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Day: March 22, 2019

Outrageously Simple Investment Banking Tips

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

 

Investment banking is a particular division of banking which is associated with capital making for enterprises, government, and bank support in compound financial transactions. In simple words, investment banking meaning pertains to a bank helping public and private companies gather funds in both the equity as well as debt capital markets. These investment banks were actually founded to raise the required capitals and also to offer guidance on different financial strategies for corporate sectors.

However, when you venture into the field of investment banking, the scenario may demand many strategies to be put in the right place to become successful. You may have taken many investment banking courses but the real battle begins when you actually start the job. This is the time when you actually realize completely what is investment banking?

Well, here are certain tips that can assist you in succeeding in the area. These tips will make the job easier for you and will definitely give you an edge over other candidates in the field.

Be Adaptable

As per Graham Ward, who has been the former head of equities at Goldman Sachs and is now at the post of adjunct professor of leadership at INSEAD, if you are aware of the kind of personalities that major financial institutions are looking at, you can ensure a long-term investment banking career for yourself. Moreover, you need to be a team player who understands all the requisites of investment banking. In addition, you need to be flexible enough to learn to adapt to the continuous changes in investment banking scenarios.

Persistence is the Key

Just understanding what is investment banking is not enough to be successful in the field. You need to be smart, with an added edge of possessing hard determination and a clear focus. Try to compensate for the area where you lack in brains with high levels of energy. In short, you need to be enthusiastic, energetic, dogged, and persistent to be successful.

Always be aware of the competition

A successful investment banker needs to continuously think of different ways in which he can add value during his or her interactions with the clients. This implies that you need to be informed about the different aspects of investment banking even more than the so-called investment banking experts. Read everything related to your specified coverage area as well as your clients. This requires extreme discipline and you need to go through your client company’s newsletters, reports and even about their shareholders. Also, try to read between the lines and make your own assessments about the company. Moreover, it will not be a drawback if you ask questions about what you do not understand about the said client company.

Taking career risks is imperative

Investment banking career path is not always a smooth one. The investment banking avenues neither stay in one location nor in just one sector. You as an investment banker need to take up the opportunities as they appear. You need to be open-minded and flexible enough to take up new investment banking opportunities. You can enroll in investment banking courses. This will help you understand the investment banking meaning in a better sense.

Consistency is the key

The job of an investment banker is not an easy one. As you rise up in position, the pressure increases. However, your consistency will help you in remaining cool minded when you reach a top position. Moreover, consistency will assist you in handling the huge amounts of revenues that you are expected to generate every year.

 Dressing Sense Makes a Major Impact

Though this sounds a little strange, it is a fact that being dressed properly makes an impact on your clients. It is also a common fact that many clients turn down the investment bankers who were dressed shabbily. Thus, it is highly imperative to be dressed properly when you are going for a deal.

What is The Market Size For Agile Software Development?

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Agility means effective (rapid and adaptive) response to change, effective communication among all stockholder. In layman terms though, agility or Agile Development in software engineering means ensuring agility, flexibility, and adaptability in the agile development, maintenance, and working of a model, i.e. prototype. All these things are equally important while trying to build software.

Before diving into how the Agile Development method works, let’s discuss a step by step approach to how software is built. This method uses the assembly of a cross-functional team, i.e. not just developers but different parties that look after various segments in the process. This not only ensures efficiency but also ensures that the customers get what they want and have more say in the making of the software.

Some facts regarding the market expanse for Agile development.

  • Large enterprises are the likeliest to adopt a business analyst certification and techniques.
  • The presumption that agile is ideal for “edge” projects but not for large, mission-critical projects does not hold true anymore.
  • The criticism that Agile’s limitations for teams spread across disparate time zones can potentially be addressed by different agile methods.

For industry breakdowns, the leading agile adopters as of 2018 are:

  • High tech – 74 percent
  • Discrete manufacturing – 74 percent
  • Banking and finance – 65 percent
  • Retail – 63 percent

Many reports suggest that while agile is maturing, there are companies that are still not ready for this approach to software development. Agile is really about iterative cycles. When you put together agile with a minimum viable product approach, you have a considerable edge building relevant software that customers/users prefer to use.

The logic of involving the stakeholders in development early and often is something that is difficult to argue against.
Many companies though are not culturally prepared for such a vicious cycle of revision. It’s not the agile methodology that lets them down, but the unwillingness to uproot stale processes.

The unwillingness to drop traditional methods of software development are what holds back agile from taking over the market speedily.

Companies adopting Agile Development method
Bosch, a leading supplier of technology and services globally with more than 400,000 associates and operations in 60-plus countries, adopted this approach. At companies like Bosch and other agile enterprises, the visions and aims are ambitious, to say the least.

The leadership teams, however, fail to look at every single detail in advance. Leaders recognize and admit that they are often clueless about how many agile teams they will require, at what pace they should add them, and how they can address bureaucratic limitations without throwing the organization into complete chaos.

So they usually bring forth an initial wave of agile teams, gather data on the value those teams create and the constraints they face, and then decide if they should take the next step and how they will go about it. This lets them weigh their options, i.e. the value of accelerating lightsomeness (in terms of economic results, client outcomes, and worker performance) against its prices (in terms of each money investments and structure challenges).

If the upsides outweigh the costs, managers continue to scale up agile—deploying yet another wave of teams, unblocking constraints in less agile parts of the organization, and this is how the cycle is repeated.

If not this though, they can pause for a while to monitor the market atmosphere and also explore ways to increase the value of the agile teams already in the works (for example, by improvement of the priority level of work or upgrading capabilities to prototype) and bring down the costs of change (by publicizing agile successes or hiring experienced agile enthusiasts).

Refine Your Product Backlog Continuously to Improve Flow

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

 

As you might already know, product Backlog is simply a list of everything you have to do to complete your project. It helps you find all your requirements for the product at a single source. This article discusses how we can improve the product flow by continuously refining your product backlog.

The Refinement Process

We can improve our product flow by merely comparing the estimates using time-dependent sizing. But, most of the product backlog items (PBI) won’t be clear enough for such an analysis.

One strategy to approach this issue of poorly PBIs is to spend more time on it and refine them as you go. This process will take time, but the total time taken for the project will be significantly reduced. It also leads you towards better reliability and velocity.

In the early days of Scrum, the sprint begins with a time-boxed planning meeting. Such planning meetings would usually go long and frustrate the team members attempting to estimate PBIs. The results were overly vague product backlogs. To eliminate this issue, the Scrum guide now specifies that along with the planning meeting, a continuous refinement process should take place. 

Benefits of Continuous Refinement

This refinement process involves estimation and addition of details to the PBI. By doing it continuously, the team will be able to deliver more consistent and improve the quality of their job. It can also reduce the duration of the planning meeting at the start of the sprint. The regular refinement process allows the team to deal with the estimation process in small pieces.  By improving the productivity of the team, the refinement improves the product flow. 

However, the refinement process will not solve all the difficulties. You still have to discover alternatives and problems during the implementation. But with the Refinement process, the questions will be smaller and much easier to find an answer. 

How to Carry Out Refinement?

The major challenge in implementing this practice is to have a refinement process that doesn’t tie up the whole team in meetings. The solution suggested by the Scrum Guide is to limit the refinement to 10 percent of the team capacity. In that way, we can complete the refinement of a 4-week sprint in 2 days. The refinement meetings should be short and time-boxed, and the number of backlog items covered in each session shouldn’t be the main focus. In most scenarios, the longer refinement process will result in a shorter planning meeting. 

In ideal cases, all team members are supposed to be a part of the refinement conversations. Dividing the team excessively will result in missing out important questions and insights. Also, be sure to have an estimation of every backlog item you cover at the end of each session.

Agile planning is all about striking a perfect balance between precision and accuracy. So, your backlog doesn’t need to be consisting of the full specification of every item. Although, it is important to have in-depth knowledge about each of them. Spending little more time of ensuring that everyone in your team really understands the backlog will help you deliver more value in a shorter time period.