Learning to document..hmmm...no...communicate

We document something or the other everyday. 

We document for "formality" purposes. 

We document to "save our asses". 

We document for "milestone deliverable" purposes (payments would be dependent on it).

But how many times have we documented to communicate?

Every time, I compose a design or an architecture document, it starts on a good note. I enter the "table of contents", with a lot of thought and structure and then as the documentation progresses, the interest wanes. The objective starts with "communicating the design" and then finishes with "documenting the design". A more deeper thought on it revealed that when I start documenting, I start with documentation, not communication...High level design documentation, low level documentation, support manual documentation, etc...These are all boring words to anybody. Who cares to read the disclosures? Who cares to read the "Conditions apply?". Because these are all documents. Their primary purpose is to save themselves and not to communicate something to their customers. That's why they are a failure..

Now documentation is a boring word...I researched the two keywords - documentation & communication on Google's Ngram Viewer and this was the graph...

(Communication vs documentation)

It is a nice comparison between the 2 words. One basic inference is that "communication" has been in use for a long time. Documentation seems to be a word of the post-40s. And communication has been used in a lot of books compared to documentation, illustrating the fact that its communication you would want to do rather than documentation in your projects.

Once you start thinking in terms of communication, your whole perspective towards composing any kind of artifact changes. You would want to communicate your design process, challenges you faced, your solution, benefits and drawbacks. Its like selling your design process. This will free you from MS Word documents. It can be a simple presentation or a movie or an audio file too or just a diagram.

Documentation..hmmm...no...Communication is an art..Its one of those pieces when done right, the satisfaction is fulfilling. Ask the book writers and scholars.

Formal meetings in informal setups

I entered this field of pre-sales/sales without any kind of formal education, so you can expect me to be a bit rusty. One month ago, I was in a casual dinner setting with a potential prospect. We were having dinner, chatting about projects, states and their cultures, etc...It seemed like everything went well that evening. I was giving my usual DW and BI story, maturity, roadmap, etc...I was invited into this meeting to primarily impart some potential pitfalls about a tool that the customer was planning to buy.


It has been more than a month and we didn't hear back from them, in spite of repeated followups. I was wondering why. Today, I received a call from my sales manager, who was also in that dinner meeting that evening. He told me. 


"Senthil, I would like to give you a small piece of useful tip. Never use your mobile during such a meeting, even though it might be a casual dinner meeting. Either excuse them and use it or don't even use it". 


After some analysis on that particular incident, I recollected that I used the mobile to text my wife that I will be coming home late. And some more analysis revealed that I had taken the dinner meeting with the prospect a little too light. After I was done with my job of educating the prospect on something that they were looking for, I was relaxed and forgot that I was still with a prospect and not a customer. I should have been more careful.


I realized that it was a bit rude from my end for having used my mobile. I wouldn't have certainly used my mobile, had I been in a conference meeting room or more of a formal setup. The restaurant made me feel that it was a very casual meeting and I felt it was okay to give up some of the "formal" rules.

Formal meetings in informal setups can be tricky. Never fall for the casual ambiance. It is still a customer meeting. I screwed up that day and I am thankful to the gentleman who called to correct me.

Internal competition & scarce resources

On our lunch table, we were having quite an interesting discussion. The question which was under scrutiny was

Why am I locked to one project? When will I be released? Hope I don't retire in this project.

Lot of organizations practice what is called as "Internal Competition". Internal fights are primarily instigated by the top management layer to get the best of the products from different project teams. In some cases, the same product might be developed by 2 different teams and the best version will be given the chance to continue it further.

This culture of internal competition can also be noticed in a lot of IT Service companies. For any IT Service company, their product is their people. They sell people and their experience on the projects And you will find that most of these companies would have services/offerings compartmentalized by "industry" groups. So, they sell people with good technology and industry skills. 

Now, when competition is induced between these groups, they fight for the scarce resource's (people's) time. They wouldn't want to release these people to other opportunities in other divisions. Its a classic example of "Controlled Labor", where the allocation of scarce resources is not controlled by the demand, but by "internal competition". And whenever this imbalance in economics happen, we know the result is not desirable.

Let's say I want to rent out 5 houses. Should I rent it out on the basis of the market(demand) or should I rent it out on the basis of some kind of rent control scheme ( like renting out to only bachelors who are vegetarians)? We all know the ill effects of rent control schemes. That's what is setting out to happen in IT Services industry. Technology skills are getting locked. And they are locked hoping that their skills would be required for future usage in the same industry group, whereas another industry group might potentially lose a deal, unable to staff the skill set. And in effect, the organization stands out as a loser.

Internal competition is good, but not in a way that it locks the scarce resources that the entire market is dependent on.