Software People Stories

In this conversation Nalini Krishnan, Head of Competency Management at TCS for the Salesforce business shares her views on her career with Chitra from PM Power consulting on - - How much of our making is our own thinking and doing - How much of the past we carry as baggage or bias - Picking up all kinds of challenges and getting out of one's comfort zone -Various ways of looking at problems - her 3-dimensional approach to addressing technical debt - experience managing customers & clients relationships. - Having different personas at work and at home - What the Grace Hopper Platform has meant to her personal growth - a message for women wishing to take up a career in IT Nalini currently heads Competency Management for the Salesforce.com practice in TCS, within Enterprise Application Systems group. Strategic focus on growth initiatives, Center growth & sourcing strategy, talent transformation initiatives etc. are some of her many focus areas Nalini has held many senior positons in IT Delivery, Transformational program managemet and Client Engagement, across various verticals in TCS. Prior to TCS she been a part of companies like Thomson Reuters, Symphony Services & Zensar Technologies, and has held positions of responsibilities across development, QA, release management and business strategy. A technologist, and a customer & business focused leader with more than 20 years of experience in the Industry, she is self driven, optimistic & result oriented professional with experience in building and sustaining a motivated & skilled team, and driving performance in a complex, global environment. Nalini is passionate about technology and business transformation, that helps organizations translate strategy into action with solid planning and execution. She is active in external forums such as GHC India (https://ghcindia.anitab.org/) (Part of advisory committee in 2016, committee chair, member and speaker in previous years, chair for TechTalk track in 2018) and IEEE –WIE Internalional Leadership conference (http://wie.ieee.org/ieeewieilsgoa2017/) (speaker 2015 & 2017).

In this conversation with Santhana Krishnan (SK), coach from PM Power Consulting and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore SK’s journey Fascinated by computers through the eyes of the Tamil writer Sujatha  Started as a tech entrepreneur setting up ERP for a spinning mill   Worked closely with different persona of users and ensuring usability  for tech agnostic members. Learnt true sense of agility by continuous integration, deployment and feedback While building India market for ThoughtWorks creating a trusted relationships as an important construct and that starts with genuine understanding of the risks and sharing with the customer to gain trust on the capabilities  Key metrics for agility - concept to cash, ability to recover from failure Agility in the Education field is a passion - look at adaptable syllabus and emerging models to use during crisis such as lockdown, floods Using concept maps, knowledge graphs to trace the learning curves of students and create a personalized learning experience Learning and Keeping beginners mindset to see convergence of AI/ML with concept maps and knowledge graphs SK can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/santhana-krishnan-ganapthy-01815b4/

In this conversation with Meera Chari from IEEE and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Meera’s journey Started as a computer engineer with curiosity and need to learn  Meera spoke about entering the electronic commerce world as a product engineer  Learnt from a mistake made during prod deployment made her acutely aware of software development need to be supported by disciplined infra management Layers of software along with security, latency, firewalls’ importance in problem solving Understanding big picture moved Meera from software engineer to an application architect and enterprise architect Disaster aware and fail tolerant application architecture based on a disaster that struck in the US East coach Sharing her experience in creating company’s IT roadmap and decisions and parameters behind them Cloud migration experience on critical business process that are deep rooted in enterprise applications Entire Economy moving towards API dynamics powered by SaaS solutions Cloud maturity is constantly changing by way of continual progression. This is leading to creation of new roles that are enabling cloud maturity and migration Key takeaways for listeners - Listen to your customer, keep an eye on big picture and being curious about technology user or an innovator

In this conversation, colleagues Srinivasan Sundararajan (Srini) and Chitra from PM Power Consulting are talking about Srini’s experiences and stories around - - A product of circumstances - Education at IIT Madras in Mechanical engineer, introduction to computing and problem solving by working across departments at IIT - Developing backup software in a manufacturing company and early lessons  - Examining data above and beyond - Risk taking, evaluating and owning your decisions - Transition from corporate (helping with solving a problem) to being an agile coach (helping people discover the solution) - Being a coach, facilitator & enabler & managing deliverables - Owning one's decisions

In this conversation with Thiagarajan (Thiagu) Ramakrishnan and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Thiagu’s experiences around ML journey Worked as software engineer in IBM,  ML Engineer in TeraData and Principal in Dell now Started the ML fascination with coursera course by Andrew Ng Research papers and meet-ups are a way of working in emerging technology on the multiplicative curve Benefited from the power of meetups to get clarity in way forward and continues to contribute in conferences, meetups and the likes Now working on creating ML platform and creating an abstraction layer for the users He learns ability to see big picture from seniors and takes one-step-at-a-time as a clear difference in mindset with millennials EQ 2.0 as an inspiration and Deep Work to improve high performance ML implementation in check clearance and how a Phone image and an API has solved the manual verification Looking forward toward appropriate product fitment and timing of the need while launching products More Information about Thiagu can be found here https://www.linkedin.com/in/thiagarajan-ramakrishnan/

In this conversation PM Power colleagues Ramki (Ramakrishnan Sethuraman) and Chitra explore Ramki’s experiences around How he got into software and IT Early programming days in C on mainframes and becoming a DB2 expert Change in mindset towards the what and why v/s how first Building performance into a system for a solid foundation Experience in the financial sector; at the forefront of adopting technology Essence of client interactions, empathy, value and understanding Playing several roles in his career and the importance of each of those roles Entrepreneurial lessons Being serious, passionate and having gratitude for his career

In this conversation with Karthi (Karthikeyan) Swaminathan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/) , Vice President and GM of Tact.ai and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Karthi’s experiences around Collaborations with doctors started in college Started working with products to customize and working closely with users Part of the open source movement and solve fellow developers problems Lost opportunities around cloud investments in the tool space Medical professionals creating an empathy for the end user by the developers in a big area of focus Staying focused with road warriors problem in Tact.ai with edge computing, AI and data Last decade has seen a tremendous shift in the designer/XD / Product talent Talks about rural students empowerment as a movement Embrace your journey with an open mindset Create space for the team to flourish their skills and mindset He can be reached via https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/  (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/)

This episode is an accompaniment and  a broad spectrum exploration of experiences and narratives as collated by Sivaguru from PM Power consulting, during conversations with people across IT/Software and Non-IT businesses on how they responded to the needs of business with covid-19 changing the environment. The complete report is available here (https://bit.ly/7lockdownlessons) This episode, a conversation between Sivaguru & Chitra, delves into and across the findings shared in the report. The exploration includes - - Backstories in preparations for changes caused by the pandemic  - What really happened even when a few large companies had a BCP in place - What was the thinking behind the unravelling of responses of companies in a series of phases comprising sensing, focus and response - How did leaders ensure that rallying around a purpose was achieved, remotely and how were employees engaged and how their work rose to another level inspired by a greater purpose - Creative approaches to sustaining or managing business  - The sense that a collective approach to discovering easier, safer things to share & increased empathy alongside the survival instinct - Though we all appear to be alone, we are certainly not alone; a contrast and take on how we associate ourselves with a mission and purpose and how the system in turn supports people and organizations. We would love to hear from you and your experiences. Please reach out to us at podcasts@pm-powerconsulting.com Please also see this blog http://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/7-lockdown-lessons-on-agility/ for an overview of the report

Rajiv Puranik, VP platform engineering and cloud operations at Vocera Communications & Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting are in conversation as Rajiv shares His professional experience with Twillio, Apigee, Yahoo before Vocera covering corporate, engineering roles as well as startups What developers should know, when building products, the ‘-ities’, beyond the algorithms A personal devops horror story  How developers can have empathy of what happens after code is written Devops is the first line of defence, and engineers are the second line About differences in the safetynet, depending on company size or areas of operation His tips for techies taking on leadership / managerial roles to be effective His mantra for scaling as a leader What the forced work from home implies for individuals and leaders in their approaches to work How one should move to a nurturing style, even if starting with a directive approach, to develop others Why quality is a business metric What is acceptable quality Making decisions when there is ambiguity The impact of AI in decision making and leadership responsibilities What he enjoys most about his career When it comes to career decisions, the one question everyone should ask themselves Rajiv can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivpuranik/

Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting is speaking with Badri Narayanan, Vice President of HCL Technologies Ltd Geography and culture aspects of IT delivery plays a critical role in not just UX/UD Communication/ project mgmt and various inter dependencies Roll mapping of local talent in critical roles and having close business relationship are key things to put in play for long term success Bridging cultural differences in Japan was around having additional business analysts with bi lingual capability to understand specs and pair program with the developers to ensure gaps are reduced German teams needed accuracy in functionality as much as the accompanying documentation Change in expectations in IT landscape with integrated business & IT Several changes have happened from owning small functions in y2k to smaller SDLC parts to owning entire app stack we have grown quite a bit Digital tsunami needs dual crossing with owning IT and making IT more valuable IT Decision are continuous and not be outsourced to only a nuanced role Conscious relearning is required to re-equip ourselves in the new digital world in terms of technology and soft skills Business outcomes would need to be innovation led and internal teams/systems need to be delivery/engineering led - Dual engine  Learnings from failure and crystalize them to the next level seems to be the way forward to accelerate the art and marry the engineering discipline