Streching the limits

It’s an old adage that in rough time nothing favors you and all news reaching to you is "bad news"; I was also facing rough times since the start of this financial year after few of my key resources from application development and maintenance decided to part away. Though at ground level there was a lot of action and restructuring happening at the technology front; newer resources were getting aligned, but it didn’t bought cheer to the colleagues who had decided to part away.

I was working on an important assignment of restructuring the physical hardware infrastructure and delivery model. My core skills being into applications, development and program management with little exposure to the infrastructure, I was thrilled with the new assignment, but on the contrary the network team felt nerves, as most of the infrastructure was moving towards managed services and they can sense a threat to their job, sensing the smoke of uncertainty they decided to part away.

This was like a double whammy for me as I was already struggling with regular development, maintenance and management task on top of it the infrastructure management team started shirking. At given point of time I appeared too much occupied with multiple types of responsibilities that too without having enough resources to answer the never ending dynamic requirements and challenges of typical IT setup.

I was bit worried and alone to understand the criticality of resources or to respond to contingent situations; it was getting difficult for me to answer all requirements, there were multiple challenges at every level and to me it appeared as if I’m fighting the lone battle. At times I appeared like an enterprise in myself, an institution which has knowledge and understanding of all the happenings in the vicinity.

But one can’t think of running the organization with this proposition, building in-house capacity or getting resources on an immediate basis was difficult. I explored an idea with my former colleagues and known associates of outsourcing certain activities which were not our core business.

The advantages of outsourcing started getting reflected, we could manage two independent consultants in less than half of the cost of a dedicated resource also with a high availability of 24X7. There are recruitment errors and so were some errors in vendor selection as well, a handful assignment with the consultants didn’t worked well and they were not able to provide solutions for some of our requirements.

But those were only one of the few cases and can be ignored. But the lesson learned is that the operations should be process driven and not person driven, with the lesson I started building In-house capabilities and capacities, though it will take some time to get fine tune and responding the requirements, but sooner or later they will take over the charge of consultants. I’m also happy with the newer dimensions getting added to the existing team as they are getting opportunity to work on different assignments.

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Unlocking the Mentality

Mindset doesn’t change and yeah it’s very difficult to change. Mindsets are basic instincts, a long drawn process formed by sedimentation of layers the way we had perceived things in our past. One and all interchangeably used mindset, mentality or a perception are governed by our upbringing, the social, political and economical environment and is a part of our DNA. In most of cases upbringing of Kids in Indian society is under strict vigil of parents, grandparents and relatives, our upbringing methodology doesn’t encourage kids to be courageous, fearless and risk takers but sometimes molest their entities. In general context we perceive a very cautious approach for the kids, we warn them repeatedly to be cautious in whatever they do and from the very beginning we start transforming them to fearful and risk aversive individuals.

The same mindset and approaches we try to put in every task we pursue and in most of the causes we tend to more reserve and cautious then what’s really required. Basic instinct of insecurity and fear of oneself getting challenges, consequences and questions in future never leaves us; we always want to carry proofs of the past and security for the future.

I could see the primitive mindset in real action in one of my assignment wherein I was working on email application which hosted some hundred odd users. Typically we don’t abort things which are unused or have lost the context, even our houses are filled up with objects which are obsolete and might be never put into the use still we carry those things with us for years and preserve them with a possibility of future use. Household items are repaired many times even if the cost of repairs surpassing the cost of newer one just because we have emotional bonding to them, we feel everything close to our heart and believe all objects are elements of our identity.

I could see thousands of mails which had lost the context and value preserved in the mail boxes. Questions regarding the usability of those email which were generally reports and archived documents got a uniform answer “I may be asked for the report and status quo for that reason I want them to preserve”. Mail box size ran into Gigabytes and it appeared next to impossible for me to work with the giant mail boxes and bulky mail items.

After a hard time convincing the mail box owners agreed to get rid of those items but I could see the fear and insecurity that they were foreseeing with future requirement. Future equation which may or may not happen and may be different than what we perceive but still we wanted to prepare for future and carry the proof of our past because we fearful, threatened and uncertain.

Mindset hardly change and it’s difficult to change

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Turnkey Project

Till recent past our requirements and technical support for IT infrastructure was answered by a local service provider and partially by in house team and we as an organization were satisfied to have 99% uptime of our services, which was collectively maintained and managed by our service provider and in-house team.

After the downturn we as an organization were hit by inflationary cost of resources and services that our service provider use to render. My hunt for advanced and cost effective solution was on and with a little bit of restructuring happening at the top level certain decisions and directions got rephrased. I got a bit of liberty to implement decisions which was for the betterment of the organization and were long term.

The idea of shifting the infrastructure resurface in March this year and I started working on the scope, though I were not fully aware of the nitty-gritty of the transition and neither I detailed it in depth but was doubly sure that the project was going to be different and difficult challenge of its own kind.

My observation and consideration that the project is going to be tricky because of the fact that we been working with certain setup and applications from last 11 years and were at great ease, customizing and reconfiguring most of the things as per the needs. To plugging out things which were up and running from almost a decade and plugging it to a different location and architecture was an uphill task.

Till some point of time it was a thought only to move to a professional data centre, colloborate with some organization which can offer better service, stability and uptime. Aspirations started building stronger with each passing day and Thoughts rolled out on paper and started getting the desired base and shape; I started formulating it in a form of project and started working on it.

With each discussion and advancement in planning stage, I observed some kind of instability in the network and server administration team who were managing the existing setup. I could make out that they were feeling insecure and they themselves were going to be obsolete in the organization once the project is fully implemented.

Things generally happen the other way one thinks of, and same happened with me, some of the key members who were important for the implementation of project left. But this movement didn’t deter me as I was confident of getting the project implement no matter what comes.

Today as most of the things are aligned as per the plans, I really boast on achieving the objectives without anyone’s support, But the funniest part is that I’m alone to understand , compliment and congratulate myself, as there are very few individuals in the organization who understands the complicacies and challenges. But no worries the learning are adding values to my skill set and me happy with that.

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Looking Ahead

It has been almost four months I have not faced the book I mean facebook, neither wrote anything and nor twitted. I’m feeling immense satisfaction while narrating my experiences after so many days. It’s not that nothing happened in life in between, in fact a lot of things happened @ personal, professional and national level, a lot of external factors changed during recent past which triggered me many time to write, but the responsibilities to which I was answerable dragged me to my core business line. My business is not writing, IT/ IT Enabled services, Infrastructure, application and database are the bread winner for me and my family.

Last many months kept me busy with migration of my organizations IT infrastructure from current location to a distinct location. I traversed the whole cycle of plan do check and act many a times, similarly internals, external, economical, political and financials factors traversed a whole cycle globally as well as locally.

Many things prompted me to write but I simple couldn’t afford to do, global finance equation traversed like a sine wave starting from Europe threatening Asia and propagating to US. It calmed down many a times but again reinitiated. Politically lots of things kept the world buzzing, kings were overthrown, and countries joined hands and parted as well. India kept on moving with lot of burning issues 2G, 3G, corruption and what not.

Globally, nationally, politically things are back to square one as if we have not moved a bit even, scenarios are same as they were a few months ago. But personally I learned and experienced a lot of things during the course of migration. Each day proved to be learning experience, Googled the queries, answered lot of challenges, adopted and implemented a lot of good practices whereas discarded older approaches and viewpoints.

As there were a lot of process and approaches which were person oriented, resource intensive and manual were bound to change with new infrastructure in place I encountered a lot of resilience from my colleagues. People are generally rigid and don’t want a change, but as this change was for the betterment of the organization and a bigger picture appeared profitable to the organization, individual interest was to be sacrificed.

As a learning from project management practices, any person, object or entity who has direct or indirect interest with the project becomes the stakeholder in the project. Colleagues who were habitual of certain practices and were working in a comfort zone were reluctant to change and could have adversely deviated or impacted the planned project scope, but as these resistance areas and objects were known I was able to win confidence of major stake holder who was interested in betterment of the systems and practices.

Now as most of the problem areas are solved and implementation is half way through I’m bit relaxed and look forward for a more stable, robust and better future of the organization… Aamin

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