What a Team & What a Connect. Simply Amazing & Magical....!

As a firm believer of connecting with people, I truly enjoyed my most recent visit which aimed at one thing and one thing only. MEET THE TEAM FACE TO FACE. It has been an awesome experience for me to meet the team from Bangalore & Coimbatore. What initially started as a discussion about a simple idea turned out to be a concrete, well-laid & very well organized plan for ALL the colleagues to meet with each other.

Most of the organizations talk about Agile transformation, self-organized teams, high productivity, innovation and so on. I strongly believe that NONE of this would work without a strong team. Here, I saw a problem. The team from various organizations, working remotely for years together for the development & enhancement of the same product did not even see each other (most of them). This is really embarrassing and and totally unproductive. Personally, I've been wanting to see those team members who always were in the dark, talking in to the phone from the other side and yet still had great contributions towards the product.

I sincerely wanted to make an attempt to change this without getting in to the bureaucratic constraints like travel budget restrictions and so on. So, since I already had plans to go HOME, I added some little personal plans to make this extra trip to where my friends were thought it would be more effective if I asked ALL to come to one place. I must admit, some really cool magic happened during the entire week. From Monday to Friday, we sat together, ate together, chatted together and worked together to talk about current critical topics, to bridge any knowledge gaps that the operations team had and also talk about I.N.N.O.V.A.T.I.V.E topics. After I met my colleagues who now became very good friends, I realized that innovation CANNOT take place if the team is NOT TOGETHER....! At least once a year, if the team would get a chance to meet with others face to face, trust me, magic happens. We discussed some of the critical topics to get a common view, had a chat about the way forward for some technical topics, some foundational topics for filling the knowledge gaps and many more....! Guess what, we had our technical team meeting as well together with our Scrum Master. Not in front of the computers, not in a stinking conference room, not via those fancy audio conferencing phones & head-sets but on the lawn outside the building which was different, refreshing, novel & productive enough. Could never forget it.

Ok. That was all about the working week. But we are not done yet. We got together on a nice & sunny Saturday and had an awesome lunch party together. This was really amazing and the team actually was extremely engaged & relaxed. I was glad & sad at the same time as it was time to say good bye for then.

God knows I want to make another trip next year..and the year after.. and the year after...! I love this team. Take a look at the fun we had for about a week.

IT can be dangerous at times....!

Over the past 6 years, I had good time within IT. With my core skill as a developer & architect, lots of experiences, interactions with business & IT colleagues, key tasks as part of internal rollout of various cloud products for the employees of the company, lots of learnings. During this period, I got an opportunity to work with some of the greatest colleagues within IT & business to accomplish a common goal à make the lives of the end-users simpler & easier by offering variety of tools, solutions & features from both on-premise & cloud side. Some of the challenges faced during the rollout of cloud products helped our team to understand the precise needs of our end-users (again, employees of the company). Not to forget, the collaboration with the standard development / R&D team was extremely collaborative & fruitful as it helped us overcome some of the key product gaps which are in the way of our successful rollout. Fascinating & challenging journey so far….!

From time to time, I keep thinking. Hmm. We know what is happening within the company with respect to various programs, engagements & initiatives. But what does the outside world look like TODAY? What are other customers up to? What are their requirements as of today? What are the current major challenges in the outer world? What are the latest trends in technology stack other than the company and related technologies? What are the top tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon doing differently for their customers? How are the technologies like Machine Learning, AI, Blockchain, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Data Science and so on? And many more and I must admit, I don’t get visibility because I am surrounded by the same requirements, same tools, systems, solutions and customers (employees of the company) beyond which I never had an opportunity to see the outside world / interact with the external world in the past 6 years.

This, I strongly believe is a serious concern because I don’t know anything about how customers’ requirements / businesses / use-cases are transforming day by day. I don’t know what technologies to look at / learn in order to expand my skillset in order to stay relevant for the organization as well as from the personal development perspective.

Today, in this digital era, every innovative organization is trying to tailor / reimagine their solutions as part of digital transformation. The companies can do this by offering their employees the freedom to choose which technologies are relevant for them as well as the company as well as for their customers because if you don’t do that and if your competitor does, then it’s game over. As a firm believer of the fact that the strength of an organization is truly it’s employees who can make things happen for their customers, I strongly believe in challenging the status quo and think beyond what one is capable of doing in order to stay relevant & competent.

In this context, I see working within an IT organization could be dangerous, monotonous over time since you only can experience the scenarios, business requirements, use-cases within your company. This is good up to some extent and until certain point in time. But in the long run, if I want to rebrand myself from my job title, role perspective, I need to know what’s happening outside. But, how would you know what other customers are doing, what technologies are in high demand, what learning path to focus on, if you are impeded by the rules / restrictions imposed by the company? I strongly believe that, in addition to adapting to the relevant learning path, it is also vital & beneficial to go out and see the world. Meaning, attend public technology conferences offered by various innovative companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft to name a few. In such kind of forums, I assume there are opportunities (just an assumption because it has been a couple of years since I attended any of such events) to experience the use cases & pain points from other customers, get to know the emerging technologies, take part in live hands-on sessions and most importantly do networking with others.

By being in IT, sometimes (or most of the times), this is not possible due to certain boundary conditions because of which the usual tasks / handling of own company’s requirements become monotonous. One might also get in to a dangerous situation where-in, after some time, you cannot stay up to date with the emerging technologies like Machine Learning, Mixed Reality, Data Science etc. because you are only surrounded by own requirements. To be honest, in such kind of situation, you only have two options. Stay in the current role with the current technology that you have experience on or challenge the status quo, quit the company and find something else. Finding internal opportunities could be quite cumbersome as there are lot of questions from your manager because he / she wants you to do what you are currently doing.

To conclude this write-up, I believe one can / should following approaches to transform him / herself in to something new from the technology standpoint to be able to rebrand themselves and stay relevant in the current era of digital transformation.

• Perform self-evaluation from time to time with respect to the skillset that you are proficient in and then challenge to learn new skills 
• Sure, you can google for information but as long as you are not getting your hands dirty, you will not be able to learn.
• Look out for announcements, tech conferences, events in the areas you are interested in.
• Set-up short, mid and long-term goals. Why? So that you can rebrand yourself and not just stick to one title like “I’ve been working for the past 27 years as a Java programmer, ABAP developer, web developer etc.” because only YOU can change what you want to become from what you are now.

That’s all for now.

Two countries in one day....!

This tour of mine to Strasbourg, France was very special to me. It was my birthday on 27th May 2015 during which I was there in Germany and cruised to France for dinner.