Supporting customers in Odd hours

Giving a title to this subject was indeed a tough job because I was doing more of a reflective thinking. One of my colleague told me that, customer wake him up every day for one pre-text or other every alternative day. I told him that, i keep my phone either in silent mode or downstairs while I am sleeping. All of them were shocked. Initially they thought i do it because i do not have US customers to support. I told them, this is the fundamental principle I operate upon.

The guidelines are simple.

1. If your team is working while you are sleeping, they are expected to manage the situation. This is typically a communication we give to the team and typically we ensure that we use follow the sun model to handle all high severity issues.
   
2. If we are doing a grave yard shift, still the team is expected to handle along with shift in charge. Do not expect complete collapse everyday.
3. Anything other than above two dimensions, can wait till I wake up. The reason is that, to bring in experts and key people to have a look at the issue, would require my day time and i can do very little during my night time.

These guidelines are not applicable if we are doing a major go live and we are on hyper care support because the project is not in steady state both in terms of resource tuning and support process streamlining. Other than this, I strictly believe in the above approach.

There was a time i used to be awake by 4 AM in the morning and go through all the emails and analyze the critical issues. But still i had to wait till team is available (India business hours) to make the next steps. I could have done the same thing starting 8 AM in the morning. This is the retrospective thought.

We think that, we are the key to the success of operations, my suggestion is just change the way we and set appropriate expectations. With every change, there will be a transition period, but at the end of it, we get our life back...

Promising on Delivery Vs Delivering on Promise

About 7 years back, one of the customers gave a T Shirt with the text in the front Delivering on Promise. Since we had only one T shirt, we put it in a photo frame and displayed it (my boss's idea...) in our work area. I kept on looking at that T shirt wondering how interchanging words delivery and promise can make signficant difference in the meaning. In reality it is a continuim - You promise on delivery and deliver on promised delivery. However more often, Indian way of workings stops at Promising on Delivery (this not a broad generalization, but my experiences over the past 8 years). The cultural difference between Western way of working against Indian way of working can be summarized with these interchanging of words.

When I returned to India 8 years back, after working for close to 6 years outside India, promising on delivery was my biggest challenge. Whenever we discussed on delivery dates on deliverables, team used to promise specific dates. Once the discussion is over, many a times, i used check on the delivery date whether work is completed or not. More often than not, i was in for a surprise , on the promised delivery date, delivery does not happen.

When I used to check with the team, typically i used to get three responses

1. Almost complete and will give in next couple of hours - interprete - i started working and the deliverable is close to 50% completion and will finish other part in next couple of hours or so. The good news here is that, there is no unexpected surprises from technical stand point
2. I will give tomorrow - interprete - Oh my god.. i forgot about this, i will work on this today and tomorrow and hopefully it will complete tomorrow subject to not finding any additional technical interruptions - You as a manager in a bad shape here for sure
3. Since you did not come back to me, i thought it is not important and hence did not work on this issue - interprete - You as a manager expected to do follow up to show the importance, you did not do your job and hence i did not do mine. At least i consider this as honest answer because you are certain that, nothing has been done.

A few such hiccups later, slowly adjusted to Indian way of working, and put together a process around follow up for Promising on delivery. More than follow up i started looking deeper into the deliverables to see whether there is any technical or process constraint that may come up in terms of delivery. Over a period of time, i built my own rules on follow up.

1. Follow ups are not done on weekly meetings, but daily routine checks with the team members to see how things are progressing. I realized the importance in this model, because meetings are only to discuss risks and issues and not for follow ups
2. Be sensitive to different styles of working. You will find a few team members do not like follow ups because they deliver on promise. Need to identify them and have a slightly different approach. Otherwise, they feel you are micro managing and it will have further negative impact.
3. Never pull up the team members in public or in meetings on failed deliveries. No one is happy for missing a deadline or delivery date. How you handle the situation would pave the way for future. From that perspective, i usually the support the team member to get back on track and work together with them.

Using this follow up approach as well as mentoring and coaching, over a period of time, the team moves from Promising on delivery to Promising on delivery and delivering on promised delivery. You as a manager need to see this transition and adapt slowly to a new way of working. In fact, suddenly you may find a lot of time in your hands and you need to find ways to fill them up. This is a welcome change and I am always happy when the team moves to a autopilot delivery mode.

How did i fare in a challenging situation

I am playing the role of project manager for close to 8 years and have definitely faced a lot of challenging situations in my career. Somewhere down the line i got into the feeling that i have figured it out all and am able to handle any situation. Surprisingly, i found myself in a strange situation and was very close to having a break down two months back.

As a manager and leader, i was managing a project. This project had a strange clause of warranty support for six months. In other words, if there is any issue is there in their production environment because of either standard product issue or enhancements we developed, we were required to support and resolve the issue.

When we started on the warranty support, we had a fairy tale relationship. We (two members from customer and myself) used call ourselves as three Musketeers . It continued that way for a while till real problems started hitting in production environment (there are multiple reasons and am not getting into details).

The fairy tale started becoming complex, because in addition to this, they were also bringing in gaps in implementation (not found during testing) and expecting us to cover them as well. Here i was handling all these combination of issues and fighting with customer almost everyday to say NO to the issues or correct the solution accordingly. Saying YES and correcting the solution was easy to handle, but saying NO started creating stress internally. We need to be tactful, polite and logical while saying NO. This combination started taking a lot of energy from me internally.

I probably never said so many times NO to a customer in such short duration. Please remember the problem for customer is real . We are saying NO from the perspective of my organization scope. There were times they were questioning professional ethics and organization delivery quality. Also at times, the calls were very aggressive to the extent of being irrational.

So here i go, identified the root cause of my near nervous break down. Unfortunately this did not absolve my accountability and commitments to the organization. I still have to find a way out to control the situation instead of situation controlling me. As the time for the warranty period closure reached i started approaching the issues using the following guidelines and framework.

1. Stop saying NO, but take your time and do the analysis and provide appropriate answer (it could be NO in the end).
   
2. Start realizing that there is an end to every problem and just stay together till the problem dies its natural death.
3. Start looking around you and see that every one has one problem or other and just accept them and deal the best way you can
4. Do not take anything personal, if we cannot fix it, state the same and if we can do it, just do it (the nike way)
   

Besides these four principles, i got great support from friends and family in this period and that allowed me to pull through this tough period. I realized their value at times of crisis. During Christmas holidays, i just left my laptop at home and took off on my vehicle to South India tour. Somehow i landed up visiting so many temples in those four days, i could never imagine. Believe me it was not planned that way, but it really helped to get over some parts of my stress. Then my brother came over to visit me, and this also helped a lot.

One lesson i learned in the process never believe that you faced every possible scenario. There is something new waiting in the corner and how you survive that one, determines your success. In the above case, i still do not know how well i fared part, but i can say this much... I survived...

If not, images like the one on this article.. will ensure that..we survive....

Expectations and Reality

I remember beginning this article at least a week back and promising myself that, i shall finish it that day... that was expectation and here i am still trying to complete is reality. This gives a glimpse towards the gap between expectation (s) and reality. Many a times, we often find ourselves in a situation like this, though we do not admit immediately. Let me walk through you a few examples in my career to highlight this gap more often...

How often you walked into performance appraisal discussion in your compay on the assumption that you have done really great and you be rated as star performer. During the discussions you get the reality that your are an average performer. Then you start breaking your head on what did you do wrong. The fact is that, you have done nothing wrong, but there are others who have done things differently and better than you.

This is probably the same race you have been through from school days. I remember one of my friend stating that, till 10th she was very best and she did even get a rank at state level, then when she joined +12 in a large city where 90% + is common, she became a commoner. This happens more often with large corporations where only the best get an entry into the organization and when the very best are compared.. you know the story.

Let me give another perspective, in a recent conversation with a customer (we almost finished implementing the solution), the customer was mentioning that, during initial discussions with the implementation partner, the partner mentioned that everything is possible. I was mentioning to them that if a there is a generic question, most likely i would have given the same answer. Only when we start understanding real expectations of the customer during implementation phase, reality strikes in. Again a gap between expectation and reality. In this situation, both the parties have to work a way towards solution and probably evaluation process should be more aligned to reality than high level queries.

In another case, we demonstrated a template to customer stating that, template covers best practices and processes. The customer expectation was that, the template is up to date with latest releases and processes. The reality is, it covers only important processes, and not all the new processes. Here again, now we start managing the gap in a painful way.

In one of the outsourcing engagements i was engaged in (2003), the expectation from the customer was that we bring in the right set of people and in three months transition of the knowledge happens and then a simple switch on and off (from resource perspective). The reality was, it took more than 6 months to stabilize and in one of the process areas it took close 12 months. Half of my time was spent on managing this gap than actual any productive work.

Long back in one of the SAP implementations, there was an expectation that the employee cost data to be moved to projects to do actual tracking. While during the proposal phase this looked simple, there will be data at employee level and this can be moved as standard feature. At the time of implementation, we realized the expectation was to do actual cost to the penny level. The customer is not implementing payroll, however we promised during the proposal, and for the rest of the project we were building semi payroll module to get to the actual cost as much as possible.

In all the above incidents, common thread is that the stakeholders are not aligned or they talk two different (business) languages. Unless both the parties work towards bridging this gap early in the cycle, this gap between expectation and reality will not go away. Many a times, this may become a show stopper along the way.

In many ways, expectations are like assumptions, the other party does not even have the opportunity to validate. It is like a perception in people mind that comes out only when reality strikes in. One or probably the only way we can minimize this gap is by being transparent and straight in our interactions with people.

On parting note, many occasions we are left to manage with the expectations set by others. If we are transparent and handle issues directly with honesty and integrity, we might be able to succeed more often than you can imagine.

Leading from the Front - Communication

We as managers are expected to lead our teams, customer relationships and other key stakeholders from the front. In fact, we are measured directly and indirectly against this ability by the organization.

A key factor that plays a role in our ability to lead from the front is communication. Communication has three dimensions - Message, Messenger and Medium. Medium (e.g. face to face; email; newsletter, posters etc.) is relevant to only to some extent. More critical are the message and the messenger.

I do still remember days when people used to wait for the postman (messenger who gives us important messages). He was so important figure in people's lives. Of course now the postman is replaced by many other technology gadgets (alternatives). The messenger role is critical (we can compare ourselves as postman/carrriers of organization messages) and leading from the front is important to ensure that effectiveness of the message remains.

Have you ever noticed that some of the most important messages are lost because the messenger is someone who lacked credibility. One of my ex-seniors always talked about punctuality and time management to me. He always came late and made people wait for hours to meet him. Here, no one will disagree the message he wanted to communicate is a good one, however the messenger was unfit to communicate this message because he did not lead from the front on punctuality and time management

The other day I was listening to an audio clip on Modern India by Amitabh Bachchan on the 60th anniversary of independence, 2007. The message is very powerful and talks about two distinct halves of India - one India that leads and the other India that wants to be lead. This message gains more significance because of the messenger. The messenger was a carefully chosen one - one who connects with both the halves of India and recognized by both of them. This highlights the significance of both the messenger and the message.

We often go to a restaurant based on the review by one of our friends who had visited the restaurant. More often than not, we seek opinion from certain set of friends than others about restaurants. The message of good restaurants from a few friends has more value because of their ability to make credible judgements.

We listen to Mr. Narayan Murthy’s ideas on organizational practices and values. These practices and values exist in the philosophy of every management and business text book and probably practiced in a few other organizations as well. However Mr. Narayan Murthy’s words carry more value because of his earned credibility on organization values.

In all these examples, we see that the great message alone is not sufficient. The messenger plays a significant role with their credibility. Unfortunately credibility is not endowed by a role or a position you hold in your organization, but earned through sustained performance. One person who made a turnaround as a Messenger in recent Indian political history is Lalu Prasad Yadav. Many of us would not have listened to a message from him when he was the Chief Minister of Bihar. He made a turnaround as Railway Minister through sustained performance. Later on he was invited to premier institutes of India as a messenger for Indian Railways turnaround. This could happen only because he earned credibility as a messenger. We as Managers may believe that our positions are good enough for us to be messengers. Unfortunately it is not true. This has to be earned through sustained performance and actions. Once we earn credibility, our communications are heard and acted upon by people (employees; customers and stakeholders) who matter. Here, history does not help. We should never walk in with our history when we meet a new set of people. I have seen senior people committing this mistake and paying heavily. We need to prove yourself and rebuild our credibility every time we are in a new situation. Our experiences will help us on methods to get there, but for this new situation we need to earn our credibility.

An article I read on this topic says that.. if the message is good and have all facts correctly articulated.... attack the messenger. More often messengers are more vulnerable... than the message. Beware of this!

Why "why"........

When was the last time you were faced with a question starting with 'Why'. A typical question we hear more often is "Why did you do this?" The moment we hear this question, we start by justifying. Earlier, I often fell into the trap of justifying unknowingly (Now, I fall into the trap knowingly). Sometimes I try to get away from this 'why' trap by admitting that I had made a mistake. But the tirade of 'why' continues with another question starting with 'Why' - "Why did you make a mistake?" You as an individual can do nothing because if you manage to miss one 'why' question, another is hurled at you. At some point we have no choice but to turn on our defense mechanism and start justifying. This gives a good opportunity to the person who hurled the 'why' at us to prove us wrong and bury us deep in the ground.

I googled for snappy quotes on 'why' and some of the first hits asked "Why nerds are not popular?", "Why software needs a platform?" I did not make an attempt to read the contents of these pages. Most likely these pages would contain multitude of reasons justifying the 'why' hypothesis in these questions. Abandoning the search for quotes, I searched my personal experiences with this word to explain it.

One of my earlier experiences with this question 'why' was during my Ph.D. Thesis Defence. The very fact that I had to defend my thesis allows or authorizes people to ask 'why' questions on my doctoral research. Some of the frustrating 'why' questions I faced were "Why is the sample size for the survey so small? Why have you not considered expanding the research into further areas? etc. etc" Obviously, if I had answers for the above 'whys' most likely I would have faced a different set of "why's". During that time, I was not aware of the 'why' trap. But when I look back, I realize that I fell into this 'why' trap unknowingly and the people asking questions had a really good time questioning. At those times, I was wondering why people ask questions around assumptions or constraints. I built a theory around assumptions during that time. The theory is "assumptions are the most fragile items (or without any support) and it is extremely easy to attack them." Even today this theory holds good. One of the first things I do while reviewing the work of my team is to go through the assumptions and validate the same. Returning to the fate of my doctoral research, I faced the barrage of 'whys' and defended my thesis successfully .

Another experience of mine with the 'why' word happened in the recent past (2 years ago) with one of my previous managers. He wanted me to do a dry run (practice session) on a training session which I was planning to conduct. Personally, though I found it irritating (I did this program numerous times earlier), I decided to give it a go. We went through the dry run and completed the same. Then he got into a rhetoric on why we had to do this dry run and so on. This sounded more like a confession which I never asked for in the first place.
In my experience, more often these 'why' questions are a product of various socio-cultural aspects which I will explore in a different article. The 'why' question, to me, is like a post mortem exercise and is reactive in nature. Very often managers can easily nail a person with a 'why' when they know that something has gone wrong. There is a good chance that the manager has got to know about it either directly from the employee or through client escalations. In all the situations, the justifications and explanations for each 'why' were plenty and you probably can write a book for each 'why'. In all the cases the value addition to the organization or individual is close to zero.

Another incident happened when I was working in my previous company. My team was responsible for maintaining the HR content in Intranet. The Holiday calendar for the company was one of the critical parts of HR policies. This document kept on changing because the organization was adding more and more state holidays into the holiday calendar because of rapid expansions. We kept an audit process in which each function should audit their intranet pages once a month as per the process. As usual, preventive measures were difficult to adhere to and none focused really on audit process. Eventually with so many changes, version management, one particular holiday was incorrectly stated in the intranet. Employees from the state that observed that particular holiday noticed it state and it became an issue. Finally the company had to include that holiday too in the holiday calendar. As the head of the systems team, I was at logger heads with the HR team and we went through the major 'why' process. As usual, each one of us, started justifying our position in this 'why' post mortem. Post that event, again we published the process, but in 3 months time the process was forgotten. Thankfully we moved the intranet management to a proper content management technology and hence the issue was resolved once for all. You can see, how 'why' triggers a reactionary justification process internally.

CMMI level 4 glorifies the 'why' thing by adding Root Cause Analysis as one of the requirements. Root Cause Analysis typically uses "why" question to understand what went wrong. I still support this because the intend is to use it constructively, but it can backfire if every piece of your work goes through Root Cause Analysis.

'Why' could be the reason for many scientific discoveries or accidental inventions. One of the greatest scientific discoveries, Newton's laws of gravity was an outcome of a 'why' and the accidental invention of Pencilin too was product of 'why'. But when it comes to human relationships and people management 'why' definitely triggers a reactionary defence mechanism leading to justification of the actions we have taken. This is not a desirable outcome because, the end result could be either the other person stops sharing with you any information or ends up disliking you as a person.

Following is the approach I used in my personal behaviour correction in the last three years.

1. Remove the word 'why' from my dictionary. As much as possible, I try to substitute 'why' with 'what'. I get reasonably desirable results. For example instead of asking a question 'why did this happen', I would ask 'what are the reasons for this event'. With mere rephrasing I get pretty solution oriented responses than when I start with 'why'. Also I have seen people approaching me more nowadays compared to during my 'why' phase.


2. Second correction I made is to engage in "in process checks" instead of reacton oriented analysis. This way I do not get surprises and am on top of the things.

Of the two corrections, the first one made significant difference, because even earlier I was engaging myself in "in process checks". Post the removal of the 'why' from my professional dictionary, I could see a major difference in my people engagement skills.

Removing 'why' from the dictionary is hard initially, but we need to make a conscious effort to get there. Marshall Goldsmith, author of 'What Got you Here Won't get you There', suggests a game to remove bad and annoying habits. As a game, whenever you start a question with 'why' put a 100 rupee note in a kitty (for team party!!!). For sure.. when your pocket starts draining fast, you will stop using 'why'.

Meetings - The Trap!!!!

We all love meetings!!! Meetings allow us to fill time in our calendars and we can spend some entire days just attending meetings. As the Amerrican economist John Kenneth Glbraith once said "MEETINGS are indispensable when you don't want to do anything". More close to our Indian context, Iremember watching a Jaspal Bhatti (comedian) TV serial episode (those were the days we just had two channels Door Darshan 1 and Door Darshan 2) in which the people working in a Government department have a meeting to decide on the agenda for the meeting with the department head (it had interesting decision items, like whether to order Samosa or Kachori etc.).
Dont think that this is restricted to Government organizations. I was part of one of the IT organizations in which we spent a good amount of time planning the customer visits and their agenda items (this includes planning lunches and dinners as well). This was an entirely a new experience for me and I enjoyed it for a while. Peter Drucker says "MEETINGS are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer MEETINGS the better". I started realising this slowly as I learnt that attending meetings was not adding any value to my knowledge and skills. I started organizing myself carefully and started working on prioritising the meetings.
There are two real reasons for attending the meetings. Visibility and Impact to your team or organization. Even if we are attending the high visibility meeting, the impact we create is what makes the difference. If we are not able to make an impact, high visibility would automatically reduce to low visibility and low impact. On one side. it is important to categorize the meetings, but on the other, it is equally important to ensure that we get the intended results.
Like for all other items, here is my block on meetings. In case of meetings, I would like to use the combination of Visibility and Impact.

High Visibility and High Impact: This is a no brainer. We must attend meetings in this category and ensure that we make a difference. During the earlier part of my career, I used to be part of many meetings falling into this cateogory and I attended them all without a defined objective in adavance. Now I walk into such meetings with clear objectives and take aways. In my definition, high visibility meetings are meetings with people one level or above than yours either in your organization or across functions. Some of the examples of high visibility meetings are making presentations to senior leadership, attending workshops with a senior group, or even presenting a paper in a conference. These opporunties do not happen frequently and deriving the maximum benefit from such meetings benefits you and your team or function.
High Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of these meetings are all- hands-meetings of the function, or generic meetings called by senior people or presentations made by senior people. These events may not have significant impact to your function or team, however these are opportunities to get noticed during early stages of your tenure in the organization. As Manager these are opportunities to groom your second line.
Low Visibiity and High Impact: An example of these meetings are technical discussions about a process which affects your team or function. This will have a signficant impact to the functioning of your team but having said that your time can be better invested. Identify the right person to attend the meeting from your team and coach the person to ensure that department objectives are not compromised. One of the best practices is to attend such meetings for the first time along with your team member and set the expectations right. Then onwards let your team member take the ownership. This again is a wonderful grooming opportunity and should be leveraged to the optimum.
Low Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of such meetings are town hall meetings organized by the company, or generic meetings organized by other functions. These meetings are good for socializing and networking, but in terms of visibility and impact the returns are minimum. Attend these meetings only if you want to enjoy...

There is one exception, attend all meetings organized by your boss or delegated to you by your boss.