Consolidating my own silos

I am moving all my posts on this blog to www.senthilonmanagement.blogspot.com

My future posts will be all published under the new blog (Senthil on management).

See you at my new location...

Identity for quality

American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM), a non-profit evaluation organization periodically tests the quality of 1 on 4 practicing physicians in the United States every year. The pass rates on the initial attempts have been close to 86%, which I feel is pretty scary, assuming that 14% of the physicians are in the risk of not allowed to practice till they pass.

Amidst a lot of critical reviews about the evaluation system, I feel it is still a very reassuring practice to let the taxpayers know that the system cares for the quality of the practicing internists. When was the last time, we, IT professionals took such a professional re-certification? We do have internal exams/certifications that our organizations mandate to pass to get our promotions/hikes, but none of them stop us from practicing the work that we are doing.

Is such a re-certification required for our profession, when most of the problems we encounter are answered by Google anyways? Should we need a authority which puts rigorous control on the quality of professionals coding/designing/managing? Should our identity for quality be a certificate and not a resume?

Deadlines or Resultlines

I have learnt to say "No" when my team members ask me "Senthil, Are there any timelines or deadlines?". A difficult one to utter, when you know you are placing too much trust on some body's commitment and interest. But I have had my share of luck so far. Success rate of 1 on 7.

Deadlines force you to think of dates rather than the outcome. Deadlines are music to the managers, but not to the solution itself. Is any woman given a deadline to deliver a baby? She needs to deliver a baby. That's it. It is outcome bound and not time bound. But does that mean that you will keep waiting forever till the solution is reached. Not necessarily, unless you have the funding to do so. I don't have that sort of liberty. I just stop the project. If I don't see outcomes or any kind of progress, I stop it. If I don't see the truck moving, (the pace doesn't matter), I abort it. It was an experimentation. With this approach, either I have quality deliverable or no deliverable at all. I call them "Resultlines".

Let me know whether it works for you or not.

Are you surrounded by irrational blockheads?

I admire Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 signals (37signals.com) a lot. His management theories are very simple to understand and hence easy to follow. They taste bitter for people who have been following astronomical, corporate lessons.

I have been lately working on a couple of consulting assignments, helping customers to strategize their BI landscape. I have taken up this principle not to give my customers too much of "visioning" masala and keep the strategy as simple and as worldly as possible. No bloat. Just give them what is required and what is implementable. My experiment gave me 50% success rate. But it gave me a 100% success rate in identifying a lot of irrational jackasses around me. How? Simple. They just couldn't understand simple things. When things were complicated and swollen, they loved it. When things were simple, they hated it. So what do you do with such blockheads? Ignore them? No. You can't. They are all around you.
Fire them? No. You can't. They are the heap in the organization.
Love them? No. You can't. You are smart and you will naturally hate them.
I decided to let them know they are imbecile, straight on their face. I decided to hurt their ego. I decided to make them feel that they are adding spam to the conversations. In this process, I was perceived to be arrogant. Who cares?

Is lateral learning an investment or an obligation?

I was interviewing one of my colleagues for an engineering position in my labs group. In fact, it started out as a request from my end to join this elite group. This group focuses on experimenting new features of a product and discovers business scenarios that would fit the bill for that particular feature. This group also fixates on identifying & abstracting reusable design patterns, which then can be serviced to various projects for specific implementations. Sounds interesting? I believed so, but my fellow colleagues didn't feel so.

The reason. "I have my project tasks to accomplish which fills in most of my day's time. I wont have time to contribute to this cause". I wondered why is it a cause. Then I realized the equation was about relating time spent to perceivable returns (appraisal comments). They felt learning a new feature outside the scope of a project was a very bad bargain. They felt it was an obligation that they were doing to the community and not to themselves.

When will the IT professionals realize that "lateral learning" (learning outside the scope of the project) is an investment to their own professional growth and not an obligation to their organization?

Saravana Bhavan and IT Services

This weekend, I had the chance to grab a morning "tiffen" at Saravana Bhavan (SB), a premier vegetarian restaurant in Chennai. As most South Indians would be knowing, SB charges a premium price for all their products. The reason: Mouth watering quality food. I ate "Aappam". It is customarily served with cocunut milk and it was truly mouth watering. Expectations met and also surpassed. I ordered one more only to realise that the second one was too heavy for my stomach. But I was satisfied.

If I have to draw parallels between SB's services and IT-enabled services, today's customers consuming IT services are starved; starved of quality. When did your customers feel that your quality of work was lip-smacking? Assume that the day he compares your work to a lip smacking delicacy, you have reached the pinnacle of quality service.

Tell me some of your experiences where the customer truly lip smacked.

Is Corporate fidelity foolishness?

I have been working with the same organization for the past 7.5 years. Multiple reasons:

1. No confidence in the rest of the IT companies.
2. 10% fidelity to the company that offered me the first job.
3. A conservative IT professional who outweighs risks to opportunities.

But lately I am realizing that my risk-taking ability is on the downward trend. I have been just thinking about how can I grow in the same ladder that I stepped into 7 years back. Is that good or bad? I don't know. Is it a good strategy to root your career on a single company, no matter how good the company is?

I really don't have an answer. What do you think?