It’s the end of the recess week already, and I find myself entrenched in a backlog of self-revision. A common pattern has emerged this semester with respect to my homework management, and it’s not so much the fault of procrastination as it is the waning interest that I have in my modules. I guess my propensity to do any work is directly proportional to my interest in it, in which case it can’t really be called laziness.

I did manage to clock in a half-day of project work earlier on Tuesday, where I had to go down to a company (not named for privacy reasons) to interview the employer and employees as part of my MNO1001 Management and Organisation project. The requirements for the project are pretty straightforward; what each group is supposed to do is to identify an organisation problem within a company, and using the concepts learnt from the module, try and suggest if not implement a possible solution that would fix the problem.

My group was fortunate as one of our members is currently working part-time at a local startup, and his employer was kind enough to allow us to use his company as the case study. This saved us a lot of time brainstorming for an appropriate company, not to mention trying to contact or convince them to subject their organisational flaws and cracks to our scrutiny. The established relationship also reduced some awkwardness when we visited the company, and we could quickly get down to the task at hand without going through the formalities.

I was among the three who carried out the interview with the employer, and I didn’t get to speak to any of the employees. I won’t say what problems about the company or staff the employer brought up during this interview, but I felt that speaking to the boss of a local startup (not really IT-related) was quite an eye-opener for me. It’s tough managing people while trying to focus on the goal of your startup, and designing the ideal hierarchical structure within a small firm is definitely a lot more difficult.

I guess when you’re the sole person running the company, the complete burden of doing well is pretty much yours to bear, considering the other workers are merely employees with no vested interest (stock or whatever), which might lead them to only work the bare minimum. If any problems or friction exist between you and your employees, then your leadership and ability to manage people will really be put to the test, as there won’t be anyone to stand on your side. I just hope I won’t have the same problem if I ever get round to starting a company or joining a startup.

Currently, when I’m not busy studying (which is ever so often), I’m working on OrangeOasis with a few friends. OrangeOasis is a website targeted at the NUS student population, and I hope to use it as a platform to provide simple services and applications to improve certain aspects of student life there. It’s a great excuse to spend more time doing web development and learning new web technologies while creating utility (hopefully) at the same time.

The first product I’ve come up with is BusBoard, which is basically an interface to SBS’s iris-NextBus bus timings. The timings are being drawn from Deepak Sarda’s NextBus application, which has been rather popular through his collaboration with PublicTransport.SG, iSinGeo and gothere.sg. While relatively trivial to code, I think the website is useful as it shows all the bus stops within campus so one can quickly check bus timings, and on top of that, it has a pleasant and easy-to-use interface.

There are a few other services that are in the pipeline, and our flagship product will probably be built around the module planning process that every student has to go through. I have a couple of ideas of how I might do this, but I’ll probably be working on it only closer to the end of the term or during the holidays. Meanwhile, another idea I came up with is similar to the current used textbooks forum, i.e. like a classifieds, but with a better interface. I think I’ll get down to it as soon as the mid-terms are over, which isn’t very far away.

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