One of the major fundamentals of the doctrinal training of commanders in the British Army is what is known as The Combat Estimate. The Combat Estimate, when applied to a situation, provides a systematic mechanism with which to shake out a plan as a response to a situation framed within a given set of requirements. The application of the 7 questions as a planning tool ensures that all of the influencing factors which are pertinent to any situation are built into a plan which seeks to secure a given aim. That aim can be the storming of a well defended bunker, the destruction of an enemy fuel depot or indeed the organisation of a trip to the Alps to teach a group to ski. As is often the case with military doctrine, it is as applicable to a military situation as it is to a civilian one. Its value lies in its ability to systematically break down a complex environment in such a way as to methodically define the important influencing elements which are relevant to a particular aim. One may imagine that such martial thoroughness would be well placed in the business boardroom and one would be correct.

The Combat Estimate (7 Questions) is one of 3 methods that the British Army uses to parse complex sets of circumstances for the purpose of systematic analysis. The other two methods are called The Operational Estimate and The Tactical Estimate. Of the three, the Combat Estimate really comes into its own in situations where quick planning which seeks to exploit and maintain a high tempo adversarial advantage is required. It is therefore best applied at the tactical and operational level. Lets look at the questions in turn;

1. What is the adversary doing and why and/or what situation do I face and why, and what effect do they have on me? This is a bit of a mouthful but it effectively requires examination of the broad constraints which will serve to hamper ones ability to complete an objective. The key takeaway from this question is "assess and prioritise" What is happening and how does it fit into my priorities?
2. What have I been told to do and why? It's essential to have a detailed understanding of the rationale behind what makes this task something that needs to be done. Furthermore, an ability to put oneself into the shoes of those in positions of authority whether that is your supervisor and their supervisor or indeed the broader needs of the organisation or company on who's behalf you are acting is beneficial. Are your actions to be part of a larger master plan? It's essential to build up this broader picture not only to understand how your task fits into other efforts but also to understand its priority, its dependants or antecedents, and more interestingly, what support you may be able to expect as you define interested parties more broadly. This information is one of the key components in the toolbox of the manager and their ability to motivate those involved in accomplishing the task.
3. What effects do I need to have on the adversary or situation and what direction must I give to develop the plan? It is essential that you clearly understand your task and the intermediate key staging points which lead to its achievement. This is not only for your own clarity of purpose but also and perhaps more importantly as a basis of your ability to direct others in the execution of your plan. Having a clear and well structured definition of your aim ensures that you maintain your own focus not to mention are well able to articulate this to others within your purview which results, one hopes, in their taking of ownership of the task.
4. Where and how can I best accomplish each action or effect? It is important to understand the situation thoroughly through the application of the previous questions and their outputs. At this stage one seeks to identify key resources, their priority and how to maintain control of them. It also begins to be possible to identify some lower level courses of action which will serve to consolidate into the broader strategy. A thorough examination of this question should produce a prioritisation of component parts of the overall strategy as well as an outline of the steps necessary to achieve each of them.
5. What resources are needed to accomplish each action or effect? At this stage a planner, armed with the structured output of question 4 can begin to examine the resource requirements of each strand of the broader plan. Their earlier prioritisation assists in the allocation of resource where contention exists ensuring that resource whether manpower or equipment is distributed most efficiently. At this stage it also becomes clear whether it is necessary to request further resources as a prerequisite for the plans success. This question reaches both up and down your own command chain in order to ensure that the correct organisational capability is allocated. It is also the ideal time to revisit the output of question 2 and ensure that efforts and requirements are properly matched.
6. When and where do the actions take place in relation to each other? It is important at this stage to begin to develop ones understanding of the temporal dimension of the plan. In a military environment this ensures that where potential exists for there to be conflict in the achievement of each effect, it is dealt with. In the boardroom, it enables individual strands of a broader planning structure to avoid duplication of effort or indeed the need to revisit certain actions. A useful tool to use at this stage is a timeline/sync matrix which provides a visual representation of the dependencies and outputs of each component part. A simple chart in the style of a Gantt chart is useful at this stage.
7. What control measures to I need to impose? This question helps to define the boundaries of the plan as well as delineate the roles and responsibilities at a more granular level within the broader effort. By carefully examining this area we ensure that each of the component parts of our plan is equipped with the correct definition but also has sufficient scope of manoeuvre to flexibly respond to emergent conditions whilst keeping an eye on the end goal. By allocating an appropriate amount of responsibility one ensures that members of a team are able to utilise their own abilities to maximum effect in achieving the goal without stifling their latitude through unnecessary micro-management. In a business environment it is important to maintain awareness of budgetary limitations or perhaps cut-off dates.

The seven questions described above represent the systematic mechanism by which the military ensures that no facet of the overall planning landscape is overlooked. In military situations, such thoroughness is rewarded with minimising loss of life. Clearly it is therefore warranted however it is clear that business can benefit from such a structured approach to ensure the success of individual objectives up and down the chain of command. Throughout history civilian activity has embraced elements of military doctrine and procedure and will no doubt continue to do so. It is to be welcomed that the penalties in the business world very rarely extend to loss of life however where one seeks to do the best job possible with the resources available and in turn to minimise the chances of failure and their knock on effects, such thorough frameworks can clearly bring a great deal of value. Their application however piecemeal would seem to be a natural boon in the development of successful business practice in any field of operation.

Thanks for reading this post. It has been my pleasure to write it and I'd most certainly appreciate your feedback either by commenting on it in the comments section of my blog below or in the comments section on the platform you used to find it. I hope you also find some of my other posts on my blog of interest and am always happy to engage in discussion either online or offline in the development of these ideas. Happy planning.

Let's face it, we've all been there. Sitting wondering why on earth a network connection that, up until 5 minutes ago had been working just fine was now all but useless. Less tech savvy individuals may just shrug their shoulders and try again later but anybody else is left wondering why. As a reader of this blog post that fact automatically places you in the latter category. So, to the problem. Could it be that somebody else in the house has started a large download? If that's the case its the easiest to solve just by asking around but the plethora of devices that are in our houses today make the job a lot more complex. For me it was a long forgotten mobile phone owned by my son, left on charge under the bed and set to auto update its code and apps that proved the final straw and drove me to come up with a solution to this problem.

Lets look at the problem in the round first of all. Homes nowadays usually have a router which connects off to the cable company or to the telephone line. These routers allow all of the devices in the house to connect to the net whether on the wireless or the wired side of life. Its not uncommon for a home network to support 10 to 20 devices not all of which will be known about by every other member of the household. Any one of these devices has the potential to bring the network to its knees for hours at an end by starting a large download. Of course the possibility also exists that somebody else on the outside has gained access to your network and it's important that this is not overlooked.

The first step in getting a handle on the situation will be to take control of your home router and secure it so that it cannot be manipulated by anybody else. Most home routers nowadays have a small, cut-down, webserver running on board which allows a management user to access the management web page. By using this web page clients can change all of the settings on the device. The page is usually accessible by both the wired and the wireless network. If you are using a Windows machine the easiest way to establish a connection to this page is to do the following:

1. Click the pearl button and in the box which says "search programs and files" type cmd and press enter. This should bring up a window which looks like that shown on the right. Inside this window, type the command "ipconfig". The output should also resemble that shown on the right showing among other things, the address of the default gateway. Take a careful note of this address. (192.168.1.1 in this case)

 

1. Open up a browser, type this default gateway address into the address bar and click enter. If your router is new or poorly configured you should now be looking at the control page for the device. If the device is configured properly you should now be looking at a login prompt page.

 

1. Once logged in you will then be able to control the settings of the router.

This post is not written to be a guide for any specific router so I will keep any further instructions necessarily wide in scope.

The following bullets will link to posts that will be made available soon which examine the different aspects of this problem. Check back soon to see them when they become available.

• Who is connected? Checking to understand which devices are connected to your router on WIFI and wired networks and establishing whether or not they should be.

 

• What are they doing? Most routers show a basic table of transferred bandwidth as a part of their reporting. This can be used to examine the usage on your network and ascertain which devices are consuming most of the network.

 

• Securing my router. As touched on previously, the router should be configured appropriately so that only those users whom you wish to have access are able to access both the network and the routers management page.

 

• Customising the routers code. Home routers purchased off the shelf nowadays have woefully inadequate firmware that is frequently shown to be buggy at best and insecure at worst. Consider replacing this firmware with a fully customisable open source router such as dd-wrt or tomato.

 

• Open source router management. (Wireshark and SNMP) Want to take the control of your home network to the max. Consider implementing network management, bandwidth management and device management.

I hope this post has proved informative as an intro to controlling your home network. Check back soon for further updates.

In the modern Telecom industry, driven by the fast changing demands that a connected society makes of it, a huge number of new applications are emerging such as IPX, eHealth, Smart Cities and the Internet of Things. Each of these emergent applications requires new customisations of the ecosystem to manage traffic through a wide variety of service providers.

This is the core challenge faced by todays infrastructure, but we must also not overlook the fact that to serve this larger ecosystem requires an enormous change to OSS infrastructure and the way networks are being managed. Service providers are placed in the awkward space between the end users and the emergent technologies but it is the fact that these technologies and their business models are often emerging on a month to month basis that presents the greatest challenge.

If we consider all the IT assets ISP's and Telcos have at their Points of Presence it represents a significant and very much underused resource. The holy grail for many of these organisation is to be able to unlock all of this storage and computing capacity, and turn it into a virtualized resources. This strategy opens up some intriguing possibilities such as bringing remote resource to bear during times of heavy compute load at a specific locale from areas where capacity is less constrained. In infrastructure terms, this cloud-oriented world of adding new network capacity whenever and wherever it is needed is a matter of merely sliding more cards into racks or deploying new software which greatly lowers the cost of scaling the network hardware by commoditising the components used to build up a service providers infrastructure.

Agility of services is the key to this new world order where services can be created orders of magnitude more quickly than was traditionally the case. In this new model the division between content providers and service providers becomes blurred. The flexibility to manage this dynamism is the key to the industry being able to meet the demands that the connected society will increasingly place on it and it will be those players who are able to manage this balancing act most effectively that will come out on top.

This is where NFV comes in. The advent of Network Function Virtualization, or NFV, has strong parallels to those developments in the computing world that gave us the cloud, big data and other commodity computing advances. Using capacity where and when it is required with a lot less visibility into the physical location of the network than is needed currently presents a whole new set of unique challenges. As computing hardware has developed and become more capable, a greater level of software complexity has taken place by its side.

The management of NFV will be critical to its operation, and the way that end user functionality is moving to the cloud today represents a sneak preview of this. We’re seeing a preview of that as computing scales to the cloud. A lot of careful design consideration will be required and service providers need to begin adapting their infrastructure today to accommodate this future virtualization.

Closely related and indeed an enabler to the trend of NFV is the Software-Defined Network, or SDN. The SDN, or Software Defined Networking can provide improved network efficiency and better cost savings, allowing the network to follow-the-sun, turning down servers or network hardware when the load lightens, or even turning them off at night. In a wireless environment, for example, if you could turn off all the excess network capability not in use from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., you will see a significant decrease in the cost of electricity and cooling.

The continued integration of technologies such as Openflow into the latest and greatest network management implementations will further enable this trend as we increasingly see these OSS and BSS systems seek to pre-empt their traditional reactive mechanisms by looking farther up the business model in order to steal vital time with which to maximise the effectiveness of their influence and ultimately maximise the value add of their managed virtualised domains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjooxoNXx4

Pearltrees was in private beta until last month. This innovative Web 2.0 app allows web users to build visual "maps" that organize web pages visually using "pearls" within a tree structure, see the picture above. Via a browser add-on, internet users can transform their daily browsing experience into a visual "pearl tree" and share it with other Pearltrees members.

I like the concept a lot but it needs some user interface improvements, such as allowing actions from a contextual menu: delete, add as friend, play the map, explore neighborhood (and more) should be accessible with a right click. Moving pearls around is easy (drag and drop) but the overall navigation could be improved. Keep in mind that this application is still in early stage and the team is releasing new features and updates regularly. The ability to embed a pearl in a blog or website has been launched on Monday (look at it in the photo gallery). Try it and send your comments to the Pearltrees team using the feedback button.