A new learning

Its been a while since my last post. Between then and now, a lot of things have happened. On the good part, I went to Europe in warm weather- though it was only Germany. All my previous trips till then were in gloomy winter.

And since I could spend a weekend, I got a chance to visit the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart - for which I got a free entrance, by virtue of my company ID card.
This was a chance to connect with history, to know about a passion for engineering excellence. This happens to be right across the Porsche Museum. Two of the many names that have brought immense fame to the city of Stuttgart.

This beauty was a restoration, once owned by the Maharaja of Kashmir

But all this was in the middle of really tough days in a particular project.
Most of this time was spent in having to prepare presentations on what went wrong, how to fix it and by when.
Just as I was about to post this, I read this tweet that someone shared.
"If its written in Python, then its probably machine learning. If it's written in Power Point, then its probably AI."

This, and the next part of the post were lessons in project management for me, and a brutal reality check.

Just as the project storm had weathered, our family took up a long pending project at home - Kitchen renovation. This was the second part of a longer program of home repairs - which started sometime in the beginning of the year.
And when I said kitchen renovation, everything up to the last tile in the 20 year old kitchen was ripped apart and replaced with something more contemporary. It was much similar to the project at work, where majority of the code was rewritten from scratch, rather than part by part refactoring.

During this period, I had to work with a lot of people - carpenters, masons, tiling specialist, painters, electrician, plumber, granite experts and so on. And this experience prompted me to write this post - the right people are essential for any project to succeed.

I was wary of the budget. But since I knew good material and good workmanship comes at a premium, I was prepared for any kind of budget over run.
But I was not prepared for the kind of schedule over run - what should have been 6 days of work, took 3 full weeks. And during this time, the family had to endure a lot of trouble without a functional kitchen at home.

The underlying problem was people, and my inability to deal with them.

Each of the people involved were good in their own area work. But the uncertainty associated with them was responsible for all the delays. So many days were lost when no work actually took place, where one person or group was waiting for the other to complete their bit.

For example, a good plumber whom I know just took off to his hometown whilst keeping his mobile phone back in the city. It was only after 4 days of waiting that I had to get a substitute fielder to do part of his job.
But then, the same good old plumber became available at the next time that I needed him - the threat of losing a bigger business did the trick.

The biggest challenge was dealing with the granite experts, who contributed to most of the delay. And since I had to pay a sizable money as advance, I could not have moved this work to someone else after that. Escalations to the owner of the company didn't help much - but threatening his 20 year reputation did.
On a positive note, I was really impressed by the quality of their work and the overall finish that their work brought to the kitchen.

An ever reliable electrician and painters did an awesome job, without having to look over their shoulder.
The tiling expert and mason also did a good job. But while one didn't know how to use the materials to the best effect, the other had to come back to fix some bugs that he had created.

But the best of the lot were the carpenters. A real professional unit, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. While the elder brother did all the marketing, design and managing finances. The younger ones did all the heavy work- creating the furniture, transportation and installation. While the quality of their work was really good, it was their cheerful outlook towards work that impressed me the most.

Their primary skill was carpentry, but when the situation demanded, they pitched in to do electrical work, tiling, masonry and everything else in order to get things done.

You may call it T-shaped skills in an agile team.

I could draw a lot of parallels with how things went on at the project at office. And in general what's common with the corporate India, and the unorganized sector is our lackadaisical Chalta Hai attitude towards work.
Between the carrot and the stick, its almost always that only the stick works.

Leadership

I've been contemplating to write on this topic for a while now.
While I was interviewing for my present job, one of the interviewers asked me, "What's leadership according to you?"
I had prepared quite well for the assessment, but somehow missed preparing for this question specifically.
Being an avid cricket follower, I replied that for me Clive Lloyd is a great example of Leadership for the way in which he turned around West Indian cricket.
In one of their tours to Australia, the West Indian lost badly, mostly due to the intimidating bowling of Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thompson.
But by the next tour a few years later, he had created a formidable bowling attack, which decimated the Australian batting lineup with the same intimidating bowling, leaving a few batsmen maimed as well.

To follow it up, their batsmen played aggressively enough to reverse intimidate the Aussie fast bowlers.

When the then English captain Tony Greg made a careless and purportedly racist comment like, "I intend to make them grovel", Clive Lloyd made the entire English team suffer brutally, with the same hostile bowling. This series was so intriguing that a movie called "Fire in Babylon" was made around it.
This picture of Brian Close says it all.

What he did, changed West Indian cricket, which meant that they dominated the world cricket scene for the next 20 years or so. 

I'm sure there have been great captains after that - Kapil Dev, Imran Khan, Steve Waugh, just to name a few.

But the one person that I wanted to talk about is Saurav Ganguly. Of course, he was "God of the Off Side". He transformed the Indian team in a way that no one else did. Undoubtedly, he had "The God of Cricket", "The Wall" and "Very Very Special" in his team, but they could not be great captains themselves.

He led them from the front and backed his team to the hilt. 

Introduced great talent like Yuvraj Singh, Mohammed Kaif, Zaheer Khan and so on.

When Harbhajan Singh was close to getting dropped, but Dada put his foot down and got the selection committee to have him in the team for the Australian "Final Frontier" tour to India. It was Harbhajan's 27 wickets in the 3 tests which was largely responsible to end the 16 test unbeaten run of the 'invincible' Aussie team.

I'm sure a lot of my batch mates will still remember risking their semester exams by watching VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid play the dream partnership at Eden Gardens, which change the whole complexion of the series.

Its legendary, the way in which Dada frustrated Steve Waugh by making him wait for the toss. 

Even more legendary is this picture from the Lord's balcony.

Back in our professional lives, everyone has some or other person they look up to as leaders. For me, a true leader is the one who backs the team, guides them when the challenges seem insurmountable. And eventually delivers in style. Yearning to be a leader is easy, but being one is not. Its easy to talk strategy from 60000 feet. But actually walking the talk, is not.

And remember, "Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm".

Why so Serious?

Recently I was scanning around my Alexa playlist for music by Ennio Morricone, the same person who created the music for "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly".  I chanced upon this magnificent track from an Italian movie "Malena", featuring an equally beautiful Monica Bellucci.

It's about the childhood crush of a young boy on a much older lady. And like most crushes, this one is about the kid's short term tribulations associated with it.

I''m sure every one of us had similar crushes in our school days, and maybe a bit later too. At that point in time, it would be the most serious thing that happened to us, but within days or weeks, all that is forgotten and life's back to normal. Much of what happened in those years was like that.

But is that the case when we grow up?

I was going back to my own posts from more than ten years back. Back then it used to be travelogues, movie reviews, photography, long drives and so on.
But my last few posts have been on not so fun topics, which makes me ask this question,
"Why so serious?"

I guess everyone goes through phases of life when different things take priority. I just wonder, how things will turn out ten years from here on.

To be honest, I didn't have anything of purpose to post lately. But then, I remembered a story that goes somewhat like this.

By Hindu mythology, it is believed that the rains are caused by Lord Shiva's beating of his special drums. And for some reason, He got angry with the people on the earth that He decided that there would be no rains for a long time.
The people, who came to know went to Goddess Parvati asking for help, who understood that something had to be done so that the people don't suffer. She told a nice story to convince the Lord that one needed to constantly practice what they do, in order that they don't forget doing it altogether.
And just to be in practice, the Lord plays his drums and in the process brings rains.

I didn't have anything much to write, which makes this a pointless post actually.
But did it just to keep in touch and not forget writing altogether. And now that you've reached this far, take some time away to "Return To Innocence"

Putting India First

I've been caught up with a lot of things lately, which didn't give me enough time post for a while now.
I was also on my annual pilgrimage vacation encompassing temple runs through coastal Karavali and Malnad regions. A 1000 kilometre drive is good for the car, and for me as well.

I must admit, the best time for photography at my grandma's house somewhere in the deep forests of  Chickmagalur district is either on a rainy day, or on a really foggy and cold winter morning.
Nevertheless, there were still enough flowers to get the photographer excited in me.

Around this time, I heard of the massacre of Indian soldiers in Kashmir. As I was contemplating what our response should be, two statements made by the same person came into my mind.
"Victory attained by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary".
"If there is violence in our hearts, then it's better to be violent, than to cover impotence in the cloak of non violence."

I could see a lot of Facebook posts, Whatsapp posts around this for the past week or so.
I am sure that the powers that may be are planning a befitting reply to all this.

I would certainly like to see an Operation Wrath of God kind of onslaught against the perpetrators of this attack. This was how the Israeli intelligence, under the leadership of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, responded to the 1972 killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.
They did kill, but in ways which created an eternal fear in their enemy.

As a country, we are far more diverse than any other country in the world - language, food, ethnicity, religion, traditions and so on. The British used all this, and the caste system to further divide us. And they also ensured that regions friendly to them benefited at the cost of others around them.

And over the last 70 years or so, the politicians have also exploited this to suit their need, or greed.

From my childhood days, I can think of Cauvery water and Belgaum disputes as two strong examples of this in Karnataka itself. They were created by the British, and nurtured by our politicians - I feel that they have manipulated the emotions in such a way that we spew hatred and venom on our own countrymen, while a practical and amicable solution is always a possibility.

Its always easy to put the blame on our politicians, but is there something that we could do on a day to day basis, at work? 

I am talking primarily from an IT professional's perspective, but could be applicable for anyone else as well. Whenever we work with a new client, or new partner - there is immense amount of skepticism, pessimism on whether the teams from India can deliver. Right from day one, its a matter of playing catch up.

And when we investigate deeper, on why its like this, the answer is clear. Almost everyone who has worked in the past, has had a poor experience working with India. 

Poor quality, lack of skills, commitment, communication, etc could be root cause - at any level, from a developer to the CEO. In one of our team dinner discussions, we guesstimated that at most 40% of the projects we take up across Indian IT is actually successful - and we were being quite generous.

I can recollect being part of a test fest at Bled, Slovenia for one our products in the late part of 2007. Though we represented a highly respected multinational company, we were always identified as Indians, and never as professionals from our company, and almost always in a condescending manner.

Every time we do a bad job at our work, the damage caused is beyond the team, the unit, the department or the company. Knowingly or unknowingly we sully our own country's name.

The real soldiers may be securing our borders, but we have to do our bit as well.

Time!

I'd like to wish readers of my blog posts a very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2019. Maybe a lot of you have made a lot of new year's resolutions, good luck with that.
I'm not much of a fan of new year resolutions. I try to bring in new changes on a weekly basis.
Agile vs waterfall if you may call it.

There's one thing I've been trying to change almost every Monday now, but struggling with it. I want to stop making the three hundred metre dash from home to the stop where my office cab picks me up. I somehow end up being late, by a minute or two - forcing me to run, thrice a week almost regularly.
There have been times when my colleague in the cab has made it amply clear that I need to be more on time. Though not the best way to start the day, I'm still OK with it.

One, I need to respect her punctuality - 6:11 AM, nine days out of ten.

And two, these two minutes help me earn close to two hours of more productive time at work.
Baffled? Let me explain.
If I reach by office cab, I am at my desk 7:20 in worst case. A quick email check, equally quick breakfast and I'm good to start my day's work by 8:00. And since my first planned meeting is not before 9:30, I get uninterrupted time alone to accomplish a lot that I've planned for the day.

On the other hand, the two days a week that I take my car, I tend to be a bit slower off the blocks. Which means that I reach office by only around 8:00 and then rush off for breakfast immediately. Which means that I can start work by 8:45 at the earliest.

Since time is the most important non renewable resource we have, I thought why not spend some time writing about it.
Maybe share some tips that I picked up over the years.

One needs to be very efficient with time, be it at work or elsewhere. Planning, discipline and prioritization are really important for this.

A known technique for better time management is the Pomodoro technique - I've personally used my adaption of this for the best part of fifteen years now.
First up in the morning, create a to-do list for the day. Keep a target end time at which you plan to end your work. Remove the non productive time - meetings, org activities, lunch, breaks, etc.
Now, breakup the total available time into equal parts, called as a Pomodoro. You may start with 25 minutes each, while I prefer 40 minutes for myself.
During this time pickup one item after the other from your to-do list, focus on it completely - no mails, no mobile phones, no self initiated talks with colleagues and so on. Working in silence, be it at office, or in the kitchen is a sign of control.
If you need to let your colleagues know that you shouldn't be disturbed during this time, you may even consider getting flags from Barbecue Nation.
If your work involves sending a lot of emails, then you may consider having a dedicated Pomodoro for that as well.
After each Pomodoro keep a 5 minutes break - where you may respond quickly to emails. 

And after four successive Pomodoros, take a longer break, say 15 minutes. Likewise, plan for a longer 30-45 minute break coinciding with your lunch break.

Please note two things here.
One, Pomodoro translates to a Tomato, which means that you are bound to get a few rotten ones - unplanned meetings, short but needed discussions and so on. So don't plan for all of the available time in the day. After a few trial and errors, you'll be a better judge of how many good tomatoes you can do in a day.
Two, if you are a developer or into testing, you may say that planning may not be straightforward. You may not have a well defined to-do list, a lot of what you do may be R & D, you didn't get the build in time and so on. Nevertheless, it's still important that you plan your work adequately well and in a very structured manner. You'll get it right with experience, and it's important that you get the first button on the shirt right.
Try practicing a similar technique for a month or two, and check if you are able to manage time better and if your overall productivity is higher.

While this was about how to manage time better, the next part is about how to avoid time killers.

A few weeks back when I was reviewing the sprint outcome of one of my teams, I found that the team had spent a whopping 25% of the total available time(at 8 hours a day) on meetings. What was even more disturbing was that most of these meetings were unstructured(without an agenda) or without preparation, or both. 

When you initiate a meeting, its good to have an agenda, and then discuss only those points which are there on the agenda. When invited for one, please request the organizer for an agenda.

A word of caution here, since most of us are operating in a hierarchical Indian environment, use some discretion with this. 

I can recollect an instance a few months back with a senior manager in our department, where I sent out the meeting invitation with an agenda. The response was "Oh, you are very being professional, meetings with an agenda!". Nevertheless, since we stuck to the agenda, the meeting that was planned for 30 minutes, got over in 9 minutes flat!

Two days back, one of the leads in our team said that people take tea breaks of the duration of a lunch break. This is a particularly irritating habit, I'm sure across all teams, in almost all companies across India. While breaks may be necessary, the duration and frequency is what needs to be in control. Self restraint, discipline and knowing one's priorities is very important here. 

And since we are talking about time here, a lot of it is applicable to our daily lives outside of work as well. In our school days, I'm sure we were taught that recreation is necessary.

In today's day and age, if one is spending more than 45 minutes a day on recreation of whatever kind - TV, internet, social media, reading novels, playing games on the mobile - they are doing a big disservice to themselves and just wasting time.

I remember that my father was very strict with time. In the summer vacations he was OK with me playing cricket in the hot sun, but never approved of me reading Hardy Boys at home. I didn't understand why when I was a kid, but now I do.

The body also needs adequate rest in the form of sleep, but we need to know to draw the line between taking rest and being lazy. 

Hours of wasted time add up to days in a few months, days to months and months to years. One can earn lost money, but never lost time.

On a more philosophical note, one needs to challenge time all the time. No matter how hard we try, Time always Wins!

Just wanted to end this post with a very profound song on Time by Pink Floyd. Its so good that I was compelled to copy paste the lyrics. If you understand this, you know what time is all about.

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain.

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again.

The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time.

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way

The time is gone, the song is over,

Thought I'd something more to say.

Home

Home again

I like to be here

When I can

When I come home

Cold and tired

It's good to warm my bones

Beside the fire

Far away

Across the field

Tolling on the iron bell

Calls the faithful to their knees

To hear the softly spoken magic spell"