Attend one of our webinars on “Addressing the Top 10 Challenges of LTE EPC Testing” to discover the challenges, pitfalls, and best practices in testing LTE EPC networks and products. Register for one of two sessions: on September 14, 2011 at 2:00pm EST, or September 21, 2011, at 10:00am BST (GMT+1).
I’m usually skeptical when local habits become emerging trends and are subsequently declared a new global management paradigm, but in the case of the much buzzed-about Jugaad I am inclined to follow the gurus.The trend began with Reena Jana’s seminal article in BusinessWeek in December 2009 (full disclosure: Reena is a consulting editor at frog, a company of he Aricent Group), in which she critically investigated the value of Jugaad and anticipated its entering the lexicon of management consultants. The term Jugaad (pronounced “joo-gaardh”) is a colloquial Hindi word that describes a creative ad hoc solution to a vexing issue, making existing things work and/or creating new things with scarce resources. Although sometimes used pejoratively (in the sense of a makeshift cheap fix), it is now widely accepted as a noun to describe Indian-style innovation (some also call it “indovation”) – describing the inventiveness of Indian grassroots engineers and scientists that have led to the pedal-powered washing machine, inspired the extra-low-cost Tata Nano car, or the success of India’s space program. It is, in short, the art of holistic (and therefore lateral) thinking, of unbound, resilient creativity, and of improvisation and rapid prototyping under severe constraints.
Last week we conducted a webinar – "Breaking the Form Barrier – Evolution of LTE & Enterprise Femtocells" – that generated a lot of incisive questions about the implementation challenges and solutions for next generation femtocells. We received more questions than we were able to answer in the time we, so the Aricent experts that led the webinar, Sanjiv Kapur and Siddhartha Bhakta, have gone through the unanswered ones with responses below.
Earlier this week we held a webinar - "7 Myths about Agile Testing - Busted!" - that generated a lot of good questions about how best to conduct testing while in a fast-paced, fluid Agile environment. We didn't have time to get to all the questions, so the Aricent experts who ran the webinar, Gopinath Ramachandran, Gayatri Singla, and Srimanta Kumar Purohit, have gone through the unanswered questions and answered them below.
In my last blog post, “Race to the Cloud,” I talked about cloud strategies for Tier-1 telcos. Essentially, they’re big enough to be able to take the risk of hosting their own cloud data centers (telco’s “private cloud”), while gradually climbing up the cloud-chain from IaaS-provider to PaaS-provider to SaaS-broker/communication-and-collaboration-as-a-service provider. But, what about the smaller players? They must be shying away from hosting cloud data centers (otherwise they would have been in the news) because of the kind of investment they need to set up the cloud infrastructure. However, they can’t ignore the fact that the cloud-model is knocking at their door and they really can’t afford to lose the business opportunities.
How do you build a collaborative mindset in a company? Collaboration needs to be seen as a process that happens over time, and that the crucial groundwork for successful collaboration needs to be laid before the "actual" collaborative work happens.