Amit’s e-world

One of my unfufilled MBA dreams was to have a sponsored trip to some place in Europe for some B-school competition. I came quite close in the AT Kearney challenge, but that was about it. I confess I envied the MBAs in my batch who did. Some were really lucky to have their interviews scheduled in foreign countries. Some one in my batch had an interview with Qatar Airways at Doha & was flown in from the UK in business class. Quite a few ppl had interviews with Nike at Amsterdam. There were a couple of MBAs who had their interview in HongKong for Prudential. Perhaps, the more well-earned trips were the trip to the US that the AT Kearney team had.

Better late than never, I have been shortlisted as one of three finalists in a European paper writing competition on Global Sourcing and Innovation (www.gsiawards.com). The event will be held at Netherlands in the first week of December. On day 1, I will be presenting & defending my paper in front of the jury. Day 2 is marked as the "Global Sourcing & Innovation" event. There will be ministers from India
and Middle Eastern countries, as well as prominent figures from the corporate world. I understand that the CEO of Philips will also be speaking at the event. This is also the day when the prize winner for GSIA will be announced.

Ecstatic & really looking forward to this event.

Although the title would suggest that this post is a review of the new Shahid Kapur film, actually this is about the recent meeting of our MBA year. On Thursday, we had our first informal reunion after the MBA. We met at the Prince of Wales, a pub in Central London. It was great to see a healthy turnout for the first of what will become a quarterly recurring event. For me, the event was a great opportunity to meet many ppl from the batch at one common location. It was great to see & hear how ppl were coping / managing their new roles. Indeed, it feels good to have been there & hopefully there will be a lot more ppl the next time around.

In my first assignment at work, I was required to manage the knowledge transition from our client’s previous IT services partner to our organisation. Apart from planning the session layout, I also had to create a framework to measure the effectiveness of the knowledge transition process. Not surprisingly, I went back to the benefits dependency model - my personal favourite.

For the benefit of those who haven’t still come across this piece of brilliance from Joe Peppard, and for those who have moved ahead to bigger & better things, the benefits dependency matrix is like a fish-bone diagram that starts with defining objectives in the right, then defines quantified benefits to measure the achievement of those objectives, followed by what programmes would be needed to achieve those quantified objectives & finally defines what IT projects are needed for the programme. This ensures that the "right" IT projects are implemented to achieve the required objectives. I built a variation of this model, by starting with the objectives of the knowledge transition project, that led me to define the critical success factors & sub-factors & finally I created a checklist of items to the left to ensure that the sub-factors were addressed. Such a representation makes it easy for the viewer to see the purpose / rationale behind having the items on the checklist, as each item can be traced back to the core objectives. A very simple yet effective model that can be used to report across different levels in the organisation, ranging from the CIO / CEO who had the vision to come out with the objectives to the manager who is responsible to manage the achievement of each critical success factor.