Meetings in modern age

Are meetings really helping to collaborate ?

Change the way meetings are organized in your company and improve your profits by 20%. Many companies have elaborate policies on how budget gets approved and how money gets spent but fewer companies consider time as scarce resource and quantify the usage .

A recent survey showed that 20% of organisation time is going into meetings every year. However, very few of these meetings are productive. Where is time going ? Research shows that on an average, a senior manager spends two days in a week in meetings. Responding to survey these managers suggested that their meetings not always productive. A regular 90 min monthly meeting among middle level managers costs 15 million dollars. Who is responsible for approving this cost? On how many occasions did you, as an engineer, walk into a meeting not knowing anything about the meeting and walked out not having anything to work on. Many organizations consider time management as an individual responsibility. But, organization’s culture is a bigger than any individual. Organization time is

Number of meetings have increased but number of productive meetings have decreased. Advancement in technology reduced the cost and effort in organizing meetings. Literally anyone can call any employee in the organization for meetings. On an average, during a 30 meeting involving 5 people 21 mails are sent. Ineffective meetings are not helping anyone. So should we totally stop meetings? Meetings are part of our daily work day, and thus they can't be completely avoided but they should be improved. Meetings are meant to collaborate. According to research, number of 1-1 meetings and team meetings has tripled in the last one decade but meetings involving multiple business units did not increase. Even if there is an organization level meeting they are intended to communicate information rather than seek inputs from various teams to collaborate and come up with a strategy. Good meetings are those that happen involving different teams and foster diverse thinking.

• How can you change organization culture, which is too big to be changed by anyone?  Everyone can contribute to improvement.

• Always send agenda ahead of meetings and give action items post meetings.

• If you are a manager encourage conducting shorter meetings no more 30mins. Attention span reduces and number of email increase post this.

• Meetings should be set to take decisions. Foster decision making in meetings and give action items to execute. 

• An hour of team meeting costs 200$ . Encourage employees to start looking from cost perspective. Make it meaningful.

• Avoid inviting people just because you like to have someone in the meeting. Call only right stakeholders to meeting.

Time managements techniques to achieve your goal.

Book        : Time Management

Publisher: Harvard Business Essentials 

                    
Read this book to understand how to effectively use time to achieve your goals. This books lays emphasis on the following:

Using your time to achieve your goals not other's.
Delegating effectively.
Adopting work based structure like a project manager.

Make most of your time my understanding how productive you are and how much time you are wasting time. Mr. Johnny Depp is an employee of an MNC. He comes to office everyday at 08:30;checks his mail for an hour; starts working on the most urgent thing to be delivered by EOD. He receives an another unexpected mail from his supervisor or his colleagues to fix something. He leaves the present task in middle and starts working on the boss's mail. After half an hour into this, Depp receives another popup from outlook to check out new collection in Myntra. He quickly gazes it and gets back to work; to get to the point where he was; he spends 30 mins and finishes the task by 03:00 P.M. Before moving onto another task he once again opens his mailbox; quickly replies to few mails and winds up for the day. At the end of the day he thinks, "Did I achieve my goal today?" what's his goal in the first place ? - Is your work day is in the lines of Mr. Depp’s then it is time to spend some time on your goals. Setting up SMART goals is the first step towards time management. Everything that you do in your day must help you to get closer to your organization or your personal goal. How can you do this ? Harvard business management essentials give many templates to keep track of your time. You can find many goods templates on net as well. Once you keep track of your time for exactly for three days , you would get a complete idea on your work style and what's eating into your time.

Delegation is yet another important step that helps in utilizing your time effectively. Effective delegation is two 

sided coin; it reduces the burden on oneself and helps to build talent around. Let us take Johnny Depp again. He is a very hard working and dedicated person. On Monday team meeting a new action item comes every now and then. Everyone knows that Mr. Depp volunteers for it 90% of the times because of his nature or willingness to put that extra mile. Do you have the same urge as Johnny. Depp. It has double disadvantage : first other team members in the team would not know much about the tasks as long as Mr.Depp is working for them . Far more threatening problem.is Depp would never get promoted. But why ? As he ismore valuable to his immediate manager. Managers are very reluctant to promote their most dependable associates.

Work base structure is another important tool being used effectively by project managers to utilize time effectively. The concept behind this is to divide a major chunk of work into small pieces that could no longer be divided. From time to time we come across a major project or task like improving your organization profit by 10%, delivering a new solution or releasing a new car into market . Let us consider manufacturing a car. The four main things involve: Getting an innovative design from engineering team, build the stasis and engine, complete manufacturing , and finally perform quality tests. Break these further to an extent that these can no longer be divided or each task can be completed in a day. With this you could effectively track your big project or task and can effectively use your time to achieve your goals. If you are thinking of becoming a manager in future you are likely to check these links that provide templates for WBS http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/work-breakdown-structure-TC001141726.aspx.

In sum, read this book on sunny weekend you would enjoy and you would familiarize yourself with time managements techniques to achieve your goal.

GOAL-II – ITS NOT LUCK

Read to Goal-II to get an idea on the following:

•   How to sell effectively
•   How to find root cause for a problem(Using Current reality tree method)
•    How to reach a goal ( Using Prerequisite tree method)
• 
  

 Goal-II is a build up to novel, Goal-I. Here, Alex Rogo faces completely different and tougher challenges. In Goal I, Alex Rogo transforms his plant from a bottomless pit to a highly profitable plant. He gets rewarded with a promotion and made responsible for diversified group. As an executive vice president, he has great vision for companies under his supervision. However, when markets hits downturn UNICO decides to sell companies under diversified group to improve cash reserves and cash flow. Alex faces daunting challenge of selling his 3 companies to three times the face value else his entire career is at stake.He succeeds finally using the following techniques.

How to sell effectively:- While selling a solution or a product , one shouldn’t start with all the positives of one’s solution. First, address the pain point of the market and quantify how much its costing .For example , legacy servers are causing 100000$ loss in revenue per annum  . Then brief your solution which address the solution. For example, virtualize your environment with investment of 40,000$. You save 60,000$ p.a. Then your solution is irrestible.

How to find the root cause for a problem using current reality tree:- Lets take problem of giving a separate state to Telengana. To find out the root cause first we have to list UDE undesirable effects like

•     People are resorting to violence
•     Both the regions want more money allocated for their development
•     Politicians in either sides are trying to maximize their gains.
•     Industry is losing money due to uncertainty.

   You may use post it notes to help with root cause.

 How to go about planning for a goal objectively using prerequisite tree: Let’s say Anil Ambani’s goal is to buy a luxury villa. Then write all the obstacles that prevent him from buying a luxury villa

• Might not have money to buy it—Get a job which gives enough savings and follow a plan to 3 years to save 1 cr so that  you could afford to buy
•  Villa might be very far from city – There are many villa projects within in 40KM of radius. Find out a good builder and with a car 40Km is not a big deal these days
•     Selling it back might be very difficult- You might not want to sell it . Just use it as an investment for future purpose which gives 5cr for the 1cr you invested now .

Thus there is an action plan against each of the negatives . When the action plan is properly executed for each of these then automatically you would achieve Goal …! 

Finally , Goldratt’s objective through Goal-II is to explain intricate business concepts lucidly to an extent that they appear commonsense. When applied effectively they help in many real life situations like, Should i invest in equity during down turn? How to solve innumerable daunting issues at work? Goal-II meets its objectives well . Try applying theory to practice  J

Netbackup Oracle internal process

Backup :

Database tables are not directly copied to netbackup .

bporaexp/bporaexp64 utility

Database tables are first converted in xml files by bporexp/bporaexp64 in backups and then data is storage in netbackup storage unit 

RMAN (oracle recovery manager ) is responsible for performing backups and restores . Rman can’t directly access media and devices it uses netbackup for oracle to uses the devices .

Rman does three things . identifies whether the opearation is backup or restore

What to backup or restore (Rman)

Submits a request for media server to accessing the media and devices for (backup/Restore ) using linking libobk or orasbt.dll

Process : Nbrb will be intaited on media servers

                 Nbrb will get the resources from emm

Controlls the flows of data into/out of databases

Process : Rman access the devices and bpbkar gets started and send the data . (Backup)

                  Rman access the devices and tar gets started and send the data . (Restore)

Once it gets the resources

                        Bpbkar gets intiates on clients .

                       Sends data to media server ( bpbkar puts data from client disk to networkà child bptm puts data from network to shared memory à parent bptm puts data from shared memory to disk )

Rman uses restore  command to start restores

                        Using netbackup library libobk talks to media server via bpcd to get resource

                        Once it gets the resources

                        Tar gets initated on the client and transfers data to client from media server

                          Parent bptm reads data from tapes/disk of mediaserver and puts in buffersà child bptm puts data from shared memory to network  -à tar reads data from network to client disk

Scripts:

/usr/openv/netbackup/ext/dbext/oracle/samples

Googly: Do Managers really matter at work ?

Google is a company set up by highly creative engineers for creative and crazy engineers. They innovate all the time and come up with crazy ideas .A company filled with “A” players who considered management a distraction from the designing and debugging they loved to do . Eventually ,  One day  an highly talented engineer , had this crazy idea of what do managers actually do ? . Do managers really matter ? .  Given the open culture of Google , this idea spread pretty fast and had gone to CEO of Google , Larry . Larry even took and reduced the number of managers per product line and wanted to see what happens  . The result ? . Things started working fine after managers are cut down…..!       only for a while  . Then things started getting worse .  CEO of Google started getting involved in expense reports , leave approval and guiding team through company’s vision .  The ploy has back fired royally and managers are back royally . But CEO of google wants to know what managers really do  . A comprehensive project called “ PROJECT OXYGEN” is launched to dig manager’s brain and  he he here the comes the tricky point document it  J J . Google’s management needs data to show and prove to its engineers why and how  managers are effective and required , for god’s sake otherwise they don’t accept after all its Google :) 

Google’s people analytics team  persuaded skeptics with data accumulated through “PROJECT OXYGEN “ . I'm sure if you are manager you would have googled up this term now :P  . In Google , engineers rate managers semi annually and annually and exit interviews would be conducted to figure out what could be improved . Project oxygen team started using this data to analyse . First , they analysed exit interviews to see if something could be deciphered  . The overall output of team with lower rating manager is almost similar to one with higher rating . Exit interviews did not help much . How to deciphere this riddle  ? . Finally , managers reviews revealed some interesting facts .  Entire team's performance is tightly in correlation with manager's effectiveness . A slight increase in management performance is increasing the teams results manifold .  

High performance managers differ from average ones in the following three categories .

1. Is a good coach.

2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage.

3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being.

4. Is productive and results-oriented.

5. Is a good communicator - listens and shares information.

6. Helps with career development.

7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team.

8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team.

One more suprising fact found is , Employees love to have freedom and want to be independent in their work but they are willing to talk to their managers about their career growth . Further evidence is found when managers of higher score are analysed for in their work styles and impact on teams performance .High scoring mangers saw less turnover on their team than other did – and retention is relatively related strongly to a manager quality than seniority , tenure or promotions . The data also showed a tight connection between manager’s quality and workers happiness .  Employeed with scoring bosses consistengly reported greater satisfacation in mutli .

This shows that decisions taken by managers with common sense is not common after . We might need managers for much more than common things ..!