In the first part we have discussed what is critical thinking and how to get clarity by asking right questions. It is important to get clear on a problem or request but it doesn’t move the needle. To perform prioritization we need to come to conclusions. In the second part we will talk about how we arrive to conclusions and how personalities affect this process.
Everybody heard that it is bad to assume and we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I believe it is misleading idea and doesn’t help at all. It is very rare situation when the one has all information about a problem or request and doesn’t need assumptions. Moreover if you will wait for all information to be available, you most probably will lose momentum and be late with decisions. We need assumptions the same way we need facts and observations. However, there is a huge distinction between automatic thinking and critical thinking assumptions.
In the end, it is all about premise and its building blocks.
Beginning of 1922. The Russian Civil War is almost over. Soviet government established on the major part of territory which is soon become known as USSR. The last piece of “old Russia” is Far East with a center in Vladivostok. But its time is running out as well.
Red Army defeated its rival White Army. Ex-officers, ex-soldiers and everybody else who are not welcomed in Soviet Russia are evacuating to all possible directions. Very soon Istanbul, Paris, Berlin and Harbin will become centers of Russian immigration. One of them is my grand-grand-father. He will settle in Manchuria and, like many other his combatants, will train Chinese troops to confront Japanese invasion that will happen in 15 years.
This non-fiction book is about one of many ex-generals Pepelyaev who fought and lost in Civil war. He immigrated to China. After hearing news about anti-communist uprising in Yakutia, he decides to organize last “crusade” against Soviets. He and almost 1000 volunteers will sail to Okhotsk and spend 1 year in deep Yakutian forests. They will fight for their Russia.
On the other side of barricades is commanding officer Strod. He is also fighting for Russia. Just his comrades ideas about world order could not co-exist with ideas of Pepelyaev’s volunteers brigade.
Both sides will suffer from hunger and extreme Yakutia weather conditions. Both sides will kill each other against the background of extraterrestrial Siberia winter nature. People will walk 30 km per day without roads and with -50 degrees outside. People will be on the edge of human body capabilities.
The book is not selecting sides. Instead it is trying to answer what made these people to be so committed to their ideas? What motivated 1000 people to take this suicide journey? How these two antipodes, Pepelyaev and Strod, will communicate with each other?
The book is based on diaries of participants and court records against Pepelyaev and others. It is very well written, I would say one of the best non-fiction books that I ever read. If you speak Russian and like history, I highly recommend it.
Overall score – 5 out of 5.
What is your favorite non-fiction book? Write a comment with your answer!
While many of us were working from home during 2020, Mobile Carriers and Telecom vendors were busy launching commercial 5G networks.
Ericsson Mobility Report says that there are more than 100 commercial 5G networks and 220 million 5G subscriptions around the globe.
5G adoption is happening way faster than 4G back in 2009-2010. The same report projects 3.5 billion 5G subscriptions in 2026.
Source: Ericsson Mobility Report
Majority of launched 5G networks in 2020 are utilizing NSA (Non Standalone Alone) architecture, i.e. existing 4G core network nodes handling 5G RAN and subscribers. (I’m going to write a separate post about architectural differences between 4G and 5G Cores)
2021 is a year of 5G SA (Standalone) networks deployment on a large scale. Some Early Adopters have done that already. Many more to come.
So, what challenges ICT providers and vendors are facing from 5G Core deployment perspective?
Scalability. Mobile network data traffic grew 50 percent between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020. There is no sign that this trend will change any time soon. Add here much higher 5G Mobile Broadband speed for consumers. A lot of compute and network capacity is required to process this vast amount of traffic.
Elasticity. 5G Core architecture allows now to build highly elastic applications capable for fast horizontal scaling. Infrastructure should support it. It just doesn’t make sense to provision capacity for peak hours traffic as we did it for 3G and 4G Core networks.
Automation. Amount of Network Functions and their instances is so huge, that automation became mandatory requirement. Automated lifecycle and service discovery should be part of infrastructure design.
Hmmm… Sound like Cloud can help, isn’t it?
Indeed, there was a wave of acquisitions and partnership announcements during 2020:
Key 5G ecosystem players selected partners among Cloud providers. Now vendors should address technical challenge – test, certify and polish 5G Core products on selected platforms.
Commercial challenge is different. Vendors should come up with new pricing model. The legacy one is based on amount of subscribers and hardware capacity, it is not applicable for “pay-as-you-go” Cloud financial model. I’m personally curious to see how 5G Core commercial offer and deal structure looks like.
The battle plan for 5G Core is ready now.
Consolidation of Telecom industry continues. In 4G era there were 7-10 major vendors, today this number shrank to 4-5. So, it is good that new players are coming on board.
What does it mean in long term?
First of all, Cloud providers are part of telecom world now. They will inevitably influence overall ICT industry path. Check out my previous article to get more insight on it.
Second, we should expect 5G Core vendors start to refactor Telco applications to utilize managed Cloud services.
Last but not least, we maybe will see All-in-Cloud Mobile providers, like we see it in Banking industry.
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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.
