Thursday, November 27, 2008

Culture rules! Part 3 –The founder’s influence

Sometimes one gets a hint of the culture of a company by simply following founder members closely. Let’s take a break from experience recitals this episode and look at the fundamentals of corporate culture once again and digest some theories.

Corporate culture is the shared values and meanings that members hold in common and that are practiced by an organization’s leaders. Corporate culture is a powerful force that affects individuals in very real ways. Corporate culture is related to ethics through the values and leadership styles that the leaders practice; the company model, the rituals and symbols that organizations value, and the way organizational executives and members communicate among themselves and with stakeholders.

Corporate values are used to define corporate culture and drive operations found in “strong” corporate cultures. The IBMs, Microsofts, Googles, Boeings, GMs and Unilevers all exemplify “strong” cultures. They all have a shared philosophy, they value the importance of people, they all have heroes that symbolize the success of the company, and they celebrate rituals, which provide opportunities for caring and sharing, for developing a spirit of “oneness”.

Organizations that stress competition, profit, and economic or self-interests over stakeholder obligations and that have on morally active direction often have cultures that are in trouble. The founders of an organization set the tone for the beginning stage of what a company’s culture will be. The practices of the founders and first employees begin the rituals, the corporate stories, and norms. Ethics are a major factor in the development of a positive or negative culture. If companies allow unethical acts to occur, this behavior perpetuates itself through the life of the organization. Promotions and raises also affect the type of culture a company has. Is everyone given a chance to excel or are there picks and choose as to who will get the promotion? This type of behavior creates mistrust among employees of a company, thus causing an intense environment.

There are many different questions asked about guidelines of how to create and maintain a strong corporate culture. One may be able to set up a goal or future vision to help strengthen his or her environment. This idea can help create an environment, which focus on enhancing the founders’ mission and objectives. Communication also affects the strength of weakness of a culture. It is essential that management communicate the accomplishments as well as the failures of the departments of the organization, not only vertically but horizontally as well.
Reward criteria, conflict tolerance, and control are dimensions of a corporate culture. The culture of a company is very influential in daily transactions. It establishes what can and cannot be done. Some practices may be written down or may not be written down and are learned through observation. Planning, leading, organizing, and controlling are functions that are affected by the strength of weakness of a culture.

Strong cultures share a common goal and have a positive environment. They hold true the not only the mission and objectives of the founding members of the organization, but they are aware of their employee and the roles they play in its existences. Employee participation and involvement creates a surrounding that perpetuates positive outcomes.

Culture clearly exists in both visible and invisible components, including actual building infrastructure, common speech patterns, and processes. Some facets of culture, for example, can be organization structure, respect for practices and people, business like interactions, a shared philosophy, valuing the importance of people, having heroes that symbolize the success of the company, and celebrating rituals. This in turn leads to Weiss’s concepts of “oneness” and “we ness” which is also demonstrated in the culture. Founders are the origin of corporate culture which employees learn vicariously. Individuals who have worked at organizations with strong cultures know the culture best and presumably like it, or they would have removed themselves from it. The existentially compelling question of culture in organizations is well documented, but suggested answers for it are many and constantly fluctuating. What can be known is that corporate culture is a powerful force that affects individuals in very real ways.

Bibliography:
Solomon, R.C. (1997). It’s good business: Ethics and free enterprise for the new millennium
Weiss, J.W. (1994). Business Ethics: A managerial, stakeholder approach.
Irish Hoosier (2006). Corporate Culture.

Culture rules! Part 2 -The eGuru

I was going through a transition that time in IBM sometime early 2000. I decided that I have devoted enough of my time upbringing our services partners and the Business Partner Program can run in its own momentum. Finally! It was time to jump into something more interesting. Dot com bubble was at its peak those days, and IBM almost became synonymous with e-Business, ruling the world, changing the way e-commerce happens and transforming, it could, even the local panwala’s business into the big E.

So I decided, this must be a wonderful moment to get engrossed into the E-world and promptly got myself certified as an e-business advisor. That looks simple in simple line, but I did have to undergo serious preparation and sit for exams! I became an IBM e-business advisor and started advising our clients on how to convert their business into simply-E.

After certifying myself, I thought I should now give to the organization my “other knowledge and skills”. I decided its time to train our teams about nuances of specialized customer facing presentation and communication skills. I was a voluntary member of the training team of my previous company TCS. I shared the coaching shoes with the Ernst & Young training team in coaching TCS project teams. It was time to teach the IBMer kids some tricks of the trade! I filed my nomination with the training group, and next day a gentleman popped up from nowhere and introduced himself as one of the training coordinators.

IBM India is India HQ in Bangalore in 2000 was about 5000 people that time sitting in 3 buildings. I was hoping for just an email with a thank you note (there were not too many internal trainers) and fixing my course name tag in the training calendar. After all, with so any people to handle in a mega organization where is the time for anything else, but an email. And make no mistake, email was a very effective communication tool in a world champ organization like IBM. It’s a mandatory business etiquette in IBM to read business emails, and reply the same day, at the earliest possible time. It used to be an “art” to push it out of one’s table at the first opportunity and fire it back to the sender’s court.

So I was pleasantly surprised! The gentleman introduced himself and proceeded to have a discussion on whatever I mentioned in my nomination to understand my motivation to volunteer for the training session. After a rather long session and several satisfactory answers, he looked pleased with the answers. He then meticulously proceeded to explain the training process meticulously and the logistics support his group will be providing me, including broadcasting support for the content and topic in all the buildings. He personally thanked me before leaving and yes, after the training session I got a little memento with a certificate too.

I was impressed, I saw it as component of a positive learning and mentoring culture of the organization, where the authorities not only went that extra mile to ensure the quality of the training and content, but also took total care of the volunteer with all back up support, and personal handholding volunteers despite their busy work schedule. I loved the trait to my heart. Was that a personal passion of the training department person or was it the process of the company? Neither! I saw similar behaviorism in all these service departments and never found anything like such a detailed process in writing anywhere.

What then is the secret of sustaining such practices? By now you have guessed it right, it is the corporate culture that once internalized, becomes a guiding spirit behind every individual’s action. Of course it comes through belief-preach-practice cycle that goes much beyond written codes.

Culture Rules!

A friend and I with our families were strolling one holiday evening in the Park Street neighborhood looking for a place to dine. My friend suggested a place with great Muglai cuisine and I nodded in agreement. I took notice of the parking attendant take special care in helping us park neatly in the narrow slot. He needlessly gave us a big smile and greeted us in “chust Urdu”. The doorkeeper, with a noticeable moustache and dressed like a Darbari attendant of a Sultan, opened the door and mumbled something in Urdu which sounded like a nice greeting too. As you were about to take a table, a couple of helpers arrive from nowhere and helped us settle down.

The Order taker arrives nicely dressed up as the sultan’s chief advisor and proceeded to e explain the cuisines and advise us in our menu selections. As the Sultan’s advisor left with the order, a musician duo approached us and asked us if we prefer to listen to a short version of Darbari Kanada Thumri while we wait for our dinner. Without going down to the details of the experience (oh yes, the food was out of this world too!), I must admit I just loved the experience. A manager approached us as we were waiting for our bill and chatted on the service and the cooking in general and explained that his restaurant is always striving to find new ways of customer satisfaction and of course no one can give him better tips that customers like us! I made up my mind to visit there again and tell my other friends how different this whole experience was.

Sounds familiar? I am sure all of us must have faced similar experiences in day to day situations and get awed by the way some people give words like “customer satisfaction” and “customer care” a new definition. What does it take to make it happen? Customer satisfaction is as simple as doing things for customer in a way that satisfies his needs and exceeds his expectations - which is the surprise element makes him come back – and more surprises you throw at him, more he comes back to be pleasantly surprised! Easy! This is human psychology and the customer is a human too! And finally the act sums up in cross checking with him (feedback) whether he is impressed. We know all this. It’s all in the book, nothing new! But do we always do it? That’s another story, right? So why do we miss the bus sometimes? What is missing?

I noticed as I was coming out of that restaurant in Kolkata, and I saw a small wall hanging the wall beside the exit gate. As the all-mush-Sultan’s Darbari attendant was opening the exit door for us, I quickly strained my eyes to read the wall hanging. It said “We care for our customer and we do it by practice”!

The word “practice” hit me. Something that we believe in and do by practice over and over again becomes something deeply rooted in us. An idea or a strategy doesn’t become a reality unless it is backed by a sustained action which is practiced, perfected and habitualized. Not only it becomes a habit, but it also becomes our way of doing things. It becomes so strong that it becomes a guiding star in whatever we do and how we do. It becomes so ingrained and so obvious one day that even an outsider can “see it”. This “it” is what I call the “Culture” (I am sure, there are better definitions available in books or internet ).

Every organization has a life of its own. Over years of operation, it becomes like a living being. It can be personified in the way it communicates, behaves and does things. In a word, it is “culture” that makes an organization stand out in the crowd. Its culture makes the difference in its becoming a “good” organization or a “great” organization.

Every kid goes through culture lessons of the family from the parents. When I was young, my parents used to tell me to choose friends with care, from good cultural background. It seems to be so important, almost like a measurement criteria of a kid’s would be friend! Not that a kid is technically equipped with choose friends with such finesse, but the lessons to catch the “good cultural traits” in a person were unforgettable!

If you look at IBM’s website, there is a printed “Culture statement” like the following:
IBM has a performance-based culture that talented people find very attractive. Employees share a real sense of community. We work in a culture that prizes intelligence and innovation. You will find that you really are working with some of the brightest and the best people around in a company that has complete trust in you and your capabilities.

I was in IBM for three years from 1998 December to 2001 December and experienced a lot of the above mentioned cultural traits along with other “hidden traits” which only an employee will know. There may be slight various in the last 6-7 years, but then cultural aspects don’t change drastically over the years for a large behemoth like IBM. The traits also differ slightly from city to city and even country to country. I traveled to various offices of IBM, my base offices in Bangalore and others in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. I also noticed zonal cultural variations when I closely interacted with IBM-ers of Australia, Singapore, Thailand, USA and Great Britain.

A common thing that however struck me in most of the conversations, particularly with senior IBM pros, is that, they are all very business like. Something that I termed as extremely lifeless during my early days in IBM, particularly as I was coming from a very vibrant, young and lively atmosphere of Tata Consultancy Services. I used to find the IBM characteristics as mature and business like, almost too robotic for my comfort. But then the success of a giant depends on mature culture – and these traits were even visible in the processes of IBM.

Right in the 1st week of joining IBM as the Business Partner program manager, I was sitting in the round table of Services strategy discussions, accompanying my first boss in IBM, and other department heads with Pawan Kumar, The IBM India president. Pawan was one of the big shots of nineties in the IT industry and was a big gun in TCS before he joined IBM. In TCS we would not dream of calling our CEO Ramdorai by first name. Despite the youngish charm of TCS culture, the TATA flagship IT company had this aura of royalty about it.

Desperate to create an impression in my first meeting, I had an extremely valid point to make my maiden entry into the discussion. I looked at Pawan and started enthusiastically with “Sir, I think…”, a few words and he nodded kindly at me, said “Pawan!” In IBM, ever one is called by first name, even a fresher calls the bid boss by the first name.

This points out to an open culture, which is partially true in IBM with standard red tape arrangements as in any other giant organization. Open culture is something which lot of companies preach and practice – but in IBM, as I found out through my experiences, it also talks about a western concept of “human value” - that whether you are young or old, experienced or not, a GM or a trainee – you are respected as a human being first and everyone is equal in that respect. A very simple point – so simple, that we almost overlook it. So who says office culture cannot influence you!?

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Typical Product development Challenges and Global Resourcing as an emerging opportunity

Global product companies or Independent Service Vendors (ISVs) are always under performance pressure as would any of us in our respective jobs. They strive for market expansion, increased product features and new product ideas and face the regular constraints of decreasing profitability, increased competition, dearth of resource and skills and rising costs with simultaneous pressure to upgrade and widen product offerings while using fewer resources.
Product-development planning remains crucial to organizations' survival.

Some key challenges (and hence success factors) are as follows:


Development Speed: Faster and faster is the mantra of product development. One way to hasten development speed is through digital design, analysis and collaboration tools to get products to market faster. Using collaboration software, file-sharing software and more, engineers can transform ideas into digitized virtual designs for testing and viewing a new product in three dimensions, in months rather than years.


Platform Flexibility: Every product guru will acknowledge that a key success factor of a product in the market is its platform flexibility. This results from using modular product architecture to provide more product variety to customers. Computer aided design and engineering tools permit easy reuse of already-completed design files. All these files make product design much more efficient, cost effective and accelerated than ever before.


Complexity Management: A product stands apart from an application in its complexity. It involves engineering complex systems through analysis of interaction networks. Research has resulted in network modeling methods to examine a network of interacting elements that are in complex systems being developed. The challenge of engineering complex systems with many components, sometimes called systems engineering, remains a key success factor.


Customer Involvement: Involving customers to improve the product features and user experience is an open secret but perhaps pose the biggest myriad of challenges to a product developer. Some companies are using the order information about what features, components or configurations customers are ordering and are interested in, and they use that in real time, or as quickly as possible, to reconfigure the next generations of the product. Paying attention to these trends can help managers and design engineers plan their product design processes and achieve their goals with higher efficiency, lower cost and less time to market.


Outsourcing and Offshoring: Finally, the biggest challenge remains as optimizing in-house skills, supplier skills and capacity, international operations and new markets. Sometimes outsourcing saves considerable cost and sometimes a little cost, but more importantly, they're actually taking advantage of global product development networks, largely to access new markets in places and leverage global talent pools. Let us look at the outsourcing opportunities closely.

Modern communication tools and the Internet have reduced the need for product development partners to be geographically close. Indeed, product development is increasingly being divided into parts, created in multiple centers around the globe, and brought back together for integration and testing. The ability to succeed at global project management is the key challenge in this model.

As the challenges grow in the face of global inflation, strengthening currencies, slowing economies, dried up venture funds so will be the opportunities, to springboard ahead of competition by globalizing. Two immediate channels to bring in the advantages of globalization are building captive centers across the globe and the other being outsourcing. Both have its pros and cons, but given the scale of expansion and flexibility, outsourcing is well acknowledged as the greatest opportunity in the globe for the entire product engineering ecosystem.
The opportunities using outsourcing, leveraging local presence of partners, 24x7 development and support centers, multi-dimensional skills and matured processed and best practices, are fairly known as follows:

At this stage the founder(s) start pondering about their next step. Must they exit ? If so how ? Should they take the company public or should they sell the company to a larger player. Should they step back from the company and let professional management take over completely? The answers to these questions decide the path which sometimes leads them to the beginning of their journey once again i.e. to start another product company.
a) Skill leverage
b) Speeding up time to market
c) Global market expansion
d) Superior Customer support
e) Enhancing product development processes
f) Localization benefits

The emerging best practice for software development is to decouple product design and development (along with testing and support) elements in the value chain. The life cycle of product development is increasingly being divided into phases that require internal expertise (and value-adding) which is essentially in product definition and design phase where as steps that are highly commoditized include development, testing and support.


The division of responsibilities between IT personnel and outsourcing staff is a critical factor in the success of the project specifically and the outsourcing relationship generally. Moreover, outsourcing vendors have made tremendous advancements in the metrics for quality and investment that drive greater efficiency into the overall process.


Offshore is usually regarded as a tool for labor arbitrage. However, it has its hidden benefits like higher quality and development discipline of the “right partners” which lead to greater efficiency and productivity levels that are sometimes superior to the in-house engineering organizations of ISVs. Moreover, during the coming years, outsourcing vendors will expand further into the value chain of product development. Additional expertise are emerging to dominate emerging technologies (e.g., Web2.0) and develop deep vertical expertise.

Let me use a brief Innominds case study here to bring out a product engineering story using the global resourcing model.

An Innominds Case Study
A Bay Area company develops and sells a compatibility server, which is an affordable and high-performance relational database that is compatible with popular databases. The Compatibility Server enables applications to run against consolidated databases with minimal to zero rewriting. This compatibility server helps customers who are looking for reduced operational expenses on licensing, maintenance and hardware, reduced complexity by consolidating multiple database and single/simple data access and ease of migration.


With its flagship product of a database server, the company was getting into a high level competition zone. The business situation demanded aggressive scale-up and a high performance next generation product. In this scenario, the need of the hour was a product engineering partner to design, build and test the features of its compatibility server, leveraging the economies of scale and global talent pools. The requirement was to build an extended offsite engineering and QA team with the expertise of building database kernel and drivers, which will co-develop, test and release the product for multiple platform certifications.


In Innominds, the company found that competent partner and an expert in building complex database servers and applications. Further more, utilizing its brand pull, Innominds attracted the best available talent from the industry and technology schools that was one of the primary success factors of the outsourcing engagement.


Innominds started building high performance development and QA teams for database compatibility, database server internals development and quality engineering for the customer in early 2007. Agile ramp up of the team and executing the knowledge transfer flawlessly using innovative training methodologies in a blended offsite-onsite model was the key factor to begin the engagement with quick wins. Innominds brought in leadership in database internals and cross experience in multiple RDBMS and connectors that created the new features in the compatibility server.


Innominds created long term value to the customer in mitigating maintenance and QA risks and reducing costs by remote management of the server regression beds by more than 45%. The team that Innominds created utilizing a global pool (there are talents from outside the country as well, namely from Vietnam!) is a pillar of the customer’s engineering success and market growth today.


To conclude, today’s nextgen software products are evolving with a distinct global flavor. The products are developed with the globalization model already deployed by large companies like Microsofts and IBMs, but are extending down to regional and specialty players — enabled by offshore outsourcing. Offshore vendors are increasingly being involved in architecture, development, and deployment, ranging from embedded products to software and hardware design. Products that are not born out of the Global Sourcing model will lose its competitiveness in the coming years.


Published in
1. HYSEA Infowire, 18th issue May 2008
http://www.hysea.in/18infowire-article2.htm
2. Smart Techie October 2008 edition

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