What is mind mapping and how to do it?

 Mind mapping is a visual technique that involves representing information, concepts, or ideas in a diagrammatic or visual form.

It is a graphical way to organize and represent information in a hierarchical structure, starting from a central idea and branching out into related topics or subtopics. Mind maps are a powerful tool for brainstorming, organizing thoughts, problem-solving, note-taking, and planning.

A mind map consists:

Customer Acquisition process and Sales funnel

 A business cannot exists without it's customer.  Customer drive the revenue, the ultimate goal of every profit centric organization. That's why it's important for every business to grow it's customer base while continuing to serve existing customers.

The process of identifying potential customers and acquiring them using various tools and techniques is called customer acquisition process. The customer acquisition goes through a various phases of customer journey, often referred as customer lifecycle.

Vendor Selection scoring criteria for software applications

 

Selecting the right vendor for software applications is an important part of ensuring the success of a project.

Different software vendors use different technologies, tools, and platforms. Proper vendor selection helps ensure that the chosen vendor’s software is compatible with your existing IT infrastructure, applications, and systems.

Selecting a vendor with a good reputation and proven track record in delivering quality software applications reduces the risk of errors, bugs, and other quality issues. This can help ensure that the software works as expected and meets the needs of your organization.

Proper vendor selection can help you get the best value for your money. By selecting a vendor with a competitive pricing model, you can reduce the cost of software development and maintenance and ensure that the software fits within your budget.

Different organizations have different requirements when it comes to software applications. Proper vendor selection ensures that the vendor can provide the necessary customization and flexibility to meet your organization’s specific needs.

Proper vendor selection ensures that the vendor provides adequate support and maintenance for the software applications. This helps ensure that any issues or problems can be quickly addressed, minimizing downtime, and maximizing productivity.

Build Vs Buy Decision Framework

To Build or to Buy that is the question! 

This question, at times, haunts the decision making leadership without having a structured approach to make such decisions. Gut feelings or subjective opinions can lead to confusion and irrational decision making. There is no better way than quantitative scoring of these two options across multiple criterion. Quantifying values also allows multiple stakeholders to score and averaging the score leads a collective decision.

As a first step, collectively align on the Metrics you would like to evaluate your Build Vs Buy decision. Go beyond achieving feature performance parity and consider metrics like compatibility Speed to Market, Cost/ROI, Training and Support.

TOGAF Application Development Method (ADM) framework

TOGAF is the most popular Enterprise Architecture framework to design, plan, implement and govern the Enterprise Information Architecture. It's a high-level approach to help define business goals and align them with Architecture objectives.

TOGAF, developed by the open group, is a global standard for Enterprise Architecture. It was initiated in 1990s and since then have gone through multiple versions with latest being TOGAF 10 released in April 2022.

TOGAF helps reduce cost, time, risks, redundancies in the development of the Enterprise infrastructure. The four typical domains identified in TOGAF for Enterprise Architecture are Business, Data, Application and Technology.

Cause and Effect Fishbone Diagram for Root Cause Analysis

 Every event is result of causal chain, in that something has happened because on something else has occurred. Its often important to understand why something has happened in order to mitigate the negative effects and prevent it from happening again.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is the process of discovering the root cause of the problem in order to identify the appropriate solution.

Cause and effect diagram, most commonly know as fishbone diagram is the simplistic and effective way of identifying the root cause of the defects. The diagram is also referred as Ishikawa diagram, Herringbone diagram or Fishikawa (Fish diagram created by Kaoru Ishikawa)