Building respectful relationships with Ramesh Rajagopal

We continue our conversation with Ramesh Rajagopal, a coach at PM Power Consulting. In the first part he shared his origin story and also experiences of his childhood and career. In this episode, he continues to share more details about

• Leveraging his lean manufacturing experience to get into Agile approaches and becoming an Agile evangelist
• Working in a company wide transformation planning process
• Being summoned to the office one day,early morning - to be told that his position being made redundant, just a few months before a planned retirement
• The support he got from his wife
• Getting an opportunity to work in Malaysia
• Becoming a trainer and exploring certification opportunities - such as SPC when he was 63
• The transferable skills from his manufacturing career that he was able to use in IT as well
• Importance of communication and the need to relate to the people one interacts with.
• The importance of respecting dignity of every person and understanding their value systems
• Teamwork and giving credit wherever it is due
• Being a continuous learner
• Being a listener 90% of the time while interacting with others
• How to become a better influencer to ensure results, by maintaining a respectful relationship and not limit interactions to only transactions
• Understanding the aspirations and motivations of individuals first before helping
• His personal practices to develop empathy as a person based on
• The Sahaja Marg or heartfulness approach
• His career advice and tips for persons who want to get into IT from other domains

He started my career as an R&D engineer at the Engineering Research Centre at Tata Motors (TELCO) in 1981, then he joined L& T during 1984, initially as a Design Engineer for Earthmoving machines. Later, he moved into Manufacturing Planning. He joined GE India Technology Center during end 2000, as a Project Manager-Delivery and stayed with the organization as it later changed hands to become GXS and OpenText. He also worked as a consultant for the Agile Transformation group for 4 years at Standard Chartered Bank, Kuala Lumpur helping teams and teams of teams to adopt to the new ways of working – from Technology teams, Retail Teams to Data and Privacy teams.

With over four decades of experience which includes over 20+ years in software Product development, Delivery, Quality and several years in manufacturing domains of Automobile and Earth moving equipment, mow a Principal consultant at PM Power, part of Agile Transformation and DevOps Service lines.