Category Archives: Culture

Culture

Culture in Tier 1 cities for ITES

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I am starting with mini caselets newsletter (once every month) which is a series of anonymous (real / hypothetical / reality inspired) mini case studies each of maximum 2 pages from my observations of industry happenings – direct / indirect / via news articles / network / friends / problems that people face and such. Intention of each mini caselet is to highlight a set of challenges that are faced both by managers & employees or hypothetically created leading to better leadership and management styles which in turn give better environment for employees or solutions or solution direction.

Think of a situation of an ITES company office in Tier-1 city which is recruiting lot of fresh talent and working on onboarding them to become productive in 2-3 months to deliver good projects.

What can go wrong?

  • Disagreements between two set of managers who manage the same account / customer in the same shared office space of an extended development center each having competing teams
  • Uneven knowledge transition to fresh candidates
  • Silos & lack of functional knowledge for team
  • Managers deciding how the behaviors of employees should be in terms of which interactions they should have and which to avoid based in older management & leadership principles from 80s/90s command and control structures
  • Cultural differences in terms of recruitment geographies of candidates leading to differing work styles – For example, somebody studied and lived in a Tier 2 city in India vs. somebody who studied and lived in Tier 1 city in non India region – both will have differing goals and perspectives
  • Culture of less knowledge sharing and long working hours
  • Struggle for accommodation, food, entertainment, social circle and more with a very limited salary in year 1 in Tier-1 city
  • Disengagement of support functions in terms of how work is done on the ground and them differing to managers for every decision
  • Add to the mix competitive landscape to go onsite, climb the corporate ladder & increase salary quickly
  • All this in the influence of 1.5/2 year retention contracts for fresh candidates when they can’t leave the firm easily

Now to solve this situation simply flip the scenario and fix each point one by one by interventions / trainings / guidance / discussions / role plays / similar techniques and you have a recipe for a better culture, it’s as simple as that.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Culture

We should not be normalizing this

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Being direct, frank, authentic and natural self is ok but below is not. We should not be normalizing this:

  • Achieve targets literally at any cost
  • Repeated bad behaviour in hierarchy
  • Messing up people’s personal lives
  • Using words like professionalism & seasoned to avoid doing what needs to be done
  • Playing mind games with people fresh out of college
  • Delegate and then take credit for other’s work
  • Judge people without knowing context
  • Promote silos, avoid team work and mess up collaboration and creativity
  • Pay someone less than market rate if we can afford the real salary
  • Treat people like trash and take advantage of them
  • Not fix the fixable
  • Not doing the right thing
  • Bring personal biases into the organization
  • Have different set of rules for the same input and output for different groups of people
  • We are not at war, we are in information technology / services industry
  • Most people lose their cool or misbehave once in a while or have a bad day once in a while but if that is a habit ingrained in the culture of the organization affecting large parts of the organization then there is a problem that needs a relook

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Culture, Social Media

The other perspective – Social Media – Part 1

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Have you realized below points when you don’t find people interested in your social media posts and activities? Its not always lack of interest or dislike that causes someone to be un-interested in your posts.

  • Is your post showing up on their activity feed or wall?
  • Are your interests and likes similar?
  • Does the other person have time for social media?
  • Is the other person active on social media? Is s/he searching for things completely different from you?
  • All social media runs on algorithms, optimizations and matching – is the algorithm correctly able to decipher where your & other person’s interests are?
  • Many people have profiles which are not exactly what they really are – either for interest of their privacy or other reasons causing more mis-match to happen
  • We get to see more and more of what we tend to like and follow, post and so on which may not be exactly in agreement with your network
  • Mathematically the permutations & combinations for even a network of 1,000 people connected to one person with 10s of likes and posts / activities per person builds such a vast set of events which is not humanely possible to track for one person
  • Probability of we seeing something that other person in our network wants us to see is very low
  • Before we judge why people have not been in touch with us, do realize some of the points above. Larger your social network in terms of physical world & virtual world – lower the chances of you observing activities, posts, likes and more from individuals in your network that they want you to see unless the matching algorithms are intuitive
  • These are some of the reasons why we keep seeing warnings about why we should not be judgemental about things on social media
  • Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in
Culture

Information Technology culture across company categories – Part 1

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Products:

  • High on collaboration
  • Cross department deliverables
  • Focus on specific areas like products, goals and such
  • They typically build their own strategy
  • Various sub-cultures like entrepreneurial, open source, hybrid and proprietary may exist within this
  • Controlled offerings for customers
  • Innovation & creativity is valued highly
  • R&D is important here
  • Flexibility in terms of what employees can do beyond the organization
  • Flat or semi-structured hierarchies mostly
  • Inventing a new category, offering, product, culture is possible here

Services:

  • No set boundaries on technologies, products & frameworks at times
  • Customer, partner & product ecosystems more or less drive the strategy & evolution
  • Standardization of delivery & facilities for employees
  • Silos & compartments within company by design and reason
  • Hierarchical & matrix way of reporting and work with management
  • Typically fixed set of roles & responsibilities for employees
  • Process plays an important role here

Startups & mid-sized companies:

  • No set hierarchy for interactions in the company – flat or semi-structured hierarchy
  • Focus on cutting edge domains and technologies at times
  • Evolves & builds strategy with the market & customers – Flexible in this aspect
  • Multi-tasking roles & responsibilities with potentially high growth and learning or relatively quick failure

Technology work in Non Technology product companies:

  • Focus on implementations of full projects & vendor, partner, product offerings mapped to business outcomes
  • Co-ordination with stakeholders within and outside the organization plays an important role here
  • Maintenance & support, evaluation of products & technologies, return on investment takes up a large amount of time

#culture

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Culture

Traits of a good Information Technology company – Part 1

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  1. Promote merit and people with soft and hard skills both not just technology or soft skills alone
  2. Get them to attend trainings from HBR, MIT Sloan & various business schools from across the world regularly
  3. Setup a culture of knowledge sharing, collaboration & team work
  4. Plan & design all projects / initiatives in advance with spirit not lip service
  5. Setup accountability & responsibility
  6. For top management, managers, architects & leaders “Practice what you preach”
  7. Inculcate culture of cyber security, discussion & respect
  8. Keep people busy with genuine work
  9. Respond to people when they reach you, ignoring and tolerating problems for long will not solve the problems and snowball into bigger problems
  10. Few bad leaders will destroy culture across the organization rapidly
  11. Transparency & explaining WHY helps when you are a leader or manager
  12. Operational level problems over time convert into strategy level problems, fix them when they start. In the same way, strategic problems convert into operational problems quickly. Cater to both of these regularly
  13. Think design & systems thinking
  14. Plan and evaluate the future regularly – if you don’t invest in the future now, your path will derail from future when it should have come to you
  15. Have tie-ups with top institutes for further education / training of employees
  16. Give time off, leaves & hobby time to employees – they are not robots. People have people problems, robots too have breakdowns
  17. Actions have consequences, repeated violations have more consequences. Everybody needs to understand this
  18. Don’t judge the book by it’s cover – take 3-6 months of regular interactions to evaluate an employee. Instant judgements don’t help
  19. Awards, limelight & likes don’t always determine the worth of a person
  20. Anything can be achieved anyhow is a dangerous concept, companies that promote this beyond the legal or fair boundaries are not the right places to work – We are not at war, this is corporate world not World War 1/2
  21. Culture eats strategy for breakfast – this is true
  22. Promote, remove & reskill right set of people who have all stakeholders’ interest in mind, stakeholders should include employees & customers both
  23. Give regular & timely feedback at-least once a quarter, be open to discussions & feedback yourself as manager
  24. In internet and social media world, you cant hide your problems as an organization, they will bounce back with time most of the times. These can only be solved by discussion & transparency
  25. Shallowness, spam, power play, sycophancy & such can be detected easily, don’t promote it. Authenticity & transparency helps
  26. Sincerity, transparency & authenticity most of the times gives you the same in return, remember that
  27. Revenue is not everything, other things like strategy, culture, stakeholders matter equally
  28. Practice inclusivity and enablement of all sections of employees rather than only one set based on any bias
  29. Understand why and how biases are formed and correct them with right intervention

Email me: Neil@TechAndTrain.com

Architecture, Culture, Enterprise Software, Excellence, Software Delivery, Solution Architecture

Productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads

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As per my experience, the biggest productivity hacks for Architects / Designers / Tech Leads are not to decide the variables / class names / loops / scope / data types / exception handling / object relational mapping & so on – they definitely are important and should be done, but so are the below points:

1. Design patterns

2. What is the code for?

3. Functional to technical mapping

4. Solution creation

5. Pseudocode & logic steps

6. Logic of solution for design / programming problems

7. Co-ordination with stakeholders & communication

8. Code review

9. Logic review of programmed modules

10. Architecture / Design thoughts

11. Knowledge updation around tools / products / frameworks usage

12. Time management of developers

13. Task management of developers

14. Solving problems in design

15. Programming standards management

16. Technical best practices management

17. New technology exploration

18. Helping sales, presales & practice

19. Working on POCs, solutions, products and accelerators

20. Updating oneself with the current happening in industry and domain

21. Automation, Security, Testing, Deployment, Continuous integration / deployment, Integrations, Logging, User Interface / User Experience, Application monitoring, Support structure, Clustering / Auto-scaling, Non functional requirements and other such important areas

22. Establish collaboration / teamwork among technical staff working with them

23. Right documentation and knowledge sharing practices

Many get stuck in only programming, that is definitely something we all love and do, but you should be dividing your time as an Architect / Tech Lead / Designer between programming and above tasks equally. Current enterprise softwares are complex and you can’t achieve much without collaboration and above form an important link for productivity in complex, large team projects.

#architecture #design #technicallead #solutionsarchitect

Email me: Neil@TechAndTrain.com

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Culture, Innovation

Race to be leaner, lighter, faster – limits will hit us

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Whether jet engines, aircrafts, IT outsourcing, manufacturing or services there is a race to be leaner, faster, better, higher quality, etc with lesser resources – humans or machines or steel or fibre. In itself its an oxymoron or irony though not always. It actually stops innovation at times.

Let us look how:
Innovation and peak performance happens when a system/entity (human or machine) works at optimum load. Pressure equals force divided by area. If you decrease the area, pressure increases. It causes more stress per unit area. Whether new entity can tolerate it now due to advances is a different stream of research but definitely stress per unit area is increasing. For aircrafts its pressure or stress per unit weight, for humans its stress per person as its assumed people will work with higher efficiency in lean/agile mode.

A fundamental rule which we ignore here is that systems/entities/people will work optimally within evolutionary biology/theoretical physics limits only. We can’t change them. Like if you want to occupy an area you need specific number of people/police/army/robots, this rule doesn’t change. You can augment this by technology but can’t change rules 100%. Extrapolate to innovation/optimum peak performance, its not possible always to be more and more lean, lighter, faster and get better quality and innovation. We need to follow nature’s limits, nothing goes faster than light in this universe.

Culture, Excellence, Innovation

Formula for Successful Innovation Driven Companies in IT industry

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There are many formulas to build a successful company:
1. Passion
2. Great investors and board with good mentors
3. Great product
4. Niche skills and services
5. Great legacy
6. Recruit the best, train them, mentor them, give them good career growth, etc.
And so on

But one that I have observed and learnt is another one. We won’t go into the discussion about the earlier ones given above but let’s look at another way to build excellence.

Excellence and innovation is driven by freedom, creativity, knowledge, skill and right intervention by management with positive re-enforcement, promotion of good attitude and removing the bad apples at the right time.

One of the primary enablers for this is less internal friction and a culture to deliver excellence, promotion of passion to perform and learn without unnecessary hindrance.

One of the best ways to do this is to find people in your core teams to go into the non core functions over time willingly and on their own. These people can build a culture that appreciates the problems of the majority core function employees.

An example, if you over time promote in any Information Technology company your core development/product team members via training, education, etc. into Finance, HR, Project Management, Support, PMO, Legal, Sales and other departments you will build a company that appreciates the problems that the core function faces and they will help/enable them which in turn results in innovation and culture of synergy with excellence.

This is not the only formula out their to build a great company but one of the many ways. Only when we perform as one unit do we succeed most of the times, don’t we?