52: Helping Society in Many Ways

This is a conversation between Hariprakash Agrawal, Entrepreneur & Agile Coach with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, where Hari talks about: Graduating from IIT Kharagpur and coming to Bangalore Taking up a process related role as a fresher Starting his first company ‘OpCord’ for optimization and coordination Building his first automation Creating a product based on Excel to create BDD [Business Driven Development] based tests Starting a solution for car pooling, to address some common social challenges such as pollution How he encountered he bumpy road of carpooling solutions and its impact on the OpCord business Pivoting to a B2B model and adding cab services His preference to being a systems or process thinker How he had to convince about his interest to join a CMM course And how that led to him getting a new job Some differences between developing application software and embedded software The need to think of mistake-proof designs to reduce possibilities of errors, such as poka yoke Giving architects and designers their due recognition How a fresher caught an inconsistency in error messages How starting up is much more than an app or just software Work life balance for an entrepreneur Getting new joiners to be excited about the company purpose Advice for people aspiring to get into IT About our Guest: Hariprakash (Hari) is a serial entrepreneur and an enterprise agile coach. He is Founder/CEO of RideAlly Travels (Cabs, Taxis, Carpool), OpCord Consultancy (Consulting/Training) and also an Enterprise Agile Coach. He started RideAlly platform in 2011 and formed RideAlly company in 2015 which offers cabs services and custom-made ride-sharing platform to corporates.
   As an agile coach, he has transformed 200+ teams using various Agile practices from Scrum, XP, Kanban, SAFe, Lean etc. He has taken care of agile transformations at ABB, Cisco (SBG/CSTG groups), PayPal (DT division, CE2 program), Mango Technologies (acquired by Qualcomm), eRevMax, Sigma Infosolutions, Cosmonet solutions etc. Prior to 2009, he worked in SEPG/QA at Freescale, MindTree, STMicroelectronics and Sharp to enable processes based on Agile, ISO, CMMi, CMM, Six Sigma, PMP, RUP etc. He is an active volunteer and have served many NGOs, like, Rotary Club, BSPIN, Suncity Apartments Associations (1200+ flats), ASCI, Alumni Association, Orphanages etc. On academics, he is an M-Tech from IIT-Kharagpur in Reliability & Quality Engineering and BE from MBM, Jodhpur in Mining Discipline.  His detailed profile can be accessed at LinkedIn,http://in.linkedin.com/in/hariprakash/ His other social media handles: 1. Twitter -  @hariprakash 2. LinkedIn - @hariprakash 3.  Facebook - hariprakash.agrawal