Agile Tasks: My New Favorite App
Over the weekend, I randomly stumbled upon (Didn’t find it using StumbleUpon, but someone should make a StumbleUpon for mobile apps) Agile Tasks, a light-weight project manager app that makes it easy to manage your day-to-day projects and to-do lists. I got really excited when I found Agile Tasks because it takes a stab at the challenge of making a universal task app that everyone will appreciate while still understanding that people have unique flows when it comes to managing tasks. As a product manager, I can appreciate the agile process and how it applies to getting tasks done. The interface and the flow of Agile Tasks makes sense to me and makes it way easier for me to apply to my daily routine.
Agile Tasks separates tasks into specific projects, tasks that are in the queue, in the process of doing, and done. It’s a pretty simple set up. Agile Tasks also includes the ability to record voice tasks and time sensitivity/ reminders.
So far, its been a pretty smooth transition from my other task manager. (I used Zoho Task Manager because it connected to my email and project platform) While there’s no special integrations for Agile Tasks, I still find its use worthwhile. I’d love to see a desk top version. The more I think about it, Agile Tasks reminds me of a simplified Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker has been my primary project manager for my dev teams so that is probably why I find it so easy to use Agile Tasks.
I’ll keep on playing around with Agile Tasks and I’ll report back in more detail my experiences.
Lean Education
After attending the Harvard African Business conference and participating in several conversations around the future of education in Africa, I’ve realized that a change in the education model is not exclusive to catch up economies, but a new model to survive in a more global and ever-shifting economy. Here are some reasons why the current education model is in the process of being disrupted:
- Technology has made the decimation of information easier and cheaper than ever. There are so many courses and learning resources available online. We’ve known for a while that a lot of learning goes on outside of the classroom but now we don’t need a classroom at all to deliver course content.
- Speed- Everyone probably feels like this at the point of their existence but the speed and rate of change on what we learn in the undergraduate level is changing at very fast pace. A computer science major will enter a program learning one coding language and by the time they finish, that language will be obsolete. (My education friends argue that the purpose of an undergraduate education is to teach a person how to think, thus making it easier to pick up new skills in the future. If we go by this, the main purpose of an undergraduate degree is to improve learning ability and is less about skills acquisition. I’d still argue that we need to find cheaper ways, both from a time and cost perspective, to learn how to learn.
- Learning at scale. Our current education system (globally) is not structured to support the amount of people we need to educate in the next 20 years. Our population is growing at a greater rate than growth of our education institutions. In order to reach more students effectively, we will need to reconsider education content delivery and think of it more as media content.
All of this points to one truth, education has to get faster. We need to educate people at a faster pace, be more effective and do it quicker. The world is moving faster and education is slowly picking up speed to adapt.
On Decision Making
Life is full of important decisions. We often have the luxury to think through our decisions ahead of time but that doesn’t equate to making the right or best decisions. After speaking with friends and mentors, one of the best ways to make sound decisions is to use a decision making model. I’ve studied these models before but I figured I’d run through a couple to refresh and provide you with some of the best models for decision making.
Pros Vs. Cons aka Rational Decision Making
Probably made famous by Plato or someone along that line, pros vs cons is as simple as a decision model can be. Nothing really to explain here… What are the pros and the cons of each potential outcome of your decision?
In this decision making process, its easy to assume that pros and cons hold equal weight which is not always true.
Satisficing
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Sometimes we don’t have access to all the information necessary to make the optimal decision and/or the “okay” decision will do. I find most people never want to “satisfice” when it comes to big decisions but in the long term, sometimes its the best strategy.
Opportunity Cost
In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a choice is the value of the best alternative forgone, in a situation in which a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives given limited resources.
So, what is the cost of missing out on other outcomes? Can you live with the cost of missing out on that opportunity?
Garbage Can Theory
In the garbage-can theory (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) an organization “is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work”. Problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow in and out of a garbage can, and which problems get attached to solutions is largely due to chance.
This doesn’t make much sense to me but I guess the garbage can theory is more of a meta critique on how organizations make decisions.
Sources:
The Commencement Speech I Never Gave
I wrote this speech for commencement last year. Fortunately/Unfortunately, I wasn’t selected to give the speech. No big deal….I found it the other day and thought I’d share… Enjoy. Let me know what you think.
To Dean Ginsberg and to the distinguished members of the faculty: it is an honor to be speaking today to the plethora of distinguished and diverse alumni, special guests, family members, and friends who are gathered here. Most of all, it is an honor to be up on stage representing the Kogod MBA class of 2014…We made it
A central tenant of a business school education is that by the end of 2 years you have a toolkit of models that you can use once you get into the real world. These models span all functional sets of a business education. You have your NPV model in Finance, change management model for human capital, or your balanced scorecard for IT management…They all help to simplify complex systems and help make decisions and create value. Its funny though, because the most important model we’ve learned/perfected over the course of these 420 days we actually learned from the friends and family members here today; Teamwork. We each have a team of people that got us to and supported us through Kogod. Friends and family that supported us to reach for our dreams and do whats necessary to get to our goals even if it included missing a happy hour here or there to prepare for the GMAT or were kind enough to listen to us vent after a tough exam. As much as this day is a celebration of the graduating class, this is a celebration for our friends and family as well. Thank you so much for all your support. We wouldn’t be here without you all.
We’ve seen how powerful the team model is and we’ve nurtured and improved our understanding of this model in business school. We’ve spent 10,080 hours working in teams to work on class assignments like our Financial Analysis project in Professor Inchi’s financial accounting class or developing strategic plans for small and medium sized companies in Professor David’s strategic management class. We’ve worked along side facility to develop our understanding of the business world. We as a class worked together to put on and support events like consulting day, the Red Dress benefit event and Entrepreneurship day. We developed skills that allowed us to collaborate,delegate, and execute on plans. We developed the bonds and became others cheerleaders and succeeded and fail as a class. We’ve gone through so much adversity but most importantly, none of us did it alone…This set of common experiences is what bonds us and brings us together today to celebrate these accomplishments.
Now that we’ve spent 604,800 minutes developing and perfecting this team model, what do we do with this model now? The most important thing we can do is to remember the value and all that was accomplished when we came together as a class during our business school education. Armed with these experiences, developing team should be central in everything we do this day forward. Our goal should be to replicate and continuously improve on this model with the general understanding that we learned nothing of value is created by one person alone. It takes a group of individuals with a common goal to create true value.
Most importantly, if we put team at the center of whatever we do, we have to opportunity to unlock amazing opportunities and solve some of the world’s most pressing issues. Its already been proven again and again that a team of diverse individuals working together to achieve a common goal are unstoppable. They come up with better ideas because of the diversity of experience and thought, they are more efficient, especially compared to one person doing the same project. A good team creates an environment where there is mutual support, encouraging people to achieve goals they may not have realized they could reach on their own. Teams lead to better outcomes…. Teamwork brings more resources to bear against a challenge thus increasing chances for success.
My challenge to Kogod class of 2014 is this; I challenge you all to be the stewards of the team in your respective organizations. I challenge you to support and develop a sense of team like we’ve perfected at Kogod the last two years. If you accept this challenge, be prepared for a great amount of success and even greater opportunities as consequence.
Thank you.