Good Bye...Good Wishes

This post is the last post for the time being. It may be the last post ever. I do not know. I may even start to post in this series again. I would like to thank you for visiting this page and wish you all the best, always and ever !

Project Managers with BPO service provider

I have really no idea of what exactly a PM in a BPO or KPO would be doing. Whatever I write here is pure speculation and some intelligent guess work. I think, a PM with a BPO would be a team manager who has margin, delivery as well as people responsibilities. The technical aspect would be quite less. The focus would be on processes. Thus, in a scale of 1 to 10 in the following parameters: Technical Knowledge, Process orientation, Team management, Cost management and Project management, the typical PM in a BPO would have the following ratings:

Technical Knowledge:    3

Process Orientation:    8

Team management:        8

Cost management:        8

Project management:     8

This concludes the series of the posts on different types of Project Managers.

Project Managers with IT product development

The PMs with product development companies would have mostly similar skill sets as the ones in IT service providers. But I think there are some slight differences. The differences would be in the fact that though the IT product development PMs work as per a budget, they are not margin driven. So, though they would be bothered about the cost of the project, they would not be fanatical about the margin. Infact, they would not care so much for the financial metrics of a margin. They would however be fanatical about the quality of work and deadlines as with PMs in other organizations. The difference would also come from the type of the organization for which the product development is happening. For example, in companies like Microsoft, I guess, the products are very huge and it calls for high specializations among the roles. Here the project managers are mostly called Program manager (specific to Microsoft) and their role is mostly coordination and facilitation. However, in smaller product development startup, the project manager may be required to do technical review and face the customers as well.

Thus, in a scale of 1 to 10 in the following parameters: Technical Knowledge, Process orientation, Team management, Cost management and Project management, the typical PM in an IT product set-up would have the following ratings:

Technical Knowledge: 7

Process Orientation: 7

Team management: 8 

Cost management: 6 

Project management: 8

Project Managers with IT service provider - Part II

People related responsibilities include building and nurturing the team, looking into individual career and growth issues and knowledge building and retention. This is one aspect which is absent for a project manager in an end user organization where s/he may be working purely as a vendor manager. Working with a fairly large team reporting into you also calls for a person who has good people skills and knows internal team dynamics.

Delivery related responsibilities include planning and executing the project such that execution happens seamlessly the delivery is smooth. May be some other time I will post a bog on this alone.

Margin related responsibilities include containing the cost of the project for which the project manager should be aware of the cost being incurred and be vigilant enough to identify and bill change requests for any out of scope work that is to be done. This is very critical in fixed bid projects. IT service provider companies are very finicky about costs and idle time. Idle time is watched for like a hawk and no one wants a non-billable resource in their team.

The PM also has to interact with the various other departments in his company like the staffing or sourcing or HR team as it may be called, so as to get resources for his project when required. The PM has to interact with finance team to raise invoice for the work delivered and has to track the payment of the same. These responsibilities may not be there in all companies and may sometimes be shared with the supervisor of the project manager (called the delivery manager).

So, the PM has to be a facilitator and motivator, and a very good leader so that s/he can lead the team members with clarity. 

Thus, in a scale of 1 to 10 in the following parameters: Technical Knowledge, Process orientation, Team management, Cost management and Project management, the typical PM in an IT service set-up would have the following ratings:

Technical Knowledge:    5

Process Orientation:    8

Team management:        8

Cost management:        8

Project management:     8

Project Managers with IT service provider

The project managers with IT service providers are again a different lot. They mostly are home grown in the company, coming up the ranks of the programmers, team leads, project leads and then become the project manager. They typically lead the project teams and are responsible and accountable for the delivery of the project. Apart from this, they may or may not be responsible for the technical architecture (some companies are very strict on this that the project manager has to be technically competent) and for the requirements part. So we see a lot of overlap between a tech architect and a Business analyst role with that of a Pm for a smaller project. For larger projects, the roles may be distinctly different. My personal opinion is that for a project manager in an IT services company, technology is not as important as the process. Therefore, the must-have skill for a PM here would be very good process knowledge and drive for processes and getting things done in general.

Apart from the process and technical side of the delivery, the most of project managers with IT service providers have two other basic responsibilities:

a)                People related

b)                Delivery related

c)                Margin related

Project Manager in an end user organization

Organizations like Citibank, GE Money etc which have IT as a support and enabling function typically have an IT department which employs project managers to execute projects. Most of these organizations follow 2 different models to their IT development approach with some variations to it. The first model is to have in-house development teams lead by project managers. The second approach is to outsource the technical stuff to a vendor which is managed by the project manager. Many organizations also follow a hybrid approach where in they have an in-house IT development shop and also do some out-sourcing.

In most end user organization, the IT project manager is the person responsible mostly for delivery of the project. There is usually a business project manager who controls the purse strings, since all projects are typically initiated by the business and the business funds the project. Typically, once the requirements are finalized by the business, the PM is asked for an effort estimate and schedule. The PM coordinates with the development teams (if in house development exists) or with outsourcing vendors for the effort estimate. When this comes out, the cost for the project is calculated and the budget is decided and approved. Then depending on the IT development model followed by the organization, either the work is done in-house or outsourced.

For an in house development model, mostly the development team reports to the PM for project related issues. The PM acts as the facilitator and motivator for the team, helping the team achieve the project goals within the desired budget. But for an outsourced model, the PM acts as a vendor manager and is mostly required to facilitate the outsourcing company complete the project. But in the second model, most of the delivery risk is assumed by the outsourcing company and the IT PM usually chases up and beats the vendor to complete the work!

In either cases, IT PMs in end user organizations interface with all the different departmental stakeholders for planning and execution of the project. The most important focus of the IT PM is to complete the project in time and under the given budget. Typical IT PMs in end user organizations that prefer outsourcing the development do not have to deal with the human resource angle, profit margins, knowledge sharing and associate growth aspirations. The in-house development center PM has to deal with all the above except worrying about profit margins as IT department is usually treated as a cost center rather than a profit center. IT PM have to grapple with Scope, Effort-Cost & Budget, Project Risks, Infrastructure and most important of all, the Deadline.

Thus, in a scale of 1 to 10 in the following parameters: Technical Knowledge, Process orientation, Team management, Cost management and Project management, the typical PM in an end user set-up would have the following ratings:

Technical Knowledge:    3

Process Orientation:    5

Team management:        5

Cost management:        8

Project management:     8

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.