Types of project managers

The field of project management is very vast. It is applicable to building tunnels, dams, temples, forts to nuclear submarines, power plants, petrochemical complexes to clinical drug trials, molecular research, nanotechnology research, semiconductors etc. Even within the realm of software there can be various types of project managers according to the domain and the organization. Role of a project manager in the IT department of a end user organization (like a bank or a retail chain) is different from a project manager in a IT services company which is different from a IT product development company and is different from that in a BPO/Transition services company. In the subsequent blogs, I will try to put in my thoughts and ideas on this subject.

Innovation at ground level

Continuing on the theme of innovation in the field of software services, we need to understand that the “service” part of the software service industry is the one which would differentiate one organization from another. A software service company can choose to provide a wide variety of services in all possible domain or remain a niche player in one field only. However, the innovative firm will choose to provide its services differently. Innovation in software services has mostly  been on processes and deal oriented. These are structured at a very high level. They dictate how the workers would go about doing their work and how the finances would be structured. IMHO, the junior employee manning the keyboard does not have much say in that. But now there is need to bring innovative solutions to touch each customer/client. This will come only if the lowest level employees, who interact with clients on day-to-day basis are empowered to take decisions, big or small. What is required is to create an unique customer experience which will stay in the mind of the customer, long after the service is done

Software products from India

Some people are of the opinion that we do not have any good, world-class, commonly used software product (like MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Autocad) created out of India. I agree to this completely. But then apart from the US, which other country can boast of many commonly used software products? I think only a handful. And that is because, most of the products are standards driven and all standards come out from the US. The US universities do a lot of technical research and create standards. This means that they are the ones who dictate how some new technology is going to work. India has a lot of engineers. But they are not researchers. They do not create new standards. Rather, they study the standards and create software as per the standards. Manpower is our strength. Unless we develop good research facilities which come up with new technologies and standards, it is very difficult to get into the product space.

Yet, some of the Indian companies have developed application oriented products. Case in point I-Flex which has FlexCube product for the banks. Infosys has Finnacle and Polaris has the Intellect product. There are some products in the ERP and CRM domains also. But these are not commonly used products. These are used only by a select few customers. So the product potential of Indian companies is not widely known yet.

But why this question is asked only relative to the software sector in India? Which other consumer product was invented in India? Was an automobile invented in India? Was a washing machine invented in India or a microwave oven for that matter? No. Today we are capable to manufacture consumer products but none to my knowledge has been invented in India. And most of these inventions came from the US again. This is because they had pumped in money and effort into such research long back and started working on them. Indians have never been big inventors. But we have been very resourceful! So, we pioneered the usage of washing machine for making lassi (example of Indian “Jugaad”).

Innovation in Software Services

There is a lot of noise everywhere on innovation. Even I have jumped into the bandwagon and have been trying my bit to innovate. Most people would agree that if one needs to remain competitive, one needs to innovate. As a person, one needs to do things innovatively, as a team one needs to find ways to work innovatively or design innovative solutions and products and as an organization, it has to have innovative processes. The USA has been the masters or innovation. Tons of patents are filed by the US companies every year. Among Asian countries, China and South Korea have also taken to being innovative and are increasingly filing patents. But in contrast, Indian companies seem to lack a bit in this area. We do not file as many patents every year. This may be going up, but we still fall far behind in this. However, I was pretty surprised to know that Infosys had filed some 60 odd patents till 2007. Tried to do some research on the net but could not gather much information on that. There was some mention of a mobile banking solution which was patented and some patents jointly with their customers. But I guess most of the work would be on process innovation. And with the way Infosys has been growing for the past 3 years in terms of man power, they should patent their hiring process!

But I think, Indian companies are making up for innovation by being resourceful. The Indian concept of “Jugaad”. This comes up while replicating processes and defining new processes. Though you may accuse me of generalizing things, the Indian mind always tries to do the work in the shortest possible way. Hence you can count on us in finding new short-cuts for everything. Everything can be done in this way. But what needs to be seen is how far this resourcefulness can propel the Indian companies in the global arena.