Live and Let Live Ola

Took an Ola Micro to get home yesterday and as usual started a conversation with the driver. Found out that the driver was completely frustrated with Ola. The statement he made was that at this rate he would soon need to either kill himself or strip the car into parts and sell it in Chor Bazar. When I asked him further about his problems here is what I found out.

He took a new Ritz from Ola by making some down payment for an EMI of 11k a month.

In all he makes a maximum of Rs 2500 on a great day (MBG) or Rs 1500 on a dull day if he works for 10-11 hours. He said he works at least 25 days a month which makes him about Rs 50,000/month.

He spends a good 30% or more on fuel which is around Rs 17500 and gives 15% to Ola which is Rs 7500. When we add these with his emi he pays a total of Rs 36000 a month which leaves Rs 14000 in his hands.

Above this he says Ola is squeezing him through making offers like ride share and micros which makes a regular trip that earlier costed Rs 300 as Rs 180 now.

He felt that he was trapped by projections that were nothing like what he is seeing. On the contrary I have heard quiet opposite reviews from other drivers with whom I had traveled earlier. Either way, I think Ola ought to watch out for both parties (Drivers and Passengers) if they want to continue successfully as a business in the long term.

Start-up Vs MNC

How some educational institutions kill innovation in India

Recently, I have had the pleasure (or should I say nightmare) of meeting some young minds who are going through the grind of studying Engineering across India. On speaking to these people, I realized that there was one thing common between them that swept me off my feet.

They all came to me for a common purpose, "assistance for college project". They all walked up to be and told me boldly to my face that they had bought off projects from other people or other institutions. While telling me this, they had no shame or regret and told me as though they were taking a walk in a park with a straight face.

This left me wondering if it was me who did not understand what they were telling or it was a common and acceptable felony (like littering in public places).  I then went and spoke to some of my friends who more senior and had the pleasure (or pressure) of having to study Engineering / MCA (Masters in computer applications) courses. They explained to me that it was a very normal thing for students to outsource project work and several colleges encourage students to outsource work rather than experiment on their own.

I also found out that some of the most common projects that are done are in the field of HRM, Security, Healthcare. Obviously when you ask questions about these projects, they have no clue about it and are happy to admin that they plagiarized the work (it is highly unlikely they know the word  Plagiarism though).

It also dawned on me that when students go to their lecturers and tell them about an original idea, they are strongly discouraged (probably because of the fear that the guide is incapable of understanding the work that will be done). I also had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing several people who are struggling to get into IT companies who work as lecturers in colleges right after finishing their studies.

Putting all of the above together, I can reasonably conclude that many and probably most (not ALL) engineering colleges across India are run as businesses (without morals) and not as educational institutions. This also probably answers to some extent the question "Why India does not produce as many innovations as the west in-spite of having one of the largest number of educational institutions?".

Some tips for doing good graphic / web designer CV's

• Give a link to your website, if you don't have one, at least create a free blog to highlight some of your design skills (wordpress / tumblr / blogger etc).
• Never give links that do not work - last thing you want to do is provide a URL that gives a 404 error.
• Presentation of your CV is a direct reflection of your presentation skills. Try using creative tools like Prezi / tag clouds etc.
• DO NOT say you know things that you have never worked on or have half baked knowledge of.
• Try to blow the readers mind, if not at least don't get them annoyed.
• Ensure that the CV is written using proper English.

All other common CV techniques apply in addition to the above.

Good infrastructure is a basis for good output

Businesses expect high levels of productivity from its resources. One of the most essential things that affects the productivity of developers that many businesses ignore is the base infrastructure.

Most developers in India are given 1 or 2 GB RAM machines with a slow preprocessor, low network bandwidth and are expected to turn around things in a matter of seconds. While this is unfair, the reason why this happens often is because of abuse of infrastructure when it is provided.

The solution is a fine balance between giving the freedom in the form of bandwidth and infrastructure and keeping a tab on how it is used. Getting this balance right is important and good CIO's often figure it out.

Google and Me

I was recently checking out my Google settings dashboard and suddenly the penny dropped. I realised how much Google has influenced my life, here is a summary that nicely quantifies it.

AdSense - 1 product Account

Alerts - 2 active alerts

Analytics - 2 Analytics accounts 2 website profiles

Blogger - 4 blogs

Buzz - Followers 36, Following 48, Posts 67 public 11 private

Contacts - 900 entries

Docs - 26 documents

FeedBurner - 1 feed

Friend Connect - Sites I've joined 5, Sites I administer 4

Gmail - 3000 conversations

Groups - 9 memberships

Health - 2 profiles

iGoogle - Gadgets installed 77 gadgets, 6 tabs, 5 themes

Maps - Starred 1 item

Orkut - Scrapbook contains 729 items

Picasa Web Albums - Albums 95 total, Photos 5352, Fans 11 people, 132 comments

Reader - Subscriptions 56 total

Sites - Owned by me: 2 sites

Social Circle and Content - 2533 connections

Talk - 225 contacts

Webmaster Tools - Sites 3 

Desktop tools - Google Chrome / Picassa / Google Desktop / 

It also shows the tools that I use more vs the tools I use less. Anyway, that's how dependent I am on Google, check out how dependent you are by clicking here and entering your Google credentials.

There is no such role called "Developer"

Today is a busy day for me, but this thought came and I did not want to let it pass, so I snapped a few mins and am writing this piece very quickly, let me make my views very short and clear,

In India  (probably in other places around the world as well), there is no such person who can just be called a developer, you could, but then I would not.

They deserve to be clearly categorised and I cannot emphasise more on the importance of this branching.

There are in my view

1. Designers - These guys are creative and are good at graceful curves, colour sense, aesthetics, sense of spacing etc.
2. Web Designers - These guys are good at HTML and CSS ... Period, ask them to do Java Script and they will look at you as though you have asked a Rooster to lay eggs.
3. Front end developers - These guys are passionate about good user interface but know relatively less of HTML or CSS, they are more inclined towards JavaScript and delivering good looking/working UI but fear that that people may call them web designers (that could be seen as a bad word by most of the so called developers unfortunately), also this breed is rare to find.
4. Back end developers AKA Server side developers- available in 1000's, throw a stone and it will land on one most likely.

Its very rare that you see people overlapping these categories (Probability of finding = firefox crashing or IE showing rounded corners properly) and even rare to find someone overlapping all the categories (Probability = Microsoft becoming a fully open source company).

Its important for businesses to be sensitive to this fact and respect the skills that people have to offer. One should not pot all people into one group and expect them to deliver quality in all fronts, its sometimes almost like expecting a gardener to do a haircut just because he is familiar using a pair of scissors, he can cut your hair, but there is no guarantee for your head :D (wah wah wah).

Recruiting for start up's in todays India

Recruitment

I have been a part of a start up firm for the last few years ... I guess it is no longer a start up and is probably a small business. I was the second person to join my company, we had a challenge to build a healthy business. Obviously one of the key parts to building a business was recruitment.

In this post I want to share my journey so far on recruitment, some of my thoughts and experiences in the area of recruitment in India and based on these experiences I want to try to cull out a cunning strategy [Which I hope can be sold to someone for a million dollars :) ]!

The Story

The first few months were actually pretty cool, the time was 2007 ... the season was summer (Read as HOT and SWEATY), people were many to find, I remember the first time we conducted interviews to recruit some sharp java cookies, we used an agency who scheduled about 15 candidates to come and meet us, we were looking forward to getting some great guys and were very motivated, it was the first time I was going to interview some techies and I had to use a lot of common sense to figure out if the chap was up to the mark or not.

My boss and me rented a friends office and decided that we will play the 3 step strategy ... that is, we would conduct a series of tests that involved Java 1.5 and Database concepts and the guys who would score over 50% would be initially interviewed by me in the front room and then by my boss inside the cool big room ... The strategy was wickedly planned and we arrived with our laptops hoping to find our technical gems.

Wake Up Call - Timeliness and Skills People have are not everything

The first shock came in the form of guys arriving much later than us, and the next shock came in the form of the test results where we found that none of them actually cleared the bench mark we expected and as a result we lowered the bench mark ... we did this since Java EE5 was fairly new then and a lot of guys then did not know much about this in the market, this was a way by which we were hoping to attract some talent (hoping that the guys would think ... WOW, EE5, I ain't able to answer any of these Q's, these guys must be wizards in technology, would be fun to work here and learn ...), on completion of the test we sort of narrowed down to a bunch of guys and I did the first level of interviews hoping to rank them in the areas of Communication skills, Ability and interest to learn, Attitude and a few other things.

I filtered a few guys whom I then sent to my boss who did further interviews that were more technical in nature compared to mine, together we finally chose a few guys whom we thought we should settle with.

Looking back today, it was these lot of guys who worked for our business the longest, many more came after them and left earlier. A few of them learned a lot and delivered and a few did just what they knew. There is a good reason for that.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzoooop ..... Year: 2010, Situ & Reality Check: Not everyone wants cutting edge technology and interesting work - most people today in India want more and more money and peace-of-mind* (*=Read: less work)

As time went on we had more business and this process of recruitment continued. We got more experienced and technical people who helped us identify more talent to grow the business to some extent.

One thing that could not go unnoticed over the years was the kind of people we were finding, as a business we have very strong values and beliefs, we did not want people who wanted to be in corporates or people who wanted just money and nothing else ... we look for people who want to learn and be a part of a growing business. It turns out that in today's India, these expectations are not easy to fulfill.

People were not willing to compromise on Salaries and were not willing to learn new technologies (some saw it as a threat to their careers!), we offered them work that involved using cutting edge technologies and developing applications (products to be precise) from scratch and most people thought that it was a ridiculous thing to try doing (tells why India has as few software products, doesn't it?).

One incident that a colleague narrated to me involved him speaking to his ex-colleague requesting him to join us, to which he heard something like this
"Oh, you guys are a small company, I ll have to work a lot if I join you, I ve got 2 offers one from Company "C" for 7 Lakhs and one from "T" for 6 Lakhs, I am planning to take up the offer from Company "T" since company "C" demands too much work from their staff and "T" is more like a government job where I dont have to work much.

It explained to me what a mess the majority of software industry is in India today, most people are in it not for the passion of technology and doing interesting stuff but are there for the money it offers. The big wig service companies just make clever use of these people to bill and fill rather than groom talent.

Reaching out to the niche lot ...

Having said those words, there are a few sharp brains out there who care for technology and are in software for the passion rather than just money. The challenge is on how we reach this lot.

Obviously job portals are tough to use and get value out of, they have vast databases and also vast amounts of junk making it hard to find the right people. Some of the tools that I believe may work are as follows

Linked In - Head hunting profiles that show specific interest in new technologies.

Bloggers - Finding profiles who have a decent blog, again, we dont want to end up with someone who has a blog for the sake of having a blog, someone who expresses their views is always better than someone who just copies and pastes code on blogs.

Common connections - getting referrals is the best bet you have to ensure that a candidate stands in your office on the date of joining, nothing else can guarantee that. I have seen senior architects promising to join and not turn up on the date of joining, some turn up and complain that the floor was slippery / no separate room was provided for them and go AWOL.

I think I ll stop with that for now ... else it will become a book.

Sacrifice of the Silent lambs

I'd like to start with a small story ...

Tommy was a hard working chap, he worked very hard and tried to do what he was good at as proper as possible and all his intentions were always good.

Now Sunny joined his company and was placed to work with Tommy, Sunny was a different character all together.

Sunny was the sorts who did not like doing much work and mostly specialised in getting others to do his job and never added much value, Sunny grew to his position by job hopping and the boss who hired Sunny got terribly mislead about his skills since Sunny was a good talker.

As a result of the association between Sunny and Tommy, Tommy felt very pressurised, he ended up doing all the work including the stuff that Sunny had to do, due to the situation, the output being produced by Tommy deteriorated, now the boss was pissed with Tommy and kept giving him a piece of his mind.

Poor Tommy got more and more frustrated and left the job, with Tommy gone, the boss got Jonny, who went through the same phase of Timmy and called it quits one fine day.

Then came Ben, Ben was a tough nut to crack and gave Sunny and the boss a tough time, Ben was moved out of the team and asked to do some other work.

Ben was replaced with Joy whose fate was nothing but Sorrow.

End of story

Come to think of it now ... in the course of my career so far, I have been seeing this pattern happening and thought that I must write about it.

I call this pattern the "Sacrifice of the Silent lambs" ...

The ultimate solution is simple ...
"Whack Sunny" if its allowed.

What the other guys should have done in my view ... Leaving the boss apart ...

Guys like Tommy must give the boss a jolt of reality to whack guys like Sunny. Otherwise the boss is living in a dream with false information. With all good intentions the boss is doing nothing but bad.

Guys like Tommy must speak up and stand up for themselves rather than become victims.

Guys like Ben must not give up easily and make it clear to the boss about the real problem and help him help others.

Work Ethics & Productivity

I believe that every hard working person in this world in their own mind believes that they are striving to be the best in whatever they are attempting to do. (How others see it is different, and yes, there are a few who do not care to think or know that they do not want to do anything better than what they are doing).

In this attempt to achieve self perfection, I believe that fundamental work ethics and being true to self play a significant role. These qualities I find lacking in a number of people I see today in India, I wish that this was just my ill luck and not a general happening. Any person assigned with the daunting task of managing these kind of people to deliver anything of quality will empathise with what I say.

Let me ponder around "Why?" this is the case today.

Consider the example of this person who has a no of things to do at work, his boss has assigned some tasks to him and he is well aware of what he needs to do. Mr X (I ll name him that for now) who is well known for his excellent technical skills and sharp thinking (has an established name in the business because of the lack of any competition for all possible reasons) comes in late into office ... say by around 11am and logs on to chat / personal email / social networking sites / live cricket matches (thanks 2 cric info and rediff), talks to his neighbours about the building that collapsed yesterday on the highway for about half an hour not just wasting his time but valuable time of others, continues the discussion on a cup of tea at the local tea shop.

As of now, over 40% of his time is gone down the drain for the day and he is left with the reminder of the day to deliver what is needed, now Mr X feels stressed and pressurized, it is 6pm, the wife is probably calling him about dinner and he has a lot left to do and starts to think that this organisation is ruining my life! My work life balance is getting affected! and all possible phrases. This is not a very uncommon situation if you are not aware and not afraid to confront truth.

It takes guts to question oneslf about how properly they are planning their own time?, to question how productive they are when on their own? Would they do what they are doing if they were the ones paying salaries from their pockets?. Some may say that its the level of maturity, but I disagree, it takes common sense and nothing more than that.

The ones who get on with their work by spending a good 80% of their time in Office doing what they are meant to generally succeed, the rest of them job hop to climb up the ladder.

And these are a few thoughts that I have had on my mind when it comes to productivity, more thoughts later.

A very interesitng piece I found on India Today.

 


Source: India Today, March 2010

Thats what I call Great Design!!! Kudos Gmail

I quiet like this video and would like to know others thoughts on it...

Scrum it ....

I have been meaning to do some reading on SCRUM and make some notes on "How to implement SCRUM in a project in a simple manner?" ... and finally got a chance to do it today ... here are some notes that people may find useful ....

To create a product we need a something known as a product backlog. A product backlog is like a wish list that several people have for a product.

We gather all these features and create a master backlog that is planned under several releases.

But first we need the “Product Owner”….this person owns the product and decides what goes in or what does not go into the product.

Then there is the “scrum master”, the role of the scrum master is to ensure that all the team members have the right tools, facilities etc to create the product and this is the person who conducts meetings to understand where the team stands etc.

Key Roles in Scrum are
• Developers
• Testers
• Customers
• Executives
• Scrum Master
• Product Owner
• SME’s (subject matter experts)

First phase
Create a product Backlog…this should contain the entire set of features that we want to create.

From the Product Backlog, we create the release backlog … this is a subset features planned for each release….

From the release back log we then prioritise each feature and estimate the time required to deliver them … By deliver we mean a proper working version of them.

No matter what happens some SME’s have to be there during estimation phase and to help the testers test.

Now…the Release backlog is broken down into sprints…There must be at-least 4 sprints minimum in a Release … can be more.

Important aspect of each sprint is that at the end of each sprint an end user must be able to use the product piece that is delivered.

Very important to make sure that a sprint is not delayed, and the only way to measure the delay of a sprint is using something known as a “Burn down chart” ….

Burn down chart shows the current status and also the velocity of closure information, ie, the speed at which tasks are getting done. Burn down charts also help in estimating projected completion date based on the velocity.

Burn down chart basically tracks the completion of granular tasks within a sprint on a daily basis.

So take for example a Sprint “X”….

If there are 5 tasks in a sprint each taking various durations to complete … measured in hours…on a daily basis the completion of these tasks are recorded using the developers/testers status’s.

Obviously we have the question of how do we handle bugs? … no software can exist without bugs….bugs must be dealt with within each sprint…. Also we can have additional sprints specifically for killing bugs and call it “bug killer sprints”…
Bugs are tracked in SCRUM and are known as “Defect Backlog”

A feature cannot be closed without all the bugs being closed.

One important thing in SCRUM is to have daily stand up meetings, in these meetings people should stand as these meetings are not supposed t last long….some of the questions that are supposed to be asked in these meetings and answered are …
What are you doing today?
What is your defect backlog like?
What are the things you plan to do to recover from them?
Do you foresee any risks or problems that we need to handle?

Its not mandatory to conduct these meetings daily in a closely knit team that is mature but it is important to have them once in a while.

Finding the right people ...

A friend and I were talking the other day and this interesting topic came up, "why is it hard to find good people to work with in India?" ...

The answer as we concluded is that most people in the west do things because they like to, for example, if a person was writing code, they do that for a living because they enjoy it .... au contrary, things are not so in India, most people join the software industry because they think they can make more money ... people become doctors because they think they can get good dowries and make a lot of money !!!

This brings us down to the point where we have to quote a proverb ... "Do not chase money ever, do what you are good at and money will come to you automatically".

I thought I got to pen this somewhere as this was an intresting view...

Developers are not too fond of project managers ...

I notice that in general most developers dislike project managers, I have been trying to figure out the root cause for this dislike and my conclusion is that its very similar to a teenager not liking his or her parents for what they expect out of them.

In some cases, this hatred is absolutely valid, I say this because not all project managers are disciplined themselves, there are the few who are just bums on seats and do not add much value to the work happening, in fact these set of people are survivors put in the role of a project manager who make the life of people working under them miserable.

In general, the project manager wants absolute discipline and processes to be followed, like a mother and father expecting their children to grow with some values, but the team wants to take as many short cuts as possible, just like the kids think what they do is right. The challenge is in getting the unruly kid to behave and do what is right for everyone.

Discipline in India is like asking for an ice cream in the arctic circle ... not very easy to find, one who drives on Indian roads will be able to understand this in a much better manner. We do not follow lane discipline, we do not do not understand the concept of "Right of way" and in many places we don't understand what signals are meant for.

The biggest challenge for the project manger is to deliver what is needed in time using these people who think they are "gods gifts to mankind", its a pretty thankless job and only one who has been through the pain of failure by attempting to deliver something without project managing it will be able to appreciate it.

Hello World

Hello Viewer,

If by any chance you have been looking for a information repository on project management as a subject, as a science, as a theory and are looking for some serious answers, you are not in the right place.

I have been doing project management in India for the last two years and thought that there is a lighter side to this so called profession and so I have created this forum to share some of my thoughts.

Of course this is not about sharing jokes in your day's work, but I want it to be a platform where I can share some sterio types about this role and how others feel about it.

There are a lot more thoughts that I will hopefully post in this blog, but for now I will have to stop since I have a burning project awaiting my attention ...