Any customer facing organization deals with questions, asks and demands coming from customers. Some of them are easy to answer and some of them require investments of time and resources.
How can you prioritize them properly?
In this article I will show you how to use Critical Thinking framework to make your decision making process more efficient. I’ll share with you common mistakes in prioritization and how to avoid them.
Moreover, in many mid and large size enterprises there are two different organizations who are responsible for process of receiving customer requests and prioritizing them.
But how the process of prioritization works? Obviously, some thinking is involved here. But what impacts the thinking? What kind of techniques can we apply to do it more efficiently?
I have started my career as account manager for Small and Medium Businesses at mobile service provider in Novosibirsk, Russia.
While I was reading the book New Sales memories of that period of my life started to appear in my head.
It was a time full of cold-calls, sales pitches and a lot of leg work. One time per week I visited random business center where 20-30 small businesses were operating. I was going door to door, knock and start a sales call with phrase below:
“Hello, my name is Roman Gorge from XYZ Company. With whom I can talk about you Internet and mobile connectivity needs?”
Sometimes I was asked to leave immediately, sometimes I was lucky to pitch my sales story and find a new customer. There were no PowerPoint slide decks, I even didn’t have a laptop in my bag – only printed materials, my business cards, pen and notepad.
I met all kinds of people during that time – entrepreneurs, IT guys, accounting and business owners. I will never forget this difficult but great experience.
The book New Sales. Simplified provides well structured guidance how to attract new customers. It covers all aspects of prospecting:
How to build a sales story
How to create finite list of prospects
How to execute sales calls and meetings
Here is what I take with me from this book:
What is sales-oriented culture and why it is important?
Too many times I attended meetings where time was wasted for “Introduction” and “Company Overview” slides, but now I know how first-call deck should look like
How to create sales power statement and use it as a tool for meetings, cold calls and emails
Best practices for a sales call structure
I’m not in Sales today, but if I will one day, this book will be the first one I read again.
In 2020 I have cleared 4 technical certifications – AWS Certified Solution Architect (January 2020), AWS Certified SysOps Administrator (November 2020), AWS Certified Developer (December 2020) and AWS Cloud Practitioner (December 2020).
My strategy for preparation was fairly simple – I have used combination of self-paced video course from A Cloud Guru, practice exams from Jon Bonso and AWS public whitepapers.
Total preparation time was 9-10 weeks, in average 1 hour per day. In total, around 70-80 hours.
I’m using Pomodorro technique to track productive time. Picture below is from Pomodorro app that I’m using and shows time investment categories over last 3 months .
60% of total time I have spent on “Technical Training” category which mostly consist of preparations for technical certifications, reading whitepapers and etc. So, it is quite time consuming.
If I will range exams from easiest to hardest, it will look like:
AWS Cloud Practitioner
AWS Certified Solution Architect – Associate
AWS Certified Developer
AWS Certified Sysops Administrator
For the next year my targets are AWS Certified Solution Architect – Professional and, potentially, AWS Certified DevOps – Professional exams.
“If I am paid for my thinking and problem solving skills, how I can become better in this?” – this is a question that I ask myself from time to time.
A book “Think Smarter” provides clear definition of key stages of critical thinking process (clarity, conclusions and decisions) and gives step by step instructions what to do on each of the stages.
Some ideas and instruments can look pretty obvious and well-known but a value of the book in systematic process that author created.
Among multiple things taht I liked in the book are:
Visual representation of decision making process – how expiriences, observations, facts and assumptions form our conclusions and how to distinguish fact from observation
Definition of “outside the box” thinking. “What is “the box” in thinking?” is a first question to ask to understand
Explanation what is premise and why it can be weak or strong. This is important knowledge to measure confidence of the conclusion
Abductive thinking – how my conclusions will change if some of my assumptions are wrong? Or how would I think about it if I had not some of my expiriences?
My next step for the topic “Critical Thinking” is to write an article that will apply critical thinking to customer’s requests prioritization.
So, a lot of interesting ideas written in easy to read language. Totally recommend to read.
Check out series of my articles how critical thinking framework applies to prioritization.
Virtualization is so deep and broad subject, that it is not possible to cover all details of hypervisor (and not needed, actually). I will concentrate on “minimal valuable pack” of knowledge that is required to understand any KVM virtualized solution, not necessarily Telco.
Overview and brief history of virtualization technology
The story of virtualization began in 1999 when young company VMWare has released product VMWare Workstation. This was a first commercial product that provided virtualization for desktop/client applications. Virtualization of the server part started a little bit later in the form of ESX Server product that evolved in ESXi (i stands for integrated). This product is being used widely in IT and Telco private clouds as hypervisor for server-side applications.
Excellent book with a lot of practice drills to improve spead of reading. Most of the advices are easy and straightforward to understand, but it will require commiment and time investment to master speed reading skill.
I’m gonna practice following skills:
Setting a purpose before starting to read
Preview reading materials
Space reading
Remove subvocalization
Reduce fixation and regression
Practice peripheral vision
Look for key sentences and meanings in text
Do recall and review after every 30 minutes of reading
Very long and very controversial novel. So controversial that I will refrain from commenting it.
It is worth to mention that novel was awarded two of the most prestigious French literary awards, the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006.
