Shop Floor experience with Ramesh Rajagopal

This is part 1 of a 2 episode conversation. In this episode, Ramesh Rajagopal, a Coach at PM Power Consulting, shares his experience related to

• Growing up in Madurai, a major temple town 
• Learning Tamil, though his grandparents were from Karnataka
• His temple visits, on the way to school as well as on specific occasions
• Moving to Bangalore and seeing the changes over the decades
• Passing out as topper in his school for the SSLC grade
• Choosing to switch colleges to study with his cousin
• Developing a talent - in his own words  -of sleeping in moving buses, whether sitting or standing
• Learning the importance of extra curricular activities
• Applying to TELCO, based on a newspaper ad
• Asking for a role in R&D, though TELCO was a predominantly manufacturing organization and getting it
• Not being able to join as planned, due to his father’s health, but being able to make it a little later, when things got better
• Understanding that work culture varies from context to context and his interesting experience on the shop floor with his manager
• Importance of practical experience on the shop floor
• Taking interest in and learning computers
• Leveraging his engineering and manufacturing experience to help the software development teams in L&T
• Joining GE and diving deeper into software engineering
• With a focus on systems, getting an opportunity to lead the quality function
• Four stages in career development: learning, doing, guide others, shape people by laying the path
• Getting into Agile approaches

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.