Support functions in all organisations: I think they have got it absolutely wrong.
Most of them are so utterly fixated on rules and processes, one wonders if they leave their brains at home!

Their existence itself is to 'support'. That's the nature of their work. But all of them, without fail, across almost all organisations, take upon themselves a 'higher' meaning: as if their existence itself is the reason for their existence.

IT support, finance, payroll, admin... Does any of them not do this? HR, sometimes, is one exception.

On top of that, they will not hesitate from using regulatory or technical reasons to avoid answering the question Why can't it be done? Hoping that most of the people will get deterred by it. When actually almost all the time, there is no underlying technical or regulatory reason at all!

Some recent examples:

• We have to deduct both income tax and FBT on your allowance. Because that's how the government wants it. Real reason:I can't be bothered to take the effort to track your allowances.
  
• We can't deduct extra tax from your income, even if you give us a written request. We are not allowed to do it. Real reason: I don't have any idea how this works, no one's asked before, I can't be bothered to go read up the rules.
• I need an urgent salary advance. It is approved by the head of HR AND my manager. Oh, well, oops. Needs approval of the CFO too. By the way, we will send you a check for the advance, not deposit it directly to your salary account. And did we mention, the check will be on a different bank, so that it will take 3 days after you deposit the check for money to come in? Of course, it's the 29th already, so your normal salary would probably have come in sooner!

These were the finance guys. The other ones, some other time.

If only they could change from Why it can't be done to Let's find out how we can make it happen!

In political or social discourse, or even in the drawing rooms of our country, a mention of Muslims flares up emotions. In most cases, they are extreme emotions: it is rather difficult to carry out an intelligent, rationale conversation based on arguments.



Of course, the polity of the nation has become such that things are completely polarised and false notions and data abound.



Recently, when Manmohan Singh talked about the need for affirmative action for Muslims, once again there was a big hoopla.



But do people stop for a moment to think about the Muslims they see around them?



I have two instances of blatant discrimination around my day to day life.



We bought a flat at one of the hot new real estate destinations in NCR, Indirapuram, a couple of years back.

And this was at the most professionally run of all the builders out there at that time. They were telling us about the kind of people who will inhabit the apartment complex: professionals: doctors, senior executives etc.



And here's the part that shocked me:



We are not selling to any Muslims. When they come asking, we tell them we're all sold.



Another one:

We just moved to a new home last month, and were looking for maids. The rates were way higher than at other places. One girl came in, started out asking a rate that was already 20% lower than the others, and looked clean, earnest and honest. But we didn't hire her. Reason? She was a muslim.



We really wanted to. Believe me, we did. But half of our parents and grandparents would probably refuse to visit us, because a Muslim had touched the kitchen. Perhaps they would have been ok if she did not enter the kitchen, but the response would have varied from " Oh my god, a Muslim" to "what's the urgency to hire a muslim? Aisa to h nahin hai ki hindu bai nahin mil rahin? Phir kya jaroorat hai"?



What is a muslim to do in the face of such discrimination? Don't they deserve some help and push from the people who can?

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Saw Crash recently. It was mesmerising. Every scene was a revelation. It captures a couple of days from the lives of a few people living in Los Angeles. The main characters are from different parts of the world: white americans, black americans, first generation arab immigrants, second generation arab immigrants, mexicans...



And mixes them all up: throws them together. They meet at various times, in varying contexts, with varying results. World view changing results. Your view of racism and race relations goes all topsy turvy. You learn of the complexities involved in the social lives of a multi-ethnic society. Real nuances, real detail.



At first, a lot of the characters seem to be from your regular movie, caricatures: the racist white policeman, the young black thug,... And then the twists start. The racist policeman is not. And the white anti-racist partner is.

Couples coping with their different ethnicities and what it means to the world. Racism is multi layered and not unidirectional. Layers get peeled, and new insights emerge.



There are some incredible turn of events, but they are all completely believable. And they all open new lines of thoughts.



Bottomline: 5 stars. Must watch. And tell me what you thought about it.

The office had a day long powercut today. They were testing the floodlights in the Mohali Cricket Stadium, in preparation for the Champions Trophy. And Mohali doesn't have enough power for both the city and the stadium, apparently. So we ran through hoops trying to keep our service up for customers, while the lights shown on the already bright grass.

If that's the situation in day time in test, what will it be like when the lights are on at night during a match? Chirag Taley Andhera? People all over the world watch the match, but someone with a home across the road can't?

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Animesh » Blog Archive » Who is your employee?
Animesh has an interesting post on it. I've added my thoughts here:

I think the family model is very well suited to a startup, mostly
because it is almost a necessity: in a startup, the boundary lines
between work and home and not well defined. In my experience, it is
true even if not all employees are white collar workers.

But keeping the same model as the company evolves into a bigger
organisation is probably not suitable and not feasible. You *want*
people to clearly delineate their professional and personal lives for a
better balance. And the returns to all stakeholders from the family
model become much lower.

Treating employees as customers is definitely the way to go. To me,
there is no other option. At least for the support functions, it should
be obvious that the rest of the organisation is their customers,
because, well, what else are they supporting?

Unfortunately, at least in India, that is often not the case.
Support functions often run as their own fiefdoms, and I think that
often goes on because the executive team doesn’t pay much attention to
them. I think the way to resolve this is to measure performance based
on customer feedback, as for the ‘core’ function. (But that’s
digressing…)

We did some bits and pieces automation on one of our projects over the last few months. It impressed some managers at our customer, who then asked to start a separate project to do end-to-end automation.
We just finished the first iteration. Now, once you have stuff set-up and configured, the following things happen every night:

• the application is built and packaged.
• The install elements: war, database dump, sql scripts, install instructions, release notes get copied to a release folder. The release is named by the timestamp.
• The application is installed and configured on a remote machine.
• The application is started on the remote machine.
• Some automated code review tools are run, and reports generated in a nice consolidated format.
• Junit tests are run on the deployed application, and code coverage reports are generated.
  

So, the next morning, when the team comes in, they know if some things broke. They can also spend 15 minutes running through the code review reports and test the application for sanity.

If a formal release needs to be made, that is also a single command : you just specify the tag name, and all of the above happens. In addition, source also gets tagged.

What's next: integrating canoo web test or some other similar tool with the deployed application, so that the nightly build can also do the sanity tests.

Finally, we are getting close to becoming the cool dudes of automation!

Just read the cover story of Business World of 6th Feb. They have rated the top 25 places to work at in India. Across industry sectors. Here are some excerpts I found interesting ( in that I've been trying to get some of these through at my workplace.) Here's some validation that these things do happen in India.

Many of the organisations in our list have unlimited sick leave, no attendance recording system and self-supervision as the norm.

True collaboration goes beyond employees setting the menu for the canteen… It requires an ability to share 'real power', as is reflected in RMSI's decision to empower employees to calculate their own performance bonuses.

Sasken prides itself on its 'single status' policy… All employees, including the co-founder, and eligible for the same travel benefits.

Amex… shares details of the salary ranges, how these were evolved and what comparator companies were used to determine them.

There is a direct relation between great places to work and superior financial performance…. During the period 1998-2002, an annually updated index of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for would have yielded a return of 9.86%, compared to -0.56% from the S&P 500.

(This one, of course, is US data)

At RMSI, when negotiating with those who leave, managers are forbidden from offering higher salaries as an incentive to stay back. At best, they can offer a different assignment or more responsibilities.

At JW Mariott, revenue and profit and loss figures are shared with all employees across levels, eve dishwashers.

At Aztec, to engage employees, CEO… sends out regular emails to them that are presonal, inspirational, and at times, even philosophical.

Sapient's senior-most bosses, its two managing directors, do not have their own rooms. Seriously. They do not even have their own cubicles or work stations.

At PSI Data Systems, employees were constantly kept updated of the company's true financial picture, orders that were in the pipeline and stragies that would change the company's performance. ( Even when the company was in the red.)