Manage Well

18 April 13

What Emerging Markets Customers Really Want from the Internet: An Indian Perspective

India is a new gold rush market. Home to some 1.2 Billion people, half of whom under the age 25, and buoyed by the recent economic growth, the country is poised to be a major economic powerhouse for the next few decades before becoming the second largest economy by 2050. In this short article, let’s review some of the data and trends that I discussed earlier in my presentation at the PDMA conference in Orlando, Florida.

3 April 13

The Joys of Designing Agile Solutions for New-Age Problems

Pune is hosting India’s first Scrum Gathering this year in July with the theme of “Scrum – Kal, Aaj aur Kal”, meaning the past, present and future of Scrum. I appreciate all efforts by Madhur Khaturia and his team in making it happen. I hope and believe it will be yet another milestone in India’s journey towards agility, and will stimulate a whole lot of new ideas and conversations thus ultimately leading to increased awareness, higher adoption and more breakthrough products from India.

9 March 13

Does your process help you preserve status quo, or deliver some kick-ass skunk works?

Problem-solving in the past has been dominated by methods involving rigorous and meticulous planning and flawless execution – something that has been questioned, largely by results (or rather the absence of it) in the recent years, if that is (still) the best approach when there are so many moving parts and the external world changes in a blink. We frequently ‘blame’ old practices of assembly plant-style waterfall days where it took years to get a project team to jump multiple hoops and just get a project done – in most cases, hopelessly delayed, unacceptable quality and overbudget.

5 March 13

So, does agile really kill innovation?

In continuation of my earlier blog post on ‘Does Agile Kill Innovation?’, I had a great time moderating the panel discussion at Agile India 2013 with Henrik Kniberg, Owen Rogers, Sujatha Balakrishnan, Udayan Banerjee, Praful Pillay and Sudipta Lahiri. The panel discussion was literally the last program at the end of two long days of management conference – but despite that, we had 60-70 folks throughout the session.

25 February 13

How do you manage intercultural issues in your teams?

Distributed and virtual teams are a reality of today’s world. It is not just limited to well-heeled MNCs – we see countless everyday examples of such teams with NGOs, startups, voluntary efforts, college project and so on. There is more to working with people from different time zones and cultural contexts than we realize. Problem is, most of us haven’t been exposed to, or adequately trained to handle such diverse teams – not just as a manager but even as a team member.

20 February 13

Does Agile Kill Innovation?

I will be moderating a panel discussion on this topic at the Agile India 2013. Given the incessant pace of technology evolution, ever-growing competition where product functionality is hardly the differentiator anymore (if it ever was!), shrinking time-to-market expectations where ‘continuous deployment‘ seems to have been relegated to a hygiene …more

7 January 13

How are you managing your talent?

In recent times, performance appraisal has been a subject of intense ideological debates. Performance appraisals have traditionally served as a mechanism to basically assess an individual’s performance in the previous year to reward employees in terms of compensation and career progression in the coming year. On one hand, organizations, at least the reasonably larger ones, need some systematic and transparent way to deal with employee’s performance evaluation. On the other hand, with more part-time and virtual employees entering the workforce on a very mission-based engagement as opposed to building a long-term career, the whole idea of formal performance management systems seems to be rather backdated. So, what’s the real deal?

30 October 12

Calm down Sandy! Calm down!!

Sandy continues to unleash its raw fury tonight.

28 October 12

Are you thinking about solving the problem, or simply fixing it?

What is the first thing that comes to mind when we see the problem? Most of us immediately jump in to start solving it. While this might appear to be a natural instinct and a logical choice for some simple problems, reality could often be otherwise, especially for complex problems. If we don’t know enough about genesis of that problem, we might spend countless hours fixing it, and yet hardly make any meaningful headway. Or, we might fix it in the short-term, but might not solve it in the long-run, i.e. address the root-cause behind it. For all we know, the first thing we do might actually be the worst!

3 September 12

What’s in a Name?

What’s in a Name? Sometimes what is truly a program gets called a project…

19 August 12

Can Program Managers Make it to the Executive Suite?

I recently shared some view on this subject for PMI’s Career Central article by the same name. In this post, I have shared the original article.

15 July 12

What’s the People factor in your Innovation equation?

Innovation is the hot new buzzword of our time. Everyone seems to be badly smitten by it. Going by the popular literature, those who don’t innovate are assured to perish sooner than later. Given that previous silver bullets Total Quality Management of 80s, Business Process Reengineering of 90s, and the most recent of them all – Outsourcing in early 21st century – have still left a LOT to be desired, there is clearly enough interest and expectation if Innovation can finally deliver!

26 June 12

Effective Escalation Practices

Great leaders know how to focus on project management competencies. Perhaps nowhere in project management do effective soft skills shine through more than in the process of escalation and escalation mitigation. Knowing when and how to escalate requires more than just an intimate knowledge of the emerging issue, but a deeper understanding of the entire business landscape surrounding the events that have led you to this moment.

11 June 12

Bridging the Cultural Divide in Global Projects

With most major corporations doing business on a global scale, projects are naturally part of that global business and, as such, project management is increasingly about leading projects and teams from different countries and cultures. This introduces potential risks related to language, time-zone and cultural differences, above and beyond the usual project risks.

6 June 12

A checklist is more powerful than an org chart?

Most of us so-called ‘knowledge workers’ don’t particularly fancy the term ‘checklist’. It smacks of an antiquated top-down command-and-control Dilbert-style bureaucracy where someone sitting on 42nd floor of corporate headquarters hands down a piece of paper for you to blindly follow and to make you feel dumb and outright humble – for it dilutes your role and underplays your intelligence as if anyone else in your position could have done it! In short, it seems to trivialize the knowledge, skills and expertize required for the job into a mechanical routine requiring no human intelligence, and places the decision-making into hands of people irrespective of their competence levels. And we hate it!

16 May 12

Seek new assignments for things you have not done before & develop deep expertise in one area…

Samir interviewed me for his wonderful blog Future of Project Management. It is all about my perspectives on how one can seek new assignments for things that one has never done before and develop deep expertise in one area to create an enriching and satisfying career.

5 March 12

How to establish credibility in a democratic workplace?

Flattening of organizations is an oft-repeated phrase that means different things to different people. My favorite connotation is what I call as ‘democratization of management’, which essentially means a more symmetric power distribution between erstwhile ‘management’ and the erstwhile ‘worker’- if at all such words make sense anymore. While there …more

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