About motivation and my next career move...

During the new year day of 2005, I made a resolution to start a website for myself. I was very serious about it for the initial few months and believe me, I even wrote up quite a few articles in preparation for it, but a few months later all of that got buried under lots of other things, both at the personal and work front. This is the usual way of life - priorities keep changing unless you are very careful and do follow ups every other day. Unless some motivation factor exists, it is most difficult to keep the priorities unchanged over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I found none and the whole thing was forgotten for long time, till about half an year back. During this period, there happened a few changes at the work front for me. My project lead made a decision to move out of the team, and a few of us who were working with him for the past couple of years were jolted by this news. Although, he tried his best to ensure everything went on smoothly during the hand-over, there was an un-known, un-spoken, un-fathomable feeling of loss over this among all of us, his team mates. It is not an overstatement to say that he was the driving force for all of us. All through my career, I've never worked with a guy so pro-active, knowledgable, understanding and compassionate.

Focus swiftly started moving away from the work we did in the group. I 'enjoyed' for almost 2-3 months at work, with nothing more than 'browsing' the net; at best, I spent time on learning some useful technologies. All of a sudden, I felt that 'worklessness' is threatening my career, like it never did before. Not long afterwards, I started to feel awful, as much as a 'cheat' not to do any work, but get my paycheque credited to my bank account duly at the end of every month. I talked to my manager about this, who couldn't do much other than ask me to 'go, look out for more work'. In fact, the problem was none of us knew where all the work we did over the couple of years came from. While a good amount of work we did carried obvious value, a large percentage of that didn't really benefit the group. However, since it benefited all of us in terms of learning, we carried along under the direction from our project leader. But, now things started to look different. I decided to quit what I was doing; and this needed some action from my side.

I revived my 2 year old idea of creating a website for myself. Websites are good portfolio setters for individuals. People appreciate you for what they read and see there. I believe that the effort and the money spent on it, is really worth that. My wife too joined me in this effort, who wanted some web-space for herself to host her teaching materials - she is a physics teacher at an international school in Bangalore. We decided to share the space and then, on came another use for it. My 4 year old kid too wanted some space for his nursery rhymes, photos...So, finally we came with http://www.my3dots.com after 2 months of effort. I had put up many of my own creations including some whitepapers, articles, downloads and even a 20 page biography for the entire public to see. No sooner than it was ready, I sported my site's address in my resume and circulated along in the Bangalore's vast job market. Exactly 2 weeks is what I took to land up in a great job. I talked to two guys from outside India during my interviews, one from the UK and one from the US. Both of them had been through the website prior to the interviews and infact, we even spent sometime talking about it during our discussions. It was evident that both appreciated my efforts in setting it up, even more than the actual contents I had made available through it. Presently, I've decided to move on from my present job to take up the new assignment on the month of February, 2007.

So, this is essentially what I've to say. Motivation is a must-have ingredient to enable you work on anything. Nobody else can supply that to you, or inject you with that. No amount of listening to stories of motivation or reading similar books will help in achieving that. It is something invaluable and all your efforts to gain even a tiny of amount of that will pay off finally. I was lucky enough to have a situation that could motivate me into doing something that is as - seemingly, but not really - trivial as creating a website. Not all people, may've this luck; but, in such cases, look around and you will definitely find some means to it. One of the good ways to achieve this is to talk to your own friends, colleagues or even neighbours. Most people will be able to derive motivation from peer pressure or pressure from the society we live in. Yes, it is the case of an artificially generated 'motivation', but it still will end you up somewhere good!

World is small indeed...

I work for a software services company in Bangalore, India. We undertake contract with many major product companies in the United States to manage their software product release cycles either completely or partially. During this process, we work very closely with the team in the US by way of regular emails, text and voice chat sessions, phone conferences etc. Every week, on an average, every single member of the team here interacts with our counterparts in the US, 3-4 hours only through phone or chat sessions. Emails communications happen in plenty and much more frequently. There are also occasional visits from either side to the other, for reasons like knowledge transfer and such things. All this has led us to understand each other better. Together we work on building the expertise on technology. While doing this, we rarely constrain ourselves thinking that benefits of technology should/will reach only the companies that we work for, or be localized to any specific part of the world. As a matter of fact, all of us are parties to this and all of us equally benefit from the technology we develop as a team, and ultimately will bring us even more closer and bridge the gaps that was perceived to be there, between us and them for long years.

I started to think about this more, and then I began to appreciate how much the world has become a much smaller place to live in than it was when I was a kid. During those times, I never had imagined that I will work for a software firm in the United States, and I will ever interact with a team over there and that we will ever meet somebody over there, who will prove to have such a significant impact on our lives. We were completely blind during those times, with my parents having heard about America only in the local radio news, seen it only in the pictures (there were absolutely no videos in those times) that appear occasionally in the newspapers, when some once-in-a-bluemoon international event happened, absolutely not seen an American guy in ‘flesh and blood’ in their whole lives. Imagine, having lived up all our childhood in high reverence of the people of America who gave our unlit houses, the much needed electricity (and lot more), it indeed is a great feeling now to reach this stage. Now, not only we work together closely and know each other a lot, we also get sincere appreciations from those people for what we do for them. I feel great! World has indeed become small, and with growing times, I hope it will continue to get smaller, before it becomes one big (or small?) village…

Sometimes, I even day-dream of such a global village, where all of us including the Indians, the Americans, the Russians, the British etc live in unity, helping each other with only love pervading our lives. Over the next few decades, or maybe centuries later, I believe, this will become possible. Even if that doesn’t happen, at least, all of us will be closer, much closer than today. The only thing that saddens me is I may not be around, to see it all happen…

Discuss outsourcing: just an ego clash?

Read this very interesting discussion on outsourcing/offshoring. Specifically, this targets outsourcing to India. Initially, I thought it just is an ego clash between two nationalities, but reading on, I found there are some people on both sides who preferred to think through the realities rather than just bark. Whatever it may be, the discussion was so interesting that I completely read it...

I'm speaking at the Step-Auto '07

I am invited by the SteP-In forum to present a paper on dynamic project scheduling and management, at the STEP - Auto'07 to be held on 17th Jan, '07 at Hyderabad. STeP-In forum is a non-profit organization based in Bangalore, India and organizes many international conferences on software testing including test automation, test project management etc, all around the year. During this year's Bangalore summit, Michael Bolton will speak on 'Rapid software testing'. Please visit the forum's website for more details.

This is my second time at the summit, presenting a paper. The first time, I presented a paper on automated generation of test cases, at the STeP-In Summit '05 held at Bangalore. Details of my paper are available at my website here.

For those who are interested in knowing what my this year's paper is about, here is an abstract...

Project scheduling and tracking is no doubt one of the most complex processes of SDLC. Though, this is typically performed by the project manager, the direct impact of this is often on all team members. Project managers need to collect essential information to assess the health of the project all the while, which typically all lies with the team members. However, most times the team member doesn't have all the necessary data himself, but is spread out in the team. Hence, the project manager is often forced to interrogate and extract information from the team members. If not practiced with care, it can be a painful experience for both sides. Most of us would have gone through such, often 'bitter', experiences at work. Trying to work out a solution for this, I realized that, most of such problems arise from the inaccuracy or even inability of the team members to prioritize tasks, plan/schedule them and predict measurable impacts of those prioritizations on yet other tasks. Team members need to be more capable of predicting their own performance and plan themselves accordingly. In essence, empowering of the team members rather than centralizing the control with the project manager is the philosophy that is fundamental to my solution.

DSM (the tool) has its goal at helping team members, who report to any level of management, to self-manage their activities in a typical project environment. This said, the activities don’t need to be project related activities alone, but any including those unplanned, task overheads, vacation plans etc. Original intent of the tool was to track moving targets, which is nothing but calculating the remaining days of each of the activities based on the input status (% completion) and helping the user to derive the start and end dates for the remaining period for each of them. In addition to this, the tool supports dynamic scheduling and maintenance of these activities. To do this, it utilizes the very simple concept of 'current task'. Thus, at any point in time, only one of the tasks can be current, which also implies that the start date for the current task will always be today. All subsequent activities are processed in a sequential manner. However, the user has the option to make any other among the activities as current and process accordingly. Another possibility with the tool is creation of burn-down charts, which makes it in line with the agile way of tracking schedules. The tool also has certain ways to manage expectations on deliveries to customer, primarily by way of generating a weekly delivery report.

Apart from the above features, the tool also has a few features that facilitate typical project management. It provides metrics like comparisons of the planned and actual, in terms of estimates, status updates, remaining days and end dates of various tasks. This is facilitated through a feature that allows 'snap-shot'ing essential details of all tasks at any point in time. There is also the facility to split up overhead among planned/non-planned tasks and to generate neat useful charts out of it.

Thus, his life ended...

Today morning, I came to the office as usual at 8.30 am. I suspected nothing. 2 hours later, I was subjected to a shock, one of the most terrible ones of my life. One of my colleagues gave me this news - that a terrible, most unexpected thing happened just today morning. It was to do with one of my other colleagues, one of my closest, who I worked with for the past 2 years - Suresh Alapati. He passed away today morning due to a cardiac arrest in a local hospital. I am trying hard to cope up with this news; it is really unbelievable that I can never ever see him again in my life on this earth.

I liked him, I hated him over the past two years, for several things. We went together to the US during the last year, on official purposes and stayed together in the same apartment. This was the time, I interacted ever so closely with him. He basically is a very sensible guy, but only with certain eccentric habits to his nature. He was a chain smoker and a drop-dead alcoholic till he recently got married. Then, all of sudden, about a few months before he got married, he stopped all that. While he was in the US, he didn't touch a drop of alcohol. What, he didn't even bite a piece of non-vegeterian food. He was so determined that if he wants something done, he definitely had it done. This is the best thing I liked in him.

He was one of those rarest guys who was so down to the earth and interact freely with almost anybody. He didn't have any pride or prejudice about anything. He didn't bother about his 'status' as a software engineer, but just went about joking casually with just about everybody at our company, including the office boys, cleaning people, security guards. He was a favorite of all these people and their faces will get lit up when they see him, for he always treated them with dignity and as equals to himself. He always used to address such people as buddies in their slang language, like nobody else I ever noticed to do.

Shouldn't this guy have lived more in this world. Perhaps, fate didn't want him to. There is a saying in our part of the world that GOD calls back those people who he feels closer to his heart than others, faster. At least for the time being, we can all believe it is true and console ourselves...

May his soul rest in peace...