Seminar 10 Review

This seminar mainly covered the topic of Business plans and also a bit on storytelling. Another important thing which happened this seminar was the professor distributing, to those who paid, the printed copies of the original version of the wiki. He said the exam was open book and so we could take this into the exam hall.

Prof Lee Gilbert first told us about small businesses and how they are defined. We also learnt about something called a limited liability partnership(LLP). Wikipedia defines it as follows...

A limited liability partnership (LLP) has elements of partnerships and corporations. In an LLP, all partners have a form of limited liability, similar to that of the shareholders of a corporation. However, the partners have the right to manage the business directly, and (in many areas) a different level of tax liability than in a corporation.

We then started to learn about small industries. Some interesting things we learnt were that 50% of them fail in the first yr, and in 5 yrs 50 - 80% fail..... nice encouragement for budding entrepreneurs among us huh?? Then we started to look at the reason y the industries might fail, and these were anything from too less money to bad management and even too much money. Here and at other points during the seminar, Prof Lee Gilbert told us about many examples from his past experiences with these matters and kept the seminar interesting. Next we discussed what companies do to avoid failure and the first step was to write a good business plan. This way we moved on to the next topic... Business plans

So what is a business plan? Wikipedia defines it in this way...

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals.

In other words it is a documents used by people with business ideas to convince people with lots of money to lend them some. It has various clearly defined parts. First comes the executive summary, the most important part of the plan, by far. Prof Lee Gilbert says(and i have heard this from many other people as well) that more often than not this is the only part read by venture capitalists(the people with lots of money) for them to decide which venture to fund. Only if they are impressed by this section will they even look at the rest of it.

The other parts basically list out who you are, what you propose to do, what your strategy to get this done, what you need to get this done and who are the people going to get this done. Lastly come the Financial statement and the appendices.

At this point he distributed the copies of the wiki, and began the mini lecture on story telling. At first i was wondering what on earth might story telling have to do with business. Then i realised that what he was talking about was the need to grab the attention of your audience. This is a common need between both the fields, of story tellers and business men. Here is harvard business review's say on the matter....

"Persuasion is at the centrepiece of business activity. Forget about PowerPoint and statistics. To involve people at the deepest level, you need stories."

A site, Dutopia, uses this statement to illustrate how important story telling is to succeed in todays business world....

"Google 'storytelling', and you get 18 million hits. By comparison, 'shareholder value' gets you 6 million. Storytelling is hot. Understandably so, since a good story can differentiate you from your competitors."

This part was all about how to make a good story. The lecture started off with the basic structure of any story and then we started to talk about the various steps one might take(consciously or unconsciously) when one is writing a story, i.e. Pre-Writing (thinking about the subject, basic plot, etc) then Drafting(writing the story out once roughly and letting others read it and give you their thoughts) and finally Revising(using the input of the readers to improve upon the story and finalizing it.).

Then we toughed upon the subject of grammar, and how important it is to make no mistakes of grammar or other wise which may add to the noise of the story and ruin the readers experience. The professor also said that it is usually advised to use active voice and avoid passive.

This marked an end to todays seminar.

Seminar 9 Review

The Main topic covered this seminar was something called scenario planning. Though i know or could guess mostly what it is i decided to check the "expert(s)" Wikipedia.

Scenario planning or Scenario thinking is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. The basic method is that a group of analysts generate simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political, industrial information, and mineral reserves, with plausible alternative social, technical, economic and political (STEP) trends which are key driving forces.

What i understood it to be was a method used to prepare for every(or most) likely events by expecting it and prepare your plan of action if it were to happen.

To teach professor Lee Gilbert was using a presentation which he said he had made atleast 10 yrs ago about the telecommunications industry. He talked about terms like norms laws and standards and the differences between them. We learnt how many other external factors influence our decisions and actions starting from task related factors to the unknown future forces. Then he showed us a plan he had made about the telecom industry with 4 scenarios ranging from the ideal to the nightmare cases and studying the changes and reactions of the environment, market etc in each case.

In this plan 3 of the four scenarios were easy to understand but one of them was called zero sun, and though you could say it was the practical bad case(i.e. between good and nightmare) i could not figure out the rationale between the naming... so back to Wikipedia. It defines Zero-sum as:

A situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

At this point the professor set us a small assignment. We were to determine a set of 3 variables which will be strongly affected in the case of a company entering the singapore WI-FI market and setting up hot spots.(He stressed here on the number 3 here since he felt, from experience, any less than 3 was too less and any more than 4 was too much) In the end thats what happened, even though he got the answers from everyone in the class, most of them could be combined with each other to for just 3-5 variables. The seminar ended at this point after the professor collected the technology plans and remining us about our upcoming project and to make edits to the wiki, which he said he was locking next week.

Seminar 8 Review

Extremely sorry for the long break, i will try to stay up to date now and catch up the old ones as i can. So here goes...

This seminar was the submission deadline of the project's proof-of-concept, so the seminar started off with each group presenting their proof of concepts. Should anyone be interested to know, Wikipedia defines proof oc concelp as follows:

Proof of concept is a short and/or incomplete realization (or synopsis) of a certain method or idea(s) to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory is probably capable of exploitation in a useful manner.

The proof of concept is usually considered a milestone on the way of a fully functioning prototype.

For us it can be just restricted to a demonstration of a partly working model of the user interface of our projects. As with the previous submissions and classworks, even here there were vast differences in the methods used to achieve the end result. Some, including my own group used good ole' power point, nice and simple. In the other end of the spectrum, we had a group with a super hifi flash presesntation, with a real fancy interface, though it too had a few quirks. Somewhere in the middle (sort of) was a group which used a motorola emulator to simulate exactly how their project would function on a phone.

After all the groups were done we began the seminar which was about almost the same topic, design. The professor started out by giving us a seemingly complicated game, where of 2 people each picks a number between 1 to 9 and the first to have 3 numbers adding to 15 wins. we tried this for a while after which Prof Lee Gilbert shows us a magic square with the same numbers in and thats when i realised that what we have been breaking our heads to figure out is nothing but the immortal game of tic-tac-toe. With this innovative start, Prof Lee Gilbert began the seminar of the day on the importance of design in the making of the product. He started off by talking about iterative development, In which he talked about a new concept/tool to me, called use case. From what i understood. It was a method by which u choose a scenario and then devlop the product to be able to handle that scenario and be able to help the user reach his goal. Wikipedia had this to say..

According to Bittner and Spence, "Use cases, stated simply, allow description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful" . Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function.

He called a student, who had a presentation about this topic, up front and he tried to explain to us what was the use case method, but i didnt really get what the big deal was. Then the professor gave use a few examples and then it started to make a bit more sense... After this he talked about some thing called UML(unified modelling language) which was i guess used in design, for use cases, etc. Again i drew a blank so back to Wikipedia ....

In the field of software engineering, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized specification language for object modeling.

Another site of the Kennesaw State University gave a bit more consise explanation so i desided to add that also here..

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standard language for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems, as well as for business modeling and other non-software systems. The UML represents a collection of best engineering practices that have proven successful in the modeling of large and complex systems.

The seminar ended on this note with the professor reminding all of us that the technology plan, the next assignment of the project was due next week and that it just need to be submitted in the digital dropbox.