The "Coach" does not have to be a great player !!!

My new lesson, that I learn hard way. I am going to treasure this rest of my life.
While struggling with one of the toughest problems of my professional sphere, I was  applying all technical skills to fix it. All hands on deck approach !!

Not going any where, I babbled the problem out in front of someone, who has nothing to do with this profession or field of work, but has been a general coach to me all through !

Viola ! His preaching did help :) I am going somewhere with this.

man vs machine ...

Ruthless business ... in the pursuit of protecting assets, sometimes completely forget the people who build it.

This story pertains to India's telecom poster child. Growth of which has been synonymous to "India Shining". It has an office routing billions of mobile calls, right next to the Arabian sea, on Marine Drive Mumbai.

And in a series of mysterious failures in the systems, the out come turned out to be what you see in this picture. The air quality. The amount of sulfur in the polluted sea shore of thickly populated and industrialized Mumbai is 6 times more than that of WHO recommended max level. So much so, that the copper wires running in the system boards turn in to copper sulfate over a few months.

Here comes the funny part. The execs of this company are screaming at all system vendors to replace the systems. But no one is talking about rescuing their employees from the same offices. Their own employees breathing the air that can destroy metal stored in air conditioned labs !!

Accessibility

A few things current govt of India is doing, that are pretty well thought through and very sensible.

Notice the new 2 rs coin. It has value written in Braille !!! Talk about accessibility.

Open Communication - Moderated ;)

When one of the biggest IT companies of India, decided to allow its 100,000+ employees to blog on intranet, it did it with a lot of confidence.

The company had a lot of arrogance and over confidence, that its employees would write constructive stuff in the intranet social networking site.

HR department was proud announcing the initiative and touted the "Open Communication" culture and ability to take open criticism.

It also said in that announcement, that the unhappy employees, now venting on Facebook / Orkut would do so on the intranet.

Within hours of it being out, so many name calling, so many unhappy employees screaming, made it an instant depressant for the HR community.

The same HR team, that announced the Open Platform for communication, went back and said, the site will now be "Moderated" by HR team for posts.

And... more importantly, they reinforced, moderating the posts is not against open communication and transparency is not reduced in any way.

After all when a cat closes its eyes and drink milk, it thinks no one can watch it !!

Improvement (Satire warning !!)

The internal support had become a nightmare as the company grew leaps and bounds over a period of time.

11 yrs ago - e-mail not working, send a mail to sysadmin@xyz.com. The guy comes running and does some magic.

5 yrs ago - A web interface where you need to sort through options and create a case for your problem. All problems starting from AC not cooling your cube to PC has virus under one web portal.

But then, you have these issues which do not fit in to any of the categories and get filed under "Other". Misuse begins and people become lazier and put everything under Other, so that they dont have to find out where the problem is. No need to apply / use the brain at all.

So, company goes ahead and hires a sr. exec to find a solution to high number of internal support issues and sorting issues and chaos etc.

Clever fella - designs a web interface that no one even can navigate through. Sales it at the "New, Improved". As no one could use it, no one files cases or they create "community support" wikis.

The sr. exec now shows metrics to the world - "restructuring of the tools, solved high case issue for such a large company" !!

Wonderful !!

Daily Updates ...

After a few days away from blogging .. and something that can be explained by the subject of this blog !!

Conveying sense of urgency is an art. Sometimes it can be really irritating.

The org is working on something which is very critical, and needs all depts to work in emergency mode - HW, SW, Marketing etc. etc.

Here is what my boss did. Set up a meeting every day lunch hour. He knows conflicts / clashes will be less during those hour. One excuse gone.

Next rule was a tough one... no matter there is update or not, everyone involved in the brainstorming need to meet for daily update. That's like written on stone. That ONE rule can not be bent.

Daily updates - some work will be done in 24hrs. No exceptions !!