Lesson 10: Business Planning!

Its been a busy week for me this week after spending whole of my last week in lab rushing my lab assignment project. After the lab assessment on Monday, I have been busy with other reports and FYP assignments..... And guess what.. its time to submit our Business Plan for this module soon too.

We had a detail seminar and discussion with Prof Gilbert last Thursday on Business Planning as well as what is expected from us in our Business Plan reports. We went through quite a few topics such as Developing a Business Plan, Starting a business, Characteristics of small business, The risk in starting a business and the Reasons for Failure of a business. Lastly we were also introduced to Storytelling.

I was lucky that I have the exposure to starting a small business in a young age of 19, when my elder brother give up his job then to start up a small retail business in the fashion industry. And of course later on in the years, I went on to start my interest cum hobby fashion design label, Labelless. These have been some great experiences and exposure I have pick up and value them along these years.

As Prof Gilbert went through the points presented in the Powerpoint slides on the topics on starting up a small business mention above. I could not help but keep knotting my head in agreedment with the pointers and facts presented. And when he mention that sometimes a business is not consider a failure if the party exit by selling away his/her business, rings a bell in my mind. Because my elder brother have since exit his business for 3 years after running it for a good 4 years. Many have consider my brother's business a failure but yet in our eyes the truth is very much the other way.

As he saw a good opportunity to exit the business at its peak when someone made a great offer to him too much for him to say "No". And the best part of it is not the cash return from the sale of the business away but the experiences, contacts made and lesson learn during these 4 years in charge and running of the business is seem invaluable to both of us. And of course, today I am still holding on to my own 'Baby' clothing label business in face of the intense competition in the market from many new start ups from young folks just like what I did 3 years back. Okay, so much about some of my experiences to share with you guys but not to bored you people to sleep.

I got to received a comment from Prof Gilbert some 2 days back which I thought why not to share it here and of course with people reading my blog if something could be created from here.
Here is the comment posted as well as my reply:

cellprof said...

I wonder how we could test whether a podcast is a good way to deliver my lectures? anybody's lectures?

BTW, the "meaning of life" is probably a circular question. I think the answer is "life is". See Wikipedia for an effort to explore this topic.

March 26, 2007 6:24 AM

MB362Gabriel said...

I guess a good way to find out is to have a short lecture deliver thru Podcast to the class make available in Edventure with a short online MCQ assignment related to the lecture deliver. Why not?

I always ask myself the question "meaning of life" but I have never seriously gone into exploring the topic till tonight. And the one answer I like best that I just found in Wikipedia is 'to find a purpose, a "reason" for living that hopefully raises the quality of one's experience of life, or even life in general'.

March 26, 2007 9:08 AM

I really think that we should give it a try since the course is to really let us not only learn about Web 2.0 but of course also to experience it. Since the NTU is also promoting E-learning where this week is the E-learning week in my school where all our lectures are being deliver online in the Edventure. Maybe we can have a short lecture deliver with the Podcast on MB362 discussion from Prof Gilbert?

And to find out if it is really useful and working, I would suggest that the Podcast lecture is followed with a short MCQ quiz and feedback session in the Edventure at the end of the Podcast session. This will help to collectively get the feedback from us (students) to help Prof Gilbert (lecturers) find out more about our experiences if Podcast will be a sucessful tools to aids in the Education systems.

I really think this will work much better than the present Wiki homework. As this have been a problem which Prof Gilbert have ask for solution and comments from us why its not working. On my personal point of view, I enjoy blogging more than updating the Wiki as I felt the Wiki lack the interactivity between me and my readers. As my blog allows me to receive comments from my readers which I truly enjoy reading these comments as it bring about connectivity between us. But for the Wiki, I kind of a update and full stop thingy. Which does not encourage me to actually log back in every week to input my thoughts.

Hopefully my suggestion with the Podcast lecture deliver and online quiz and comments may work much better than the Wiki?? Maybe the next batch of students taking MB362 will know the answer...

Lesson 9: Scenario Planning!

We had a very interesting seminar session last Thursday, "Developing and Using Scenario Planning to Forecast Competitors' Strategies".

What is 'Scenario Planning'?

Scenario planning is a model for learning about the future in which a coporate strategy is formed by drawing a small number of scenarios, stories how the future may unfold, and how this may affect an issue that confronts the corporation.

This is really something I have done during my attactment period in Motorola's S&E Asia Networks Strategy and Business Development team. And one thing for sure I did was Competitive Intelligences (CI) every month for the team report to higher level meeting. Every morning when I reached the office and switch on the my desktop computer, I will spend the next 1 hour or so going through these CI emails, newsletters and alerts from varies big CI resource firms around the world on the latest updates in the market places as well as whats' up on our competition's movement in the industry.

This was something really interesting and keeping me busy throughout the whole attachment period to collect CI informations for the team. And seriously speaking, I really enjoy every moment of it to the later stage where I was call upon to do strategic planning and business development.

Okay, I am really eager to elaborate farther to you guys more on my experience in the attachment job scope and stuffs. However, due to the sensitivity level of my work and our team in Motorola, I could not provide more to full up the gaps here. However, I would said my experience and learning opportunity there is second to none I have experienced so far. And its so challenging in Strategic planning and CI data collection work that you will get hook on to your work so much that you fall in Love with it. Hahah... Maybe because I am a person who enjoy challenges, if you do so this could be an area of job scope you can consider joining. Who knows we maybe one day competing against each other in the real world. Sound interesting to me...

Okay, Prof Gilbert go on to give us a very detail seminar on how to go about using scenario planning to help in our forecast of competitors' strategies. We look at building Multiple scenarios on a particular subject, a robust tool for exploring the likely consequences of current decisions in alternative futures.

One great example brought up by Prof Gilbert in the discussion was the use of a table to represent the Structural Dimension and Scenarios. The need to identify the structural factors to aids in the decision making is rather important. Looking for at least 3-4 factors will be best as 2 is too little to provide any insights and too many may form contradicting answers. The important of picking the best and worst case scenarios with a few other inbetween scenarios to illustrate the possible outcome of a certain decision making is the last step to complete the example.

With the multiple cases present in the table its time to perform Scenarios Analysis to scan and monitor external changes, prioritize large-scale reseach activities, game competitive responses and create or extend a learning organization.

To summarize the scenario planning and analysis work, here is the 'Ten Steps' to help you get it right:

• Develop CI planning & analysis premises
• Define Time Horizons and Decision Space
• Historical Review: search for structure
• Identify Common & Conflicting Assumptions
• Determine Indicators of Structural Shifts
• Build Draft Scenarios to fill Decision Space
• Develop Strategies for all Competitors
• Map Strategies against Scenarios
• Validate Alternative Strategies
• Select or Adapt Most Robust Strategy

Some traps to avoid in a Scenario Planning:

1. Treating scenarios as forecasts

2. Constructing scenarios based on too simplistic a difference, such as optimistic and pessimistic

3. Failling to make scenario global enough in scope

4. Failing to focus scenarios in areas of potential impact on the business

5. Treating scenarios as an informational or instructional tool rather that for participative/strategy formation

6. Not having an adequate process for engaging executive teams in the scenario planning process

7. Failing to put enough imaginative stimulus into the scenario design

8. Not using an experienced facilitator

Wanna learn more on Scenario Planning? Check these few sites out, which I thought are quite good with lots of insights:

http://www.juergendaum.com/news/09_08_2001.htm

http://www.geog.mcgill.ca/faculty/peterson/scenarios.html

Cheers!

Lesson 8: Interactive Designs

We started the new term with a series of presentation for each of the groups on the Proof-Of-Concept for our team proposed project on the Mobile based application for the tourists. Again this was kind of interesting as we can see new ideas and concepts being presented from each team and I couldn't help but admired some of the design concepts and presentations being put up.

First, our team put up a short introduction of the usage and applications of our project E-Sing targeted on the tourist upon arrival in Singapore. We did in a different way this time round without using Powerpoint for our presentation but with the knowledge I have gained while working in Motorola by using their emulator of the Mobile phone to present the software that represent part of our application to the class.

This emulator actually behaves just like our mobile handsets that able us to run and test our application software written in Java programming language. And thats how we are able to present to the class how actually this BuSmart application which is a mobile Bus Directory of the Singapore Bus system that can be run in a mobile handset environment.

Anyone interested in this Motorola emulator application and wants to learn more on how to design their own mobile application to run on their mobile handsets can sign up as a menber and learn more about it in MotoDev website. This is a mobile application developer club set up by Motorola Electronics to encourage more mobile application developers to come together to share and learn more about mobile applications development. Here is the link:

http://developer.motorola.com/

However, team Visionaries once again caught my attention with their Creative and Interactive application user interface design with the help of Flash media. I thought their application is rather innovative with the use of sound and visual effects to enhance the user experince and catches user attention. Just like Prof Gilbert had mention, initially it's not very clear of what is to be expected on the menu bar. But once you start to interact with the application, it started to attract your attention and ultimately makes you want to find out more about it.

And this leads to the day seminar topic on "Interactive Designs".

We touched on the Critical Design Trends that an application designer should look into while trying to work on his/her application development. Prof Gilbert move on to play a very simple game with us to illustrate to us the most important factor to take note of while designing our application for the users. This game required the two players to each take turn to choose a number for a set of numbers between 1 to 9 till either side got a total of 15 from the addition of the numbers each pick. The class take quite awhile to figure out how this game should be played and this caused quite a number of confusion among us. Prof Gilbert then came back to explain to us the concept of the same game could be made easier to understand with the introduction of simple symbols like X and O that we are more familiar with the game Tic-Tac-Toe. And this illustration of effective design concept makes all sense to me how much a different it can be when you are able to present your design in an Interactive yet Simple and Attractive to the users.

We also discussed briefly on the Used Case designing concept that can help in the process of system designs. Software Engineering is the key to the effective software system design process. And here is some addition information I have found out about Use Case study to shared with you guys.


An important part of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is the facilities for drawing use case diagrams.

Use cases are used during the analysis phase of a project to identify and partition system functionality. They separate the system into actors and use cases.

Actors represent roles that can are played by users of the system. Those users can be humans, other computers, pieces of hardware, or even other software systems. The only criterion is that they must be external to the part of the system being partitioned into use cases. They must supply stimuli to that part of the system, and the must receive outputs from it.

Use cases describe the behavior of the system when one of these actors sends one particular stimulus. This behavior is described textually. It describes the nature of the stimulus that triggers the use case; the inputs from and outputs to other actors, and the behaviors that convert the inputs to the outputs. The text of the use case also usually describes everything that can go wrong during the course of the specified behavior, and what remedial action the system will take.



Use Case Diagrams have low information content.

Use case diagrams don’t tell you very much. They convey the structure of the use cases, but tell you very little about the text within them. As such, they are not particularly interesting documents when they are separated from their textual descriptions. At best the diagrams provide a nice roadmap of relationships so that readers can reconstruct the whole text of a given scenario by tracing through the «uses» and «extends» relationships inserting the text of the former, and modifying the text according to the latter.

Use cases are powerful tools for analysts to use when partitioning the functionality of a system. Use case relationships and the corresponding diagrams help analysts to structure use cases such that their textual descriptions contain a minimum of redundant information; thus making the whole text document much easier to maintain. But use cases are not design tools. They do not specify the structure of the eventual software, nor do they imply the existence of any classes or objects. They are purely functional descriptions written in a formalism that is completely separate from software design.

For more information and details why not check out these sites:

http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~dbraun/csis4650/A&D/UML_tutorial/use_case.htm

http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/useCaseDiagram.htm

That's All for this week Folks...

Lesson 7: Podcasting!!

Yeah.. Its the term break... But why am I still so busy?? Haha..

Okay... Jokes a side.. We had a very interesting seminar last Thursday on something I have been reading on the internet and hearing from people yet I still do not really know what it is about.. Ha.. That is Podcasting!!

So What is Podcasting or Podcast??

Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately.

Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device.Think of your iPod as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates. Today there are a limited number of programs available this way. The format used is RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

In the future, radio shows like All Things Considered and Rush Limbaugh will be available in this manner, and perhaps other syndication formats will support enclosures.

For a quick sample of the latest podcasts, check out http://audio.weblogs.com/.

We move on to discuss all about podcasting with Prof Gilbert explaining to us what is podcasting and how is podcasting being use to enhance people's life. We touch on the advantage of podcasting in the company, use to conduct training to it's sales executives as well as conducting meetings. Only then I do see the great potential of podcasting as well as the advantages it bring to us. However, I do have some reservation over its true potential as I felt that since the application is build and free for the people to pick up on their free will to listen to it.. information are still not diseminated if the audience choose not to listen to it just as they choose to delect or not read their e-mails.

We also discuss about the potential of podcasting to be use in the delievering lectures in the university. Hence, podcasting could be a disruptive technology in education systems.

Via podcasting, instruction can be packaged to take advantage of the small size and portability of devices like the iPod. As long as instruction is designed with clear performance objectives in mind this could be an incredible tool to put in the hands of educators.

Is podcasting a disruptive tecnology for education? It may be too soon to tell. But there seems to be real interest in this technology in education with the potential benefits of podcasting that can be offer in education:

· for distance learning
· to facilitate self-paced learning
· for remediation of slower learners
· to allow faculty to offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content
· for helping students with reading and/or other learning disabilities
· for multi-lingual education
· to provide the ability for educators to feature guest speakers from remote locations
· to allow guest speakers the ability to present once to many sections and classes
· to allow educators to escape the tedium of lecturing
· to offer a richer learning environment

Could these factors be the driver for the podcasting as a disruptive technology in Education arena? Its not too long before we will know the answer soon.

Anyway, I still felt podcasting do have its great use in many way that can enhance our digital life. And yes, we move on to discuss about how to go about creating our very own podcast which I am very much interested to learn more about it as one day I would like to do one of my own.. haha.

While I am searching through the internet for training aids, I came across this dope shit of information to help me in my learning process step by step.

Here is the link: http://www.engadget.com/2004/10/05/engadget-podcast-001-10-05-2004-how-to-podcasting-get/

Here is a snapshot of the equipment you will need and the explaination of the equipment usage in the podcasting process:






Lets see if I am able to get one up before the end of our course of study in April... I will Love to do so...

Other links of interests, check them out dudes: http://www.podcasting-tools.com/

Cheers!!