04.20.07
Posted in Cognition and Learning, Corporate Life, Behavior, Startup, Personal at 9:07 pm by ngkaboon
Sometimes, I get the feeling that there is nothing left to learn, but each year, despite being in a relatively poorer environment, there is something new to learn. In the start up, I learn about perceived fairness and the not so glamorous side of running a business. It made me understand better what the work contract is about. I also learnt that my technical skills have not gone away but in fact, have grown more powerful when integrated with the corporate skills I acquired.
In the year spent with the pharmaceutical company, I have clearly identified my strength in gathering business requirements. I have gone into a completely new domain and understand the needs better than some of the people who have been in the business for a long time. A large part of it is due to the in-depth understanding of the domain, developed through easy access to domain knowledge (from internet), learning broader domain knowledge beyond the work scope and building relationships with people who are willing to impart the knowledge.
I also get to know my weaknesses and preferences better, which can also be considered as another form of learning. I cannot work in an environment where open discussion is suppressed. I produce my best work under a good boss (but the good bosses have a tendency to be too open and soft in pushing certain points across). I always have this feeling I am unfairly treated in terms of human resource issues, e.g., office space, pay, etc. I still do not know the right things to communicate to senior executives.
In terms of future learning, I need to start working on higher level skills like wielding my intuition more effectively and confidently and to be able to regulate my emotions. On the former, I realized my intuition is usually right but I do not have the conviction to insist on my gut feel. There is this tendency on wanting to do some things. On the latter, I tend to get frustrated too easily and have this tendency on wanting to even things up. I need to be able to discard the frustration and begin each day with a fresh page. In times of elation, I need to be able to control my excitement over unqualified successes. On the other hand, it also does not mean that I have to think negatively constantly to avoid disappointments. I must be able to control the mental states of anger, happiness and sadness more effectively. With a well-balanced emotion and powerful intuition, I should be able to reach to the next level in terms of problem-solving capabilities.
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03.25.07
Posted in Technology Adoption, Software Requirements, Corporate Life, Process, Politics, IT management at 9:29 pm by ngkaboon
I just saw a master seasoner seasoning mackerel on TV. It is impressive that he can grab 20g of salt each time with his bare hands. He demonstrated by grabbing salt and scattering it onto 3 electronic weighing scales. On the first attempt, he was off by 2g on one of the scale. In the second attempt, he managed to “weigh” 20g consistently on the 3 scales. In practice, he is able to salt the mackerel with such consistency 10 at a time in 2 seconds flat. That is what we call a true master.
It reminds me of what I set out to be. I have to strive on being the best in the line I am in. Being the best currently means to be able to make impossible projects finish in record cost and time covering the most scope and attaining the highest quality. Only when I am able to do that consistently for all projects would I be able to call myself a true master.
Unlike operational work, project work is not repetitive and hence, to be able to see patterns across projects is challenging. To be able to master this, I need to work on impossible projects. To work on impossible projects, I first need to show to people that I can do the simple projects well. In addition, I need to be doing projects across multiple domains to be able to comprehend different types of projects and understanding the patterns. So far in my career, I have a fair bit of switches from research to technical to people management, from pharmaceutical to products to projects and from supply chain to regulatory to financial accounting.
Some of the hard projects I have seen as one or more of the following characteristics:
- Same data coming from different sources
- Processes driven by legacy and regulation that nobody really know absolutely about
- Organization structure mismatches
- Strong resistance from key business stakeholders
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10.05.06
Posted in Design, Product Architecture, Leadership, Corporate Life, Politics at 8:15 am by ngkaboon
There is this lead engineer and business champion somewhere in the team, who stood up and said that the project is going to be delayed. Sure, there may have been bad design to begin with, but kudos to those who stood up.
On an engineering note, a project that is delayed is likely to get further delayed or reach a state where it is not launched at all. Something must be inherent wrong with the design and for a project of such huge undertaking, it is understandable because it is impossible to predict all possible outcomes.
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08.11.06
Posted in Technology Adoption, Corporate Life, IT management at 8:23 am by ngkaboon
Recently I visited a dentist for a root-canal treatment. I have always hated visiting a dentist all my life. In fact, I gave advice to a colleague for her kids, (1) Bring the kids to friendly dentists so that they will not be afraid of dentists and (2) Make sure their teeth are in proper arrangement so that it will not suffer from dental problems in the future.
Recalling my work as an IT professional, I realized I am sometimes being perceived as a dentist. People, over the years in dealing with misappropriate IT professionals, have become afraid of dealing with IT people. And like visiting a dentist, once you are on a dentist chair, there is nothing you can do to complain (at least not through your mouth). Does it not sound like the inept helpdesk that we keep encouraging our user to call? In a long session like a root-canal treatment, you do not even know what happen if the dentist keeps on working on your teeth. Drawing on the analogy, it would seem that it is important for your users to find an avenue to raise their discomfort (like raising hands in a dental session) and it is important to provide constant feedback on what is happening in the session.Â
As for the earlier pair of advice, there is nothing much I can do about exposing first time users to the right IT. And for the latter advice, the closest analogy would be to fix the information problem and make sure the information is well-organized. In this way, even when system upgrades, the migration would be simpler.
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07.05.06
Posted in Cognition and Learning, Corporate Life, Behavior, Politics at 8:31 am by ngkaboon
What exactly is experience? And why even with significant experience, you could still make mistakes?
Experience, to me, is having done something before and “experiencing” the outcome. Scientifically, it only works for very repetitive activities that you do a fair number of times. In practice, there are a lot of things that we decide and do only a few times and does having experience with the few occassions really help? (In fact, sometimes it makes it worser especially when wicked variables team up and work against you, giving you false sense of associativity.) Furthermore, these decisions/actions comprise a lot of different variables that somehow make each situation unique.
From a management perspective, academics talk about the ability to see the context and generalize the principles. Acquiring this ability, strangely but surely enough, requires experience. Then, based on this principle, one way to accelerate your experience acquisition is through varied experiences (as opposed to repetitive experiences). By experiencing the spectrum, it should help you to identify the true constants, the nearly constants, the variables and entirely ill-defined non-functions.
One general footnote: People who enjoy power dislike power being taken away from them and when that happens, they would exercise/exaggerate their remaining power.
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06.13.06
Posted in Corporate Life at 2:31 pm by ngkaboon
As someone who has worked for BOTH a startup and sizable American MNCs, I think I am in a position to clear some misconceptions.
1) Start-up hours are not necessary longer than MNC hours.
2) Both start-up and MNC can offer you a large variety of work, including dirty work.Â
3) Start-ups do not necessary give you more freedom than MNC. Dress down in MNC can be quite relaxed.
4) MNC welfare is better than start-up welfare. Pay, for example, is paid regularly.
5a) A lot of time is spend on talking in an MNC vs a startup.
5b) A lot of time is spend on doing rather than talking in a startup.
5c) Neither is really good.
6) There are less policies in a startup. Your notebook is as close as it get to become your private asset.
7) The level of technical work in MNC is ridiculously low. Most of the problems deal with people.
8) The amount of technical work in a startup overwhelms until it becomes uninteresting.
9a) I left MNC to join startup to have more say in the work I do
9b) I left startup to join MNC because I thought I had more say in the work I do in an MNC.
9c) Finally, I realized, your say is dependent on your relationship with your boss and the influence of your boss.
10) You do not need to be in sales/marketing to prepare slides to communicate with people in an MNC (I included this one…because I like making slides 
)
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05.10.06
Posted in Corporate Life, Behavior, Startup at 5:45 am by ngkaboon
I edited these points briefly for something i wrote elsewhere. Maybe it’s applicable to real life and largely inspired through 20% startup - 80 % corporate exposure I have.
- Do a little everyday. A little step is better than no step at all. You can program. You can read and research about the vision. You can establish the values on how the project would be runned.
- Communicate everyday. If you cannot, communicate through documentation is better than none at all.
- Communicate with yourself through documentation.
- Communicate with everyone else because they are your potential users.
- To have content for communicating, you have to read. 80% of what you communicate is your interpretation of ideas from somebody else.
- Keep an open view. Seek out opinions. No one knows for sure on which decision is best given everyone is living this particular scenario for the first time.
- Trust your instinct of understanding the users and tranform the product to meet what your instinct guides you to understand from the users.
- Do not translate directly from what the user want to your product
- Understand yourself because you are your first user.
- What you do is revolutionary, be it the peopleware you are establishing, or the product you are releasing, and this what will be the why to guide your how.
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05.03.06
Posted in Corporate Life, Process at 9:14 am by ngkaboon
Like most software, you need to screw up to understand the flaw of the design and you need to implement the fix to see if the fix works or screws up further. No analysis would be sufficient. In the enterprise world, the key is predictability. High maintenance cost is less a sin than unpredictable maintenance cost. Hence, new processes are designed to institutionalize the predictability of a hack-up.
This behavior of course goes beyond software.
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04.27.06
Posted in Leadership, Corporate Life at 1:52 pm by ngkaboon
Now that I started my corporate career, I thought I share some of my strange work attitudes.
1. This week would be your last week at work. You should try to contribute the most value as much as possible (Triage and Efficiency).
2. You must make your work become simplistic enough so that they can either hire a dummy to do your work or eliminate your position (Process).
3. Seek feedback early and continuously (Communicate).
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