But it's funny how fast a month goes by, 'cos hey! Here I am plodding away at a keyboard about what happened this week. Before we do that, let's spend two blank lines (I couldnt find an equivalent for 2 minutes of silence) in the memory of the togetherness of the students of PGSEM 2009.
The thing is... for the first time since we joined together in May 2009, our class split up as we chose different electives. Some of your favorite mates and buddies in chaos were no longer around. Such is life, and electives. But at least we get to drop what we find to be god-awful-topics! And we can actually choose how many subjects we want to pick in a quarter, or whether we want to do the quarter at all in the first place! I hear we have some brave people who just dropped the quarter since they didn't get subjects they wanted. Anyway, on to my fav subjects.
MSP - Managing Software Projects. This is being handled by a known devil, one of our previous profs well known for his sense of energy and theatrics in class. An unconventional prof by any standards, he bring youtube videos, varied cases and interesting points of view to class. The subject by itself is considered by many to be a well-beaten dead horse, but our prof got it to romp around the lawn for us (dont spend too much time understanding what I said, basically I'm saying he made it sound interesting). This week we discussed how without requirements planning, enterprise architecture, acceptance criteria etc. large projects involving humongous architecture can definitely fail. And what case did we study? None other than the FBI. Apparently they made a big goof up with a system that was called the VCF (Virtual Case File). Try looking it up. Now, I did feel that since the project failed, everyone has something or the other to say about it. Apparently now they have something like a version two that is supposed to be a lot better and stabler, but I'm guessing that if it fails, people will have a whole new set of reasons to explain it. It's just so easy to do post-mortems.
LOC - Leadership and Organizational Change. Honestly, I was expecting this class to be dull. I mean, who doesnt have their two bits / twenty paise to talk about leadership. And to top it off, we've seen this professor previously too! In fact, the profs from both these subjects taught us in the same quarter previously. So, our expectations weren't way too high on this subject. I must say, I am pleasantly surprised. While half the fundas seem straightforward (Yes, I know enough of leadership, give me my MBA now, thank you.) this prof does tend to have a small surprise in each of his lessons. Some twist seems to be inherently present all the time. For e.g., a small anecdote from this week. He was talking about a theory drawn up by Henry Mintzberg. Mintzberg believed that MBA schools are useless and in fact dangerous. He said that true leadership comes about as a result of reflection on past experiences. And if you pick fresh engineering grads, pump them up with MBAs, fluff up their feathers, that doesnt help in any way! You're just giving them the technical education to try and game the system, not really helping. So give MBA education only to people atleast eight to ten years old in the industry. Apparently none of the MBA schools are happy and a huge uproar was unleashed. Obviously! You try coming and telling a prof that he should stop taking in the cash cow set of students who're coming in every year! However, it seems that people and companies are indicating that they'd like to give his theory a serious run, to see if he is indeed right. Good luck to him, I already made it through the door anyway. The rest of the week was primarily taken up by the difference between leadership and management (Yes, there's a difference), and how the PAEI model can point to which are you're more oriented towards. Good stuff.
PM - Product Management. I'm still a little undecided about this course. I have never met this prof before, but something tells me that further observation will be required before I can truly claim if this subject is as applicable as the syllabus dictates. Theory is one thing, practice yet another. Anyway, this prof started the class with telling us that the world is evolving... blah blah... the time for meeting people's needs is over... blah blah... now people don't know what they want. Wait, what? Yea, you heard right. People no longer know what they need! If I invented a flying car today, people might well take it tomorrow! I could invite singing shoe laces for all I care, people MAY get interested and take it! So what he continued on to do, was to describe a new product, figure out what goes into it, and drill it into our heads that case studies are good, but remember that they are written AFTER the shenanigans around them. In hind sight, you can always analyse what went right and what went wrong. But a product manager tries to figure out what the audience wants BEFORE they reject the offering and decide what can make it more of a success. and all this by following some sort of repeatable process. The class had its ups and downs, and the initial predictability. I hope it springs more surprises, good ones at that, as the quarter goes on.
It was also our first distributed session, so it was a little cool. We had a few guys from Chennai VC-ing in from what I think was the Infy campus. So questions and thoughts came in every now and then over the mic. A little disconcerting at first, but hey, it worked pretty ok. Atleast from where I was sitting! Now to see if we feel the same way when the prof conducts a few classes from there!
All in all, a good start to what appears to be a promising quarter. The second years have arrived.
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