The world as I see it

I am not in a position to continue blogging. A blog requires lot of time and energy along with thoughts and I don’t think I will be able to do justice by posting something for which I have not expressed my thoughts properly.

I am signing out from this blog. Hope, some of the information put in the blog becomes useful for fellow visitors so not deleting the blog altogether.

Good-bye!!!

“Anniyan” is the name of the movie which I saw a year back in a video coach bus. Even though it was being played in Tamil, I had thoroughly enjoyed it. Language was not much barrier as I could get the clue of events from the body language and the voice tones of actors. I personally liked the song “Remo” which I found had flavour of “Disco dancer” song(Remember Mithun da?) but still was having its own individual presentation. It was based on multiple personality disorder of an individual named “Ambi” who is also “Remo”.

A few days back I saw the Hindi version “Aparichit”(meaning: stranger). I could not resist myself to watch again, may be because I had not got exact dialogues in the “Tamil” version which I had seen. Sadly, it was a dubbed version, neverthless I liked the movie because of strong points it raised prevailing in our society like corruption, government negligence and all.

I am waiting for the next part of the movie as the film ended in revival of “multiple disorder” after 2 years of medical treatment of “Ambi” when he throws a man outside a moving train.

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant’s a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house. Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other grasshoppers demanding that grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter. Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the grasshopper. The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance). Opposition MP’s stage a walkout. Left parties call for “Bharat Bandh” in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.

CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among ants and grasshoppers. Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the ‘Grasshopper Rath’. Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act [POTAGA]”, with effect from the beginning of the winter. Arjun Singh makes Special Reservation for Grass Hopper in educational Insititutions & in Govt Services. Chidambaram imposes more taxes. The ant is milked more and more by being fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV. Arundhati Roy calls it “a triumph of justice”. Lalu calls it ‘Socialistic Justice’. CPM calls it the ‘revolutionary resurgence of the downtrodden’. Koffi Annan invites the grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.

Many years later…Meanwhile, the ant has since migrated to the US or UK where talent in recognized and rewarded. 100s of grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India. Can you believe that India is the only country where some people take pride in calling themselves the reservation class…As a result losing lot of hard working ants and feeding the grasshoppers India is still a developing country…

PS: From my friend’s blog

I have recently started with Hollywood movies. Though I have watched few good ones like “Forrest Gump”, “Speed” and some others in the past but it was never a conscious decision. I got few Hollywood DVDs.

Yesterday, I saw “Top Gun” with lead role of Tom Cruise. Guess, it was one of his earlier movies. I liked the actions and excitements of flying MIGs along with the romance with his lady instructor in the flying school who was shown few years older to him. The best part was - he relinquished his flying career to become another instructor in the same institution after having given choice of choosing any career path he liked. That was so cool.

This is an interesting article which in totality summarises the current level of maturity in the business model of IT services companies. I just wonder whether all the companies are on the same page or there are companies who have grown from this level of business level maturity and are actually helping clients reduce their costs while improving the business. While I agree to the facts stated but totally disagree to the expectation level of author and the reason for failures stated. It’s well known fact that there is always diffculty in making and sustaining relationship if you are not equal. Smaller companies commit mistakes by engaging a vendor/partnet bigger than the size of their own companies. There is always going to be difference in the business goals of the company and the vendor/partner.

Do not forget to look at my comments(Blog owner) at the end.

How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us

Oct 16, 2003
By Wesley Bertch

What are my options if my highly productive, 15-person software team generates only one-third the output our customers demand? I wascertain that augmenting our team with offshore development was the right answer. It wasn’t, at least for a small project we recently outsourced to an Indian firm. Here’s our story. I lead the software development group at Life Time Fitness, a high-growth, nationally expanding health and fitness chain. We’re more than just health clubs–we have spas and salons; cafés; member services, such as personal training and swimming lessons; a division that produces a nationally distributed magazine; a division that formulates and distributes energy bars, powders and other consumer goods to national retailers; and a corporate wellness unit that sells products and services to thousands of companies. In addition to supplying these departments with systems, we provide software services to Life Time’s internal real-estate group. Keeping pace with the growing software needs of so many diverse business units is a huge challenge.

From almost every angle, offshore development appeared to be the ideal solution. We needed to augment our internal team cost-effectively, without sacrificing quality. Judging from what analyst firms and the media were saying about Tier 1 offshore developers, with their CMM (Capability Maturity Model) qualifications, Six Sigma quality experience and “proven” low-cost development model, how could we go wrong?

Personally, I was excited about the promise of offshore outsourcing. If it worked, we’d be heroes to the business. Philosophically, I view free trade as highly beneficial to its participants.

We met the key criteria for offshoring: centralized IT, process maturity and years of experience working with Indians both in the United States and offshore. We had executive sponsorship. We had IT commitment. We even had the perfect project to test the waters: a small, low-risk Web application for our real-estate division. The
application’s purpose is to provide screens for entering new location information. The application isn’t complex: The back-end database is Microsoft SQL Server; server-side Java components implement business rules; and Java Server Pages (JSPs) are used for the front end. We use BEA Systems WebLogic as the application/Web server and Concurrent Version Systems (CVS) for source-code control.

The Tier 1 Indian vendor we invited to implement the project was successfully supporting our Siebel 7 sales-force-automation implementation, so both sides thought this project would be a slam dunk. The vendor agreed to take on the project for a fixed fee of $20,000, with a nine-week time line.

To avoid finger-pointing, everyone agreed that the vendor should perform all phases of the project, from gathering business requirements through QA (quality assurance). Life Time’s internal staff would monitor and participate in every way necessary for the project to succeed. If the project proved successful (defined asanything shy of disaster), we promised a small fortune in project work.

Here’s how the project team was organized:

o An on-site liaison, supplied by the vendor, acted as a bridge between the Life Time team and the offshore project manager. This person was on a senior level technically and had strong communication skills.

o An on-site business analyst, supplied by the vendor, completed the application’s functional requirements, then returned to India to act as offshore project manager.

o An offshore project manager tracked tasks and schedules for three offshore team members: a Java developer, a JSP developer and a tester.

o An offshore technical manager supervised our project, as well as three others.

o A Life Time software manager coordinated his team with the on-site liaison to provide code reviews, database design and general advice.

o A manager in Life Time’s real-estate division served as the business champion.

The project got off to a good start. The vendor’s business analyst met frequently with the real-estate division’s users and, with the on-site liaison, worked furiously to document all the functional and user interface requirements within four weeks.

By week three, however, our internal lead business analyst threw up a red flag. His review of the functional specs exposed problems in the requirements, particularly in the interface specs. For example, the UI as laid out forced the users to re-enter data they had previously entered. Plus, the screen flow was illogical and confusing. The on-site liaison countered that though the UI had problems, it ostensibly complied with the documented business requirements.

To ensure that we would get what we needed, we extended the project time line, agreed to a cost increase of $7,000 to allow for additional analysis and better interface design, and dedicated internal Life Time analysis and UI people to guide the final version of the documentation.

After the vendor’s business analyst wrapped up the documentation, he returned to India and, in an effort to exploit his knowledge of the project requirements, was assigned as the offshore project manager. By this point, the offshore technical manager had lined up the offshore project team, so the coding design began in earnest.

Once offshore, however, the project started down the slippery slope. Upon receiving the offshore company’s database design, Life Time’s lead data architect declared it to be the worst he’d ever seen. There were so many critical database flaws–more than 100–that our architects were unable to log all of the defects within the scheduled one-week review period.

The database was not the only problem area. Determined to dazzle us with their software prowess, the offshore developers insisted on completing the entire code design before allowing us to review it (we had requested an early design sample to head off any problems). Naively confident in their original code design, the offshore team had launched immediately into writing Java code before checking the code design into CVS for our review. Tragically, our review determined that the offshore team’s design patterns weren’t in accordance with the standards Life Time follows, invalidating all the offshore team’s Java code.

In two short weeks, the offshore team had gone from proud and eager to embarrassed and dejected. Once the stark reality of our logged defects sank in, the team knew there was no way they could straighten out the code design and then code and test the applications within the set time frame. Frustration levels were high on the offshore team, and the on-site liaison became increasingly defensive. The internal Life Time team was disappointed and annoyed as well, but we accepted the fact that mistakes were bound to happen on our first end-to-end offshore project. We valued a quality final product much more than time-line precision. Nevertheless, as we learned only later, the offshore team began working extra-long hours to avoid asking for a time extension.

To the Rescue?

Given all the problems up to that point, we sensed the project was at risk, so our internal software development manager, QA manager and I flew to India to meet with the offshore people. Graciously, the vendor also scheduled us to meet with the top brass. The visit was highly informational and warm feelings prevailed, but by this time the application was in the testing phase and nearly “complete.”

Not long after our trip, the offshore team delivered the tested, “finished” application. According to the on-site liaison, all we now needed to do was perform a ceremonial user-acceptance review, sign off on the project’s successful delivery and celebrate.

Not so fast. We instead decided to perform a little QA of our own. In less than a day, one Life Time tester and one developer found more than 35 defects, many of them showstoppers. Screens randomly went blank, “saved” data was lost, functionality was missing, the interface wasn’t consistent and data validation didn’t work. The offshore team categorized the hundreds of newly found defects as “in scope” (these they fixed) or “out of scope” (these were deemed Life Time’s problem).

Even after the vendor fixed the “in scope” defects, the application was unusable. And fixing it meant it would be late and even more over-budget. At this point, we decided the best course was to take delivery of the application and overhaul the code ourselves. We couldn’t bear trying to explain to the offshore vendor all the code fixes that were needed and then haggle over who would pay for them.

Post Mortem

You might assume that, given our dismal experience with offshore development, we have written off this model completely. Not so. Offshore may still hold promise as a way to cost-effectively extend our current team.

What would we do differently? Instead of relying on the vendor to institute the offshore processes and team, we would set that up ourselves. Ideally, we would have a developer (probably an Indian) from our internal team relocate to India to build and manage a competent offshore team, perhaps within leased space at an existing
development facility.

Another lesson we learned the hard way is that fixed-bid offshore projects tend to misalign the vendor’s interests with ours by placing undue emphasis on cost and time line while sacrificing quality and customer focus. Because we care about what the code looks like (this vendor’s on-site liaison and account executive admitted to me that
they do much better with fixed-bid projects when the customer doesn’t inspect their code), we would have been better off using a time and materials arrangement, which would have given us more control over every part of the process.

Finally, next time I would pay more attention to my employees’ concerns. Even before the project started, several employees expressed doubts about the quality of offshore code and predicted they would end up redoing it themselves. Turns out they were right.

Wesley Bertch is director of software systems at Life Time Fitness. Send your comments on this article to him at wbertch@lifetimefitness.com.

Why did our offshore software project fail?

Root Cause #1 — Inexperienced Labor

Indian software labor is highly educated and dedicated, to be sure, but we found that workers lack the technical and people skills that come only with experience.

Our vendor’s employees averaged only two years’ experience. Because so much was riding on this trial project, the vendor assigned us a “senior” team: The Java and JSP developers each had four years of experience, and the tester had two years of experience. By comparison, any one of our internal Life Time software developers has more experience than the entire offshore team combined.

The on-site liaison explained that one reason offshore developers and testers are on such a junior level is because as soon as they gain experience, they’re promoted to project management, account management and other nontechnical roles. Apparently, there isn’t much of a promotion track for developers.

This development inexperience led to a series of rookie blunders: formatting every database field within the back-end components as “string” (only to reformat them back at the interface); disallowing punctuation in a comment field because the documentation called for “alphanumeric”; and not asking for guidance when faced with difficult coding decisions.

Root Cause #2 — Overemphasis On Process

I never thought I would say that an offshore vendor is too process-dependent. I had always listed this vendor’s quality and process focus as a strength–and it can be. But process by itself can’t assure project success, and documentation can’t substitute for domain expertise.

Like a contract manufacturing plant, the offshore model is designed to funnel any and all projects through a labyrinth of processes and internal controls so that novice employees who don’t know anything about a customer’s business can achieve acceptable results.

The problem is that you can’t factory-produce this kind of software. Developing software is more like team surgery, where competency, experience, group chemistry and knowledge of the patient go a lot further than a set of processes for how the surgery should be performed.

Root Cause #3 — Project Performance Metrics Masking Problems

Our offshore vendor uses a comprehensive project-tracking system, and its employees are reviewed and rewarded based on customer-satisfaction surveys. You would assume, therefore, that this project’s problems and our dissatisfaction were evident to the vendor’s management, right?
Wrong.

During our visit to the vendor’s development center, the offshore project manager showed us data on our project. I was astonished to find that the data indicated things were perfectly on target, and the number of hours worked during each phase was precisely in line with the vendor’s original estimate. The coding snafus and overtime hours weren’t evident, nor did we detect any inkling that the project was at risk.

Likewise, the vendor’s surveys appeared to be “managed.” For instance, after the vendor completed our Siebel implementation, one of the vendor’s employees requested that I fill out the post-project customer survey with all 5s, the highest score possible. These surveys are mandatory, but I’m still waiting for the survey to arrive for this latest offshore project. So, on a project that went relatively well, we were hounded to complete the survey, while on a project that didn’t fare well, no survey appears to be forthcoming.

o Savings: Not So Big Although wages are generally 80 percent lower in India compared with the United States, total labor cost savings are just 10 percent to 15 percent for most U.S. companies that outsource to India, according to a report from Deloitte Consulting. What chews up potential savings? Higher costs for travel, communications, equipment and managerial oversight, along with lower productivity, cultural differences and incompatible systems. And, as U.S. workers make productivity gains, the savings gap could widen further.

o Security Angle: Despite the events of 9/11, U.S. corporate IT security worries still mainly involve worms or cyber-attackers. Doing business overseas opens up a whole new set of scenarios. For example, in August two bombings in Bombay killed 44 people and wounded more than 150, many of them critically. This followed a series of blasts that have killed 66 people since December 2002. These attacks, blamed on Islamic militants, struck at the economic base of India: Bombay contributes more than 30 percent of India’s taxes and revenues. See CBS News.com.

source: www.nwc.com

My Comments(Blog owner-Abhiraj):
1. The above thought does not categorically deny the net cost savings by companies who outsource their IT part. The true cost saving depends on other factors like the total volume of the work. Piecemeal work like in this particular case possibly may not give the true savings as a threshold level of volume is required(economies of scale) to sqeeze the real cost savings in case of offhoring. So, the companies who engage larger chunk of IT services to a single firm will have greater savings than companies who do in smaller chunk. Those companies who have dedicated Offshore center either in form of captive unit or a strategic vendor partnership will have true value of offshoring the IT activities.

2. If you are engaging Tier 1 Indian companies for piecemeal work, you will never gain the real value. Smaller IT part should be outsourced to smaller companies where management will have bandwidth to give attention to your work. Top management of bigger Tier 1 companies only look at major accounts.

3. Pay higher price for better value. If you are looking for 80% cost cut after offshoring you are expecting ‘God’. If you are spending peanuts you can’t get cashewnuts. Get satisfied with even net 20% cost cut. If you have large volume of IT work, it will translate to huge operational savings and sexy bottomline.

Friends, dost, yaar, da…however we call each other, the meaning will always be the same not just literally but in true sense..direct ‘dil se’..

Wishes to you and your families for a great, fun-filled and prosperous New Year 2007!!!

Abhiraj

When you get standing ovation from the club members not once but twice and people, both known ones and unknown ones, come to you and congratulate you for your speech at the end of the meeting during snacks, who will not feel good? That was the kind of feeling I underwent yesterday. It surely has boosted my confidence.

Being decalred as the best speaker is incidental for me, what is more important, that, I have started on the journey to become a competent orator and my long term goals are certainly dependent on the skills I am trying to hone through the medium of TI club.

One takeaway is that one should prepare and rehearsh one’s talk before delivering it, it increases the confidence which further adds substance to the talk. Guess, this was for the first time I got my speech reviewed before delivering it. And it certainly worked as the evaluator had hard time finding faults in my speech.

Guys,

It has been sometime when I joined as the inception member of Covansys, Bangalore chapter of Toastmasters International.

I tried honing my public speaking skills by taking part in Table topics till now. Once I became evaluation committee member for one TI meeting. This did not require much skills.

Tomorrow, I am starting with my prepared speeches. The first one, an Icebreaker where I have talk about a topic which is “Me”. Yes, I need to speak about myself for 5-6 minutes. I just hope everything goes on well. It’s not a B-School presenantion where you can use your Presentation slides. It will be simply “me” on one side standing and the member gathering-around 30 guys sitting on the other side. Lot of senior guys are members. Some are VPs and are taking this club quite seriously.

Lets see.

Great Lakes Institute of Management, a B-school founded by Kellogg’s Bala V Balachandran, is setting up its own campus on a 14 acre land about 55 kilometres away from Chennai on the east coast road. The management school, which offers a one-year management programme, plans to invest Rs 25 crore in infrastructure over the next two years.

For detailed Economic Times article Click this link: Great Lakes

I still remember the day when I joined my first project after 4 months intensive training in TCS. Anahita, the person whom I admire and I belive, she was the one an apt for the position of Project Leader(Project manager), briefed me about the project assignment and made it a point to convey what she expected out of me on the very first day. I was on my toe as soon as I joined the project. She knew the weak points of the project. One of the weaker sections was absense of project documentation, both technical as well as functional. She knew in order to have better response time and productivity from my side as well as from her side including enhancement estimation, new development work estimation it was important for me to know the functional as well as technical knowledge of the existing application.

In the absense of any automated system which would have aided me in understanding the program conections and doing the impact analysis, I was to go through each program files and add comments/method functionalities(even comments were missing) in each of them. I was also required to prepare a flow chart of program connections. It was tedious and required a good amount of concentration in looking at the all black screen with lines of codes(programs running on Linux/AIX box). This was an ad-hoc method and worked for me during the project duration I was associated in. Though, I could teach and mentor the next batch of guys joining that project, it was not the best way to “manage” what can be put as “Knowledge”. IT industry is ever evolving and each organization knows the importance of “Knowledge Management System” or “KMS” in their organization. However, very few organizations have been able to establish a fairly “good” KMS in their organizations which is taking care of the objectives for which KMS is, at first instance, created. KMS involves Management sponsorship, good amount of time, internal marketing and processes and if the objectives are not fulfilled it becomes demoralizing.

Looking at KM systems in services sector particularly IT, we find that the “top-down” approach where the central team is dictating the KM initiative in the organization is widely used. The logical questions which arise are -

‘Is there a visible improvement in the productivity of the organization?’

‘Has the organization (employees) been able to move up the value chain?’

If you look at some of the key metrics used, ‘number of hits on the KM portal’ (that are generally low for most organizations) or even a survey among employees regarding the ‘usefulness’ of KMS, we find that the KMS has not been able to provide satisfactory answers to the above questions. The existing knowledge management systems have failed to meet the requirements of the organization. So what’s the problem? The problem is the organization is following “Top-down” approach which is incapable to address the actual needs of the customer-the internal employees which are “developers” in case of IT organizations and “Reserach analysts” in case of Financial services organizations and like wise.

The need of the hour for organizations is to follow “bottom-up” approach rather than “top-down” approach. It is important to understand the pain-points of knowledge workers first and then find the appropriate solution accordingly. CTQs(Critical to quality) are to be established listening to the major stake-holders and then work towards the appropriate KMS specific to that organization.

PS: The above thought is based on inputs and discussion with my colleagues and friends especially World Renowned KM/Productivity expert Mr. Vaibhav.