How EZPass taught me to reason beyond the obvious?

It was a simple lesson learnt. Whenever I cross the tolls in the EZPass lane and happen to see the front-of-me motorists'  EZPass status alerting - "Go, Low Bal(ance)", I always thought that the guy had forgotten to re-fill his EZPass. It is right most of the times, but not all the times. Now the "minority" reason never occurred to me and I always thought that could be the only reason.

A few days back, my EZPass also started showing the same alert whenever I crossed the lane - "Go, Low Bal". Now, I had setup automatic refills and how could that happen. Then I realised that I had replaced my lost credit card a month back and the EZPass had the automatic payment on that lost credit card.

The core reason for my EZPass status alerting was not that I forgot to recharge it, but I expected the recharge to work automatically, but didn't work because of a failed  payment. That could have been the reason for many of the motorists that I see who gets alerted, though not a majority, as you don't expect the credit card payments to fail.

The obvious reason (motorists forgetting to refill) was so obvious that it completely masked me from other potential causes (failed payment gateways) and only experience taught me that there could be multiple reasons for a failure.

So, whenever there is a screaming, obvious reason in front of you for a failure, don't get dissolved in it. There might be also non-obvious reasons for a failure, which you might completely miss.

Attrition promotions

The Indian IT industry suffers from a real bad phenomenon. - Attrition promotions.

Let's say you are a super technical brain and is the most sought by your client. The client loves you and thereby your boss also loves you.

Now, you decide it's time to move on. Because the job doesn't interest you anymore. So, you open up the monopolistic email client "MS Exchange" and start happily typing your resignation letter. And then you click "Send".

A few hours later, if you are a super performer, you will be stunned with the number of calls you receive asking you to reverse the decision, as you are the most critical "bolt" in the engine.

Finally if nothing works, they promise "Promotion".

And then if you are person who loves power, you would gleefully accept it and work for another 3 years, before you send the next resignation letter.

Now, this is what I call as an Attrition promotion. To stop losing you, they promote you.

The industry is flooded with such wrong promotions at the wrong time. You should get promoted, when you are found capable and not when you want to leave the organization.

Instead of a promotion, the organizations can challenge their employee with some meaty work and equivalent pay. Promotions signal a wrong direction. Promotions mean that the organization is ready to wide the peak of the ladder.

Don't promote to make the guy stay in your company. If you find him capable, do it upfront or else don't do it.

A hair dresser's "Just for fun" past-time

Yesterday, when I was having my haircut, after a long 3 month break, my hair dresser asked me...

Hair dresser: "Sir, where are you from?"
Me: "India"
Hair dresser: "What do you do?"
Me: "Guess?"
Hair dresser: "So, if you are from India, you should be a software guy. Right?"
Me: "Perfect. Thanks to clustering algorithms in data mining"

I knew what he does, but I went on to ask him, what else does he do? He told me he takes MIT Online computer science classes once he goes back home and has been learning programming to write some apps for iPhone.

So, I asked him why is he doing all this?

"Just for fun".

Wow. That hit me like a bullet. Learning computer algorithms after a day's job of standing and dressing people's torn hair and that too for fun...I personally was ashamed of myself.

"When was the last time I learnt a new programming language and that too for fun....And I call myself a software guy..."

Realized that being in IT for a decade, has stained me with the whole notion of "cost-benefit" analysis. For everything, I look for a cost and benefit.

"What benefit do I get by learning Python?"
"What benefit do I get by learning clustering algorithms?"

It was a rude awakening. Probably fun is the benefit....

Leadership is support....

Do you feel like calling your boss when you are in a problem hoping he is there for you?


In my opinion, leadership is about the support you can provide to the community that you touch upon - your team, your customer, your vendor, etc, when they need you.


I want to take an example of one of my colleagues, who is basically an account manager. His role doesn't demand him to fix a java or a shell script, but in case of one, I feel like reaching out to him. His role doesn't demand him to take care of low quality conference bridge issues. But in case of one, I reach out to him. And he does all this without a fuss. For me, he is a leader.


I know whom to reach out in case of an issue. Are you one of that kind? A supportive leader or a tyrant boss.

Working with your competitors...

The IT Services business is very very tricky. And to win business, you are supposed to do anything...


You need to stay competitive. And you need to stay with competition...


The latter part is a very unusual situation when you are supposed to work with competition to deliver value to the customer. Now, how do you do that? You would have won the deal against the same competition and post that you need to work along with them. 


To give an example, take a Manufacturing services company getting serviced by multiple IT service vendors. Nothing unusual about it. Now, typically in a datawarehousing project, the data is pulled from multiple sources and then integrated into a datawarehouse and then reported from this environment into a presentation layer. 


We have 3 distinct ecosystems- sources, data-warehouse & presentation. Now, if each ecosystem is driven by a separate IT services vendor, and all 3 of them compete against each other for every project, how can you expect harmony to exist between the 3, which will naturally flow into the application that is getting built. 


Lot of times, projects get delayed not by the team performance, but purely by such strange de-risking practices followed by organizations to make the competitors work together. They never can. There will always be the line where information sharing will be seen as an "evil act".

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.

Filling timesheets

I am sure a lot of us would have had a tryst with the "nonsensical" work of filling up time sheets. This was initially introduced to keep a track of how long does an employee spend his time in a project, so that it could help them for 2 purposes

1. Bill the customer for the exact amount of time the "employee works".
2. Calculate exactly how much time he works so that it will help in future estimation of projects.

But how effective is this process? Measuring productivity has always been a great challenge. Because productivity is not just about time. It is about quality, efficiency, growth, etc.... And what is the solution that we have today? Time-sheets.

Why would I want to enter that I worked only 5 hours? Because I know that if I enter 5 hours I will be questioned, even though I had finished my work. Its like the prisoners dilemma problem in game theory. You don't trust the system, because the system doesn't trust you. And the system also thinks the same way.

Now, what about entering more than 8 hours? That is also a tricky problem, because you will be questioned on your effectiveness to finish the job and on top of this there would be 100s of clauses in the SoW which would detail that you wouldn't bill the customer more than 8 hours a day. So the magical number of 8 hours a day was established and employees just enter that number.

So this madness continues on a week-week basis to enter 8 hours/day. And in this process, we are not solving both the issues mentioned in my first paragraph. We will keep billing the customer 8 hrs/day.

In my opinion, organizations should first open out this channel to accept realistic time lines from the employees and bill that same back to the customer. Yes, it will cut corners, but that's alright in the longer term of things. There will be certain unpredictability, but its alright.

I think CMM guys should make this as a mandate in their evaluations !!!

We belong to 2 parents

In this post, I want to address one specific case of attrition. Attrition of employees from their "biological parents" to their "foster parents". In IT services, we are bound to 2 sets of parents at any given point of time. And I guess that relationship is what causes these kind of fall-outs.


Biological parents

These guys are the ones whom you work for. They are the ones who recruit you and position you into projects. They are the ones who send your paycheck every month. You belong to them.

Foster parents
These guys are the ones for whom you perform the work. They are the ones who nurture your skills. They feed you with challenges & requirements. They are your customers. In fact, they feed you and your biological parents.


Now, when you spend a lot of time with your foster parents, your loyalty and faith starts tilting towards that particular organization. You will be honest to them. You will give them unbiased opinions. You like them. What happens to the biological parents? They still own you.


I have seen a lot of my friends leaving their biological parents for a more stronger relationship with the foster parents. Is it unethical? No. I don't think so. It's purely the way this industry works. When there is osmosis, we will have reverse osmosis too. Its talent here. And it will move towards higher concentration. If the "biological parents" have to somehow stop this osmosis, they should be gearing for better people policies, which will attract their employees to stay back. Ideally, they should be more concerned about their people leaving to join their competitors more than their customers. Because when your own employee leaves to join your competitor, you have leakage of your IP, whereas if he or she joins your competitor, you have promotion of your IP.


I feel its perfectly okay when your employee joins your customer. He will spread the good word of your organization.