First Mover Advantage : IT Consulting Perspective

In the business world, there is this thing you call the "First Mover Advantage". It is an interesting situation wherein you are first to enter in the given market segment. If the conditions are right, you can capture a large chunk of the market and succeed.

This happened, case in point with C2 of uncle John G. The bottled drinks market in the Philippines prior to C2's launch is dominated by sodas/carbonated drinks and only a paltry percentage belongs to the other types of products like zesto,etc. There was no other company that produced bottled green tea drinks at that time. And with the right situation created, the low price of C2, healthy appeal and and alternative factor for sodas, C2 made a killing. First mover Advantage.

In the IT consulting perspective, first mover or early mover in terms of business requirements and software specification is also a huge advantage. As business analysts, we are the first movers. We gather advanced information and cover all the grounds needed by the software engineers to build quality, usable and scalable software. In this business(IT Consulting) having a first mover advantage in a software development project is really important as we have learned during our sprint retrospective earlier today. We(the team) concluded that it is vital for us BA's to look 2 sprints ahead for every iteration. By doing this we can improve our productivity and our velocity in developing the software. By looking ahead(First Mover) we can gain the advantage, minimize the risks and succeed.

First, by looking ahead(business rules and implementation strategy) we can have an accurate estimate on how complex the functionality are. By having accurate estimates, we can make informed decisions and be more agile in terms of software development. Second, by having clear and defined business rules and software specification on hand, we can mitigate or minimize the uncertainty and manage the change brought by evolving business rules/proponents. Third, with complete and well defined information on hand, the engineers can work faster and have better output with less refactoring.

O&B Library

What i like about working in O&B is that we have a comprehensive library. Our CEO bulk orders books every now and then to add to the growing library. The books that we have covers a broad domain, from technical books, PMBA books and even up to project domains like insurance, accounting, stocks and a lot more. I think that a library like this is a good investment in any company. First, it is a good and always available resource for accurate and comprehensive information to aid our work. Second, It creates a culture of learning inside the company. Lastly, it can be a source of inspiration for people to broaden their knowledge and explore other things that they don't know when they browse the comprehensive title listing in the library.

Reading a physical paper and ink book is an entirely different experience than reading an electronic copy of a book. It is easier to read and much more convenient in terms of time and location constraints. Having many copies per title is also a good idea because a group of people can read the same books and have discuss what they have learned from the books. In a way, discussing lessons learned and discussing various subject matters can also be seen as some sort of informal training to widen the knowledge of an individual.

Recently, there are a lot of new additions to the Onb library. Personally, i have only read a few books from the library mainly PMBA books and a few self help books. Right now, i'm reading "Skills for New Managers" from the new batch, It's an interesting book and by the way its written, the information is easy to absorb. There are other interesting titles that i have seen in the new batch of books and i hope to read some during the coming holidays.

An Isac Tale

A group of us from the pmba team has recently finished training from CPI. We attended the ISAC (Informatino System Analysist Course). It lasted for 7 days, with the final case presentation as the culmination point.

It was a good 7 days. The training was pretty thorough and the flow was O-K. It covered a lot of BA and SA ground as well a spinkling of PM info. Much of the meat was given to database stuff tho, CPI being an Oracle subject matter expert.

It was very interesting working with other people from CPI. It was a different experience working with DB guys. For most of our groupwork, the thinking was more DB centric rather than thinking on the code level. It was only there that i got to appreciate the ERD diagram that i was clueless on, back when i was still studying at the university. I would want to explore Oracle or DB stuff more in the future.

Overall it was an interesting and worthwile experience. It is good to attend training like this because all your past doubts about a certian topics can be alleviated or reinforced, in my case that is what happend. I also gained a deeper appreciation for the BA craft, the role that i couldn't understand the relevance before when i was still a developer : >.

Startup Environment

Ever since i graduated college, i became fascinated with startups. I like the startup culture and the work environment. There seems to be some kind of structured\controlled chaos behind it, which actually works. In fact, having worked for 3 startups and one big multinational megacorp, i could say that at many instances people are more productive at any given point in time as compared to people at large enterprises. Startups are more "agile" in terms of how the employee executes his work, unlike in a megacorp ,eveything needs to be signed in triplicate, forms for everything and approvals for every move you make. One more thing i like about startups are their work environment. Its really is day and night from an uber boring cubicle. Here are some pictures from web 2.0 startups around the world. Pictures are worth a thousand words :>
















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Stock Market Epiphany

If i had P 1, 000 ,000 right now, i would probably sink it in the stock market. I would buy a ton of Jollibee and San Miguel Corporation Shares. These companies have huge growth and are established,if not a part of every filipino's everyday life;thus, equating to a huge market share : >. Anyway,i digress.

For an upcoming project i have which involves the stock market ,our project team attended a basic course about trading trading stocks and the Philippine stock market in general.

The instructor from Citesec was a good talker. He talked about the science behind stock trading and the psychological forces behind the price movement of any stock. The two factors are FEAR and GREED. These two psychological forces are the reason why stock prices move. Let me give you an example of these two concepts. When a person buys buys a certain stock that is trending up, that is greed in action. He buys that stock hoping,wishing or praying that it will move up and bring him huge profits(buy low and sell high), ladies and gentlemen GREED in action. On the other hand, if the stock goes down, fear sets in. Fearing that it would go lower, the person would sell that stock just to recover his/her capital even at a lower price, ladies and gentlemen FEAR in action.

To cap the end of the short seminar, the lecturer talked about their online trading platform. I think that, the online trading portal is a great idea. By having online trading, more and more people can participate and invest in the stock market. The stock market can be accessible to almost everyone. With a good stock trading platform with good decision making tools like stocks charts and stock news, you can be golden.

Blogging Genesis

Blogging is the catalyst for web 2.0 propagation. The so called "read and write" era of the internet history is probably driven by the blogging movement going on right now. So, if everyone is doing it, why not join the bandwagon? This marks my first blog entry on the interwebs :> Finally!