? In decision making, the graduate will heavily rely on historical events, index patterns, market data or future predications, but later one will just rely beats of the street, people day-to-day problem and his vision to tap it.

Education teaches us to plan for uncertainty. But often, this education can be disabler and can hamper our ability:

• To be adventures against stated risk.
• To tolerate the risks and event due to over-analysis.
• To pursue the unknown.
• To dream!!!

But what I see a down side of education is that you heavily rely on data and skills. MBA education does not mean that you get the job of entrepreneur or guarantees the taste the success for any startup you dip in. I think formal business education can be a liability to an entrepreneur. Why? How?

This can damage a potential entrepreneur success prospect. If a potential entrepreneurs goes to MBA collage, he will be made to think and make decisions just like professionals sitting in big corporates. These graduate professionals are supposed to depend data sheets and computer generated project report to make decision. And certainly, he will not be allowed to take any decision on any a potential prospects without databased projections. Entrepreneurship is doing just the opposite. It is about

• Beating the rich and fat corporate guns where they cant think and shoot.
• Making gut feeling a reality.
• Beating the elephant with rabbit like speed.

I am not advocating against MBA grads, instead stating, entrepreneurship is not for just for those graduates ‘unicorns’ but for any body who can dream and chase those desires to douse the fire in belly.

Learning from Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed

I think in this article Bill has hit the nail at the head by summing his 30 years success in Computer World. I take following learnings from him.

• It is about continuous learning.
• Develop good habit of reading lots of book.
• For success in any career, knowing the right software is essential .
• Software Innovation is not a cubical job. Rather, it requires:
• To collaborate and share idea with other people.
• To site down and talk to customer.
• To get feedback and understand the needs from end users.

According to Microsoft: Key Business Skills

NanoSaka = Nano + Saka
Ancient Warrior in Digital age.

I have started a new blog on my personal site.
It is call www.NanoSaka.com!!!!!
You will have your valid question… what the hack it this word?? Or is it some Japanese dish…??

No!!!
Actually… I tried to add this to Wikipedia… but they rejected…it… ;-( My content follows…

What is NanoSaka????

Nanosaka

NanoSaka is a modern concept in nanotechnology to bring in the civilization concepts from Saka warrior tribes.

NanoSaka is a combination of Nano and Saka. Nano is know for its extremely small nature of size and also recently associated with technology revolution taking in computing domain. Nanotechnology refers broadly to a field of applied science and technology whose unifying theme is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers, and the fabrication of devices within that size range.

Saka is the terms used for central asian tribes during 1500BC. The [Sakas] were the Scythians who lived in the eastern part of Central Asia. They are considered to be of north-eastern Iranian people by modern scholars. They lived in what is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, parts of India, parts of Iran, Ukraine, and the Altay Mountains and Siberia in Russia, in the centuries before 300. They were considered to be part of Aryan and Persians. Sakas has long history and association in most civilization history.

What is NanoSaka means? NanoSaka is inspired by Saka civilization’s evolution and survival and its new breakthrough in technology such as nanotechnology which promised to change our world for ever. We term NaoSaka are the people who will drive the change into new neno world with Saka sprite.

NanoSaka is a budding organization funded by social entrepreneur to work on next generation technologies. NanoSaka initially wished to brainstorm the ideas amongst social networking communities.

Sakas Today

Many communities in Asia are speculated to be the descendants of the Sakas. These include:

• Aryan
• Saka
• nanotechnology
• Nano

External links

• NanoSaka web site
• NanoSaka Blog site

Final Comment:
Saurabh Kaushik has started NanoSaka to publish his thoughts and commentary on various technology, product and services.

I have been trying to manage my projects using wiki in my present organization but I am not getting enough attention from Sr management and unable to trigger cultural change in organization.

At this point, I sat down and thought about it. I came to an article on change Management in Organization. So here I am putting my take on Change management with Web 2.0 culture.

Pain Points:
To spread a new agenda, you have to address main pain points of organization.

• Why? - Business Case
• You should be able to justify why a person needs to blog?
• How? - Adaptation
• New tool should be have easy to install, start and use.
• Where? - Fragmentation
• You should be able to connect all these wiki in an organization process.
  

Approach:
To have a successful launch, you have to hit the nails from top to bottom.

1. Senior Management: They are the driving force and should be able to see benefits. Any thing you do, it has to be blessed by top management. They should include it into their mission statement.
2. Communication: You should be able to do Marketing and advertisements across the company about new idea.
3. Culture: It will be an more open and collaborative environment. You will have to re-tailore the basic values and process of organization.
4. Incentives: A change attached with a reward can act as an catalyst to the success of new initiative.
5. Infrastructure: Yes not to forget, to get best of the solution available for usage. I like Atlassian Confluence.

Launch Considerations:
Once you have above all addressed, you have to see that you can tie every one together for success.
Organization generally work in vertical silos. This web 2.0 effort should work across silos and tie them together horizontally. But you should ensures the integrity of silos while doing this. Example, you don’t want customer representative to know about patent research work in R&D department.

All this work of web 2.0 should be a process oriented otherwise it will loose its significance. It should be like an output of a Wiki update can become input for next stage silo.

With this platform set, you will be able to;

• serve customer with more efficiency.
• involve employees for collaboration.
• manage suppliers better.

So the key to success of of Web 2.0 in your organization

1. Align it with critical business processes.
2. Get blessing from top management.

Here I am sharing my experience at PMP Conference 2007.

Mr. Prabhu Eswarla from HP has presented HP process to assess a project health. Actually, the five of stated checks are generally placed almost in all organizations, but to connect all of them for assessment is a new approach. I find this very interesting.

• Project Management Review:
• Objective: Assessment of project alignment with organization goals.
• Involvement: Project Manager and Group Manager / Sr. Project Manager
• Time Duration: Monthly
• Quality Health Check:
• Objective: Quality compliance assessment of project level of with Quality department standards.
• Involvement: Project Manager and Quality Manager
• Time Duration: Monthly
• Customer Satisfaction:
• Objective: Assessment of customer satisfaction using his feedback during project.
• Involvement: Project Manager and Customer feedback
• Time Duration: Monthly
• Project Audit Council:
• Objective: Assessment of peer review on all aspects.
• Involvement: Project Manager and Peer Managers
• Time Duration: Quarterly
• Technology Management Review:
• Objective: Assessment of optimal and efficient technology usage.
• Involvement: Project Manager and architects.
• Time Duration: Quarterly
• 5+1 th view:
• Circle graph with parameters:
• Time, Cost, Cost/est
• Quality, Resource, Communication,
• Risk, Contracts, Client Satisfaction.

Here I am sharing my experience at PMP Conference 2007.

Ms. Sujatha Blakrishnan from Valtech India System has presented her view on Agile Development Management.

I find it fairy interesting as she gave a holistic view of methodology. In consider Agile is shorter release cycles with age-old methodology V shape model software life cycle.

Yes, it is good for both Product and Service companies. I generally know that companies just adopt this model to show customer. But real adaptation requires more work than generally perceived. She mentioned that ValTech has invested almost $ 20 million to establish. I certainly consider it is a heavy investment. I think most of the cost goes into basic setup like Cruise Control, Wiki (Confluence), Video Conference, Skype etc.

After that, it comes culture awareness and customer agreement to participate.

Certainly, it gives tremendous value to customers who can control the flow of development and gets what he wants at the end of project.

But it may not be good enough for a service company like Infosys, Wipro, etc, who wishes to drive it by themselves. Also it is very difficult to define the SLA in these terms. Even if you have come up with one, it will an open-ended SLA which will state to chase a moving target. Because, you have just signed off to changing requirements and adopting customer needs.

Yes, it will good bad new for developers. In this model, developers may have to sit tight all the times without any relaxed day.

But I have to say that this kind of play field give lots of room and flexibility for innovation and creativity amount team and product owner. It is good and bad news for both.

Three main roles in Agile PM:

1. Product Owner: Defines the Sprint and participate with team to achieve goals.
2. Scrum Master: Removes the hurdles for execution of project.
3. Team: Performs the day-to-day and release-to-release tasks.

Here I am sharing my experience at PMP Conference 2007.

I have attended a penal discussion with Wg. Cmd. Patrawall and his panel. It was quite thought provoking. Here are some of the points, impressed me.

Organizational Success:

Integrating three main ingredients:

• People
• Process
• Technology

Stages of innovation:

1. Leadership
2. Funding
3. Incubation
4. Walk the talk

Project Management success relies on understanding of following aspects of project.

1. Vision
2. Purpose
3. Goals

Inspirations for innovation:

• Innovation comes from hearts.
• It is about getting most from least.

• Free your mind. Tranquilize it.
• Mistakes are stepping stones of innovation.
• Innovations done not happen overnight.
• Stay away from autocratic procedures.
• Innovator has to think-outside-the-box.

Innovator should be aware about:

• Value creation for stockholder.
• Marketplace transition
• Process to get there.

Circle of innovation for an organization:

• Passion
• Vision
• Process
• Values
• Standard

Generally, Project Managers in IT industry think that after PM designation their engagement with technology is over rather they should just play organization and people game. This is where they kill innovation and core competency. It should not be encouraged either from organization or culture. It should be about keeping core business competency alive and contributing from all sides.

I am big fan of Virgin Comics. there latest take on Indian Idol Ramayana has fascinated me. I always like the feel of Gothic touch to all my dreams.

Recently, I watched 300 movie. I just loved it very much. Especially, the dialog of Spartan King Leonidas “This is SPARTAAAA…!!!!!” still…. gets me goose bumps ….. even now.

I wish Frank Miller get attention to this Ramayana tale and make smiler pattern movie.

Anyways, here is a amazing offer for all of you to get a hold on this comic book….. for free!!!

All you have to do is send a large, self-addressed stamped envelope into the Virgin offices, and they’ll send you an autographed (by Ron Marz) copy of issue #1. All you have to do is pay the postage.

The address:

Virgin Comics Ramayan Offer
594 Broadway
Box 407
New York NY 10012-3234

The postage:

• $1.98 for U.S. addresses
• $2.24 to Canada
• $5.40 to other countries.

Additionally, did you checkout the articles in Hindustan Time on Ramayana.

Batman, Superman and Spiderman may now have to pack-up their hoods in the US as American fans of comics appear to be hooked on to tales of characters inspired by Indian mythology.

Here is the traitor, which I love like hell……..

I have recently changed my project management methodology to Agile. At frist, I have decided to assigned role and then tie each of them together. Here is first shot at Development Process.

Roles:

• Customer: Product Owner
• Project Manager: Scrum Master
• Project Lead: Team lead
• Quality Manager: Quality assurance
• Developer: Team
• Peer Reviewer: Team

Here, blue color indicates the customer involvements.

Initiate

Planning

Execution

Quality Control

Closure