Simple^4 Xiaoming Wang

AAladdin.com is an agile organization transition framework that was created by me in order to help medium and large size company to transfer from current organization structure to an agile organization.

For details please check AAladdin.com (in Simple Chinese) and AAladdin.com/en (In English)

What is time & material model and when it applies

Corporation old procurement process

They just do not fit!

Change is inevitable

Solution

Change it!

UK is one of the dream lands of young boys and girls for education. Not only because there is the best are educational system on the planet but there are friendly hosts, fabulous living environment and good job opportunities.It is legal to work in the UK by holding a student VISA. Please check the legal statement below and be aware of the terms and conditions.

Having been granted leave to remain as a student, there is no objection to you to taking part time job or vacation work. However, while you may work full-time during vacation periods, you must not work more than 20 hours per week during term-time, expect where the placement meets the definition of a sandwich course or an internship. As a student, you must not engage in business, self-employment or the provision of services as a professional sportsperson or entertainer; and you must not pursue a career by filling a permanent full-time vacancy.

There are different part time job opportunities available for students to choose. They have been organized into the categories and illustrated in the Fig A:

Fig A

From Fig A, we can see there are plenty of chances in the universities and Chinese or anti-Chinese business.

As well there are different job seeking mechanism generally. See the Fig B for more information:

Fig B

It seems that the job seeking mechanism is not as much as available jobs. Basically, “Ask help from A friend” and “Go to the job centre” will be the two efficient ways to get a job successfully. Although the accurately number has not been calculated based on certain surveys readers can still see how many ways to get a part time job.

The relationship between the job seeking mechanism and Work categories is illustrated in the Fig C:

Fig C

From the three diagrams we can clearly see the points below:

• University jobs will be applied only in its own framework
• If you want to work in a restaurant or as a cleaner “Ask for help from a friend” would be a good choice.
• For the Anti-Chinese job opportunities go for the job centre or newspapers for more information.
• Sometimes, students can directly visit the shops, restaurants and ask if they need staffs to do part time jobs.

Generally the process of getting a job will be:

1. Look for job vacancies information
2. Contact the job opportunities publisher or employer
3. Try to get an interview
4. Sign a contract
5. Get pay and your payslip every week or month

OK, last thing, payment. Different job has different value, so the employer will pay differently. The experience told us that Chinese teacher and working in university normally would get more money than any other business. Chinese restaurant would always be the last place to work because the pay is a piece of shit.

Cleaner is probably a good job for lots of new comes. You do not have to speak English frequently and the money is not bad compared with the jobs in restaurant. Key job has its advantages because you do not have to work in a solid hours. However it is not easy to get one.

Tips:

• Working experience is important. If you do not have some, at least pretend you do.
• Chinese students, always join a working environment without Chinese people around, otherwise your English would never been improved rapidly.
• As fast as possible call your interested employer when you get information from Friday AD, other newspapers or job centre.

Reference

Friday AD: http://www.friday-ad.co.uk/

Job centre: http://www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk/JCP/index.html

Definition

Consulting business has been getting more and more market share across industries.

IT giants (Oracle, IBM, HP, SAP, SAS, Accenture etc ) have been doing this business for quite a long time. Most of the big enterprises have benefit from those IT consulting service by improving their management of Information system.

There are still lots of medium size companies and manufacture in south of China don’t have good ISIT strategies and Management system. Focusing on these customers, this would be an busness point.

Above, the possibilities of creating a new business growing point are obvious. Then how to run the business, in another word how to run an ISIT consulting company has been put on the table.

There are three keys for running such a business. They are “Client”, “Contract” and “Resources”.

Obviously, Client is the most important one of the three. No client, no contract , resources would be useless.

Client — Satisfaction

• Client’s satisfaction. KFS, in order to achieve Client’s satisfaction, there are several things we need to accomplish.

1. Create benefit which can be seen in Client’s finacial report
2. Cut down CTR
3. Management team and employees satisfaction.
4. Accomplish deliverables on time.

• What does Client really wants? It really does matter. Sometimes, Client is not 100% sure what they want. Consultant has to help Client to produce an equirement report.
• How Client want the deliverable to be delivered? Sometimes, consultant did an excellent job but did not deliver it in a right way. For example, Client want all the documents to be deliver in a Website with doc lib but we might deliver it in a hard copy. Although there are nothing different for the deliverables.
• Communication. Could not be less important. Before everything has been started, clarify the resposibilities of everyone involve in the project and build more than one communication tunnel and set up interface in the process of communication.

Contract — Achievable and different

• Contract template, don’t have to talk too much about it. A professiona template is enough.
• Bottom line, what we can do. What we can do in the period of contract.

1. Promise only what we can do and do well.
2. Know what we can learn and do well in a period of time (contract period)
3. Never tell Clinet what we can not do, but what we are not professional at.

• Breakdown into different phases

1. Break down contract into different phases, if the contract is too hard to be negotiated.
2. At least get one phase of the contract and try to get all the phases of the contract.
3. Avoid doing the phase that we are not good at.

• Budget of the contract, get a good negotiator to deal with. Any other good way?
• Market price, be aware of the market price of the business, try to know other biders’ bid in the competition
• Shining points, something different with other competitors. Something that they would care, maybe.

Resources: MIS + knowledge database + People — All of them are crucial

1. MIS (ERP) — Finance + PM + HR + File server (Document lib) + Website + Simple CRM + Software dev environment (Optional, for fun). MIS is for ourselves, for the continuing improvement and growing.
2. Knowledge database — Web based application with portal. “Tools”
3. People — Consultant, has to be or have

• • • Team player,
    • Business sense
    • Never stop learning.
    • Good code of English and Mandarin.
    • At least be professional in one scientific area.
    • Have more than one hobby.

Project management

It is a complicated topic, refer to A Guide To The Project Management Body of Knowledge

Key factors of success

Deliverables, credit, partner + relationship

For cooperation, policies:

1. There is no difference between employees. (Wal-mart)
2. Be creative, do things differently (BOC)
3. Open working environment (Platform)
4. Work as a team, there is only one team! (Tesco)
5. Everyone is talent. (From me?? haha)
6. Treat everyone as treat your self, life as one family (Tesco + Dalian Loco)

Notes and Definitions