Software People Stories

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches. In this episode, Chitra shares her views with Shiv on - Why this mode of working feels like a disruption - Dispersal in nature v/s whats happening now - What teams can do - in terms of holding each other and creating virtual circles of trust - What individuals can do - in terms of acknowledging what they are feeling, sticking with routines and doing at least 1-2 things each day - Looking out and appreciating nature around us with hope that this too shall pass

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches. In this episode, S Srinivasan or Srini as he is popularly known, shares his views on - The word from agile values - "over" - What people can use "over" as to discover a higher order purpose - Loss of water cooler moments & side-bar conversations - Formal remote work mechanisms would work, but.. - Social distancing and isolation - Planned banter & a sense of belonging - Inducting new joinees into an organization at this time

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches. The first one, by S Sivaguru is captured via his blog here (http://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/tips-for-a-suddenly-dispersed-team/) . He shares perspectives on - Distributed v/s dispersed teams - Tips on time planning, Home planning and work activities We'd love to hear from you. Please do write in podcasts@pm-powerconsulting.com

In the second episode for the women’s special in the month of March, Gayathri and Chitra from PM Power Consulting are in conversation with Jacintha Jayachandran, Author, Coach & HR professional and Sushma Joshi a communication & employee engagement specialist who have worked for tech companies. They share stories of their non-IT roles and working with IT professionals and cover topics such as  - Coming to IT by accident; the journey from pharma and journalism to IT Understanding the vocabulary and language  Culture shocks and back to work after a decade, stepping from a victorian era to plush officers Building relationships versus being pushers, connecting with business to build partnerships in IT HR in IT as partners in governance rather than policy or process makers 7 blind men and the elephant, perceptions about the role of  communication & employee enagement   Importance of respect and understanding roles to becoming a powerful collaborator and active listener to enable the right culture Software people love their data points and HR can bring more agility leaving aside ego Moving  towards a  Narrative 2.0 where we can do career pacing.  Discovering and enabling women’s core strength work  The empty nest syndrome and tapping into an ecosystem to pace and chart alternate career graphs Having role models and getting success with happiness is key Networking a super-critical act and starting with your local organization  Staying authentic to yourself and expecting the same from others without judgement Our guests - Sushma Joshi is the Employee Engagement, Culture and Experience Leader at Symantec in Pune. She is also a passionate DEI evangelist. Sushma started her career as a journalist with the Maharashtra Herald and came to the IT world after a break of a decade when she joined Nihilent Technologies and later Persistent systems. She has spent the last 13 years with Symantec where she has a diverse set of roles across such as a global content strategist, communications consultant to the leadership team, partnering with engineering product groups to drive innovation and driving employee engagement. Sushma has a BA (Hons) in English from University of Kolkata and Bachelors of Communication and Journalism, media and mass communication from the University of Pune Jacintha Jayachandran In a span of 25 years in professional life, she has been an integral part of and led teams in defining best in class talent management practices in organizations such HP, Infosys, OnMobile and in the past 10 years as an entrepreneur has co-founded 2 organizations; Transcendix a Training and Development organization and LeadNOW an organization enabling women to start, stay and soar in their careers by providing research based solutions. Jacintha is a seeker, a learner, a human in the pursuit of living a meaningful and authentic life, also an entrepreneur, author, teacher and public speaker; who has inspired over 40,000 participants in various learning and coaching engagements across organizations and domains and geographies. She is Trustee and chief volunteer at HopeWorks foundation which is currently impacting 500 girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to live , learn and grow with Hope. She has also served as the evangelist trainer , member/head ethics committee and compliance and coordinated all Posh related processes at Infosys Technologies, Infosys BPO, OnMobile Global Ltd. Eli Lilly, SFL, Enquero Global amongst others. She recently co-authored and published the book Words Matter aimed at women and girls. Jacintha is certified in change management from Cornell University, certified in conflict management through mediation by Meta culture and is a post graduate in Social work from Bangalore university

We begin our special series for the month of March in celebration of Women's day with 4 episodes.  In this one, Maggie Imbamuthaiah Managing Director of Anita Borg India India is in conversation with Chitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting where she shares her experiences and perspectives on Bringing technical women together through stories How women easily fall into an isolation trap Discovering and working with exceptional women Cultivating a place for support for entrepreneurs - a possible way to sustain in future Sustaining businesses & innovation, creating safe spaces to be vulnerable and thrive Balancing passion and practicality through diverse capabilities  Having a personal board in addition to a company board; in addition to having a solid revenue model, watching costs and getting the right talent Picking up comp sc in college and liking creativity in programming Joining Infosys in its early days and cutting teeth with software development Starting in tech, learning personas through OOP Liked being an interface between technology and business Why design thinking and solutioning remain key skills Her personal transformations through yoga and being a teacher of yoga Focusing on the present to be purposeful Future of tech and what to be watchful for, asking the right questions and bringing one’s concious self to work A Message for listeners Maggie Inbamuthaiah (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiei/) is Managing Director of AnitaB.org in India. She works with various community and Technology organizations to advance careers of women in technology and on the various programs including the flagship event Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI - https://ghcindia.anitab.org) She is  a big believer in equal opportunities across gender, social status and backgrounds. This has led her and her friends to create Mandram (www.mandram.org), a platform to curate ideas and talks in native languages so that they can reach people across the social diaspora with no impediment of language.  She was the Co-Founder of Employee Experts (www.employeeexperts.com) and MyCampusDays (www.mycampusdays.com). A great learning experience that helped me work on end to end aspects of running an organization from people to sales. In her corporate career spanning ANZ, Infosys and Dell Computers, she has led many global Technical/ operational projects and and led virtual teams across Asia. She has a Post Graduate degree in HR Management and Organizational Behaviour from University of London (College of Birkbeck) and am a Computer Science Engineer from NIT, Tiruchirapalli. She writes regularly on the technology, gender and social equality and occasional philosophy on LinkedIn and various other topics on my blog "A balcony with a view" at https://maggiei.wordpress.com. She is a runner, yoga practitioner and teacher and an environmentalist at heart.

In this conversation, Mani Ratnam, Senior Vice President at Strategic Education Inc shares his  thoughts and experiences, with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, related to: The transition from being a techie to someone visualizing and creating a larger impact How wanting to take ownership of the impact helped in this transition over time Getting guidance from many experienced mentors and learning by doing / failing Using a data driven experimentation approach, based on some formal models such as lean thinking, six sigma etc Understanding the user personas and their challenges when designing the key value propositions for the company Why data alone is not sufficient to make decisions His views on delivering knowledge not just in tie, but also just enough as needed at that moment The significance of a culture of innovation  Encouraging teams to take risks How to help new team members think team results above individual contributions His thoughts on work life balance Getting teams aligned to a larger goal His perspective on the future of IT as a career option, and his own learning in this career Mani Ratnam is a Senior executive with deep business and technology experience leading Strategic Business Transformation initiatives and Operations. His Specialties include: Strategic Planning, Information Technology, Product Development, Big Data, Analytics, Customer Experience, Operations, CRM (SalesForce). He can be reached at: www.linkedin.com/in/mani-ratnam-6812044  (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.linkedin.com_in_mani-2Dratnam-2D6812044&d=DwMFAg&c=bzqg8wBG-gmCffjjhiRy9RUbPhJ6AtQiizA-WVtoiSk&r=sXnBnMpFCw7fwo0iMNgQ1knmlCaviVvmE-p5pRkTjh0&m=dNRh88K60K8BHElfY2Tal5hihHqfrvYAS79U2VkyJy0&s=oydhc4HDRCi4YTyWTzqJ7YcGo2jc5bCFSr52PTSHiaM&e=) mani.ratnam@strategiced.com

In this conversation Ved Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) at Trianz, shares his perspectives and experiences with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, about: His education in engineering and management His experience as a techie Being the first person in the company to lead an industry vertical How he was asked to make knowledge management more effective in wipro;  what, he thought would be a 2 year stint, became the turning point in his career The opportunities he saw in making larger impact and hence taking up new roles in other organizations Bridging an engineering mindset that may need clear specifications to the KM domain, where many things could be exploratory How his doing an MBA helped him become a knowledge oriented person The key role for a knowledge officer What is the role of knowledge management in the context of startups and beyond organizational boundaries Adopting some simple practices, such as scrum and using simple techniques to manage collective knowledge in startups  His thoughts on whether AI and ML will replace knowledge management professionals The traits needed to be a successful KM professional and the opportunities as a career in KM Ved Prakash is a well-recognized senior industry professional with a global experience of 28 years in a variety of leadership roles with strategic, business and operational responsibilities. He is currently Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) at Trianz, a Silicon Valley based Management Consulting firm helping Fortune 1000 organizations transition to a digital enterprise. He is also an independent KM Strategy Consultant to other organizations, guiding them on their knowledge transformation journeys. Prior to this, he spearheaded Knowledge Management at Montreal-headquartered CGI Inc. He led a large business transformation program across the organization there and was also a member of the Global Application Services Council at CGI. Ved was with Wipro Technologies for two decades where he was the CKO in his last role. Under his leadership, Wipro was the proud recipient of Global, Asian and Indian MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) Awards and was also granted a US patent on KM. Amongst other leadership roles at Wipro, he led the Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical with P&L responsibilities, and incubated and grew the Energy and Utilities business as the Practice Head. Ved has been an invited speaker in many national and international forums. He has been a driving force over the past many years in the conduct of CII Knowledge Summit, the annual flagship event on KM. He has consulted organizations across the world and across industries on their KM strategies. Ved is on the India Jury of Global MIKE (Most Innovative Knowledge Enterprise) Awards. He has been a member of several industry bodies including KM Global Network, KM Advisory Committee at National e-Governance Division of central Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, CII National Committee on KM and Business Transformation, and Bureau of Indian Standards National Committee for KM Standards. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and a B.Tech in Computer Engineering where he was a Gold Medalist.

In this episode, Balakrishnan Sreenivasan - a Distinguished Engineer with IBM shares his perspectives with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting on His experience that led to becoming a distinguished engineer How one has to internalize and abstract models [such as TOGAF] to solve large enterprise problems Starting with documenting an existing architecture.. How hard could that be - until you realize the possible ways in which it can be used On whether he has seen Conways law in practice How abstracting shared or common services helps simplify organizational design as well How he got to thinking of problems from an organization or business point of view, rather than technology alone How to look at microservices to enable robust architectures The dimensions an enterprise architect should know, when considering cloud based solutions How an architect balances the anticipation of future technology and the need to implement something today by the dev teams Benefits of embedding Site Reliability Engineers into dev squads An experience from a delivery transformation exercise to reduce the average release cycle from 3 months to 3 weeks Implications of mixing and matching homegrown and open source components in enterprise solutions Shifts in business models with the acceptance of ‘... as a service’ concepts The blurring lines across industries Considerations for building ecosystem based solutions His tip for future proofing one’s career in IT Balakrishnan Sreenivasan is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Officer in IBM's Global Business Services. He is a Subject Matter Expert in Cloud Transformation, Application Modernization, DevOps, Application Operations on cloud, Offering development & enterprise architecture He is a Technical Advisor, who guides senior client executives on IT strategy and enterprise architecture including Cloud strategy across varied industries. Capability in offering Client Services for Cloud Application Services in IBM's Global Business Services (GBS); As a Thought Leader, he bridges the gap between IT and Business to improve business flexibility and agility using approaches such as BizDevOps, Cloud, Microservices & API economy. Responsible for cloud computing, DevOps Transformation and Hybrid Cloud / Multi-Cloud Architecture. Bala is recognized as a Cloud Solutions Evangelist for Cloud adoption including DevOps transformation with excellence in ensuring continuous improvement of Cloud offerings and building Cloud-scale data services.

Tune into this episode, a deep exploratory conversation between Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting and Rinka Singh, Co-Founder, AccelerateFire shares his stories of  Being a serial start-up-person Doing things outside of the day job, including starting the Software Process Improvement Network (BSPIN), Bangalore How he got interested in quality, process etc The experience of getting representatives from many organizations to come together and share data Some of the driving thoughts behind the open source movement, and Linux, in particular Can the NIH syndrome be broken to help with opensource adoption? How an external [customer] trigger pushes internal adoption What would be one overarching reason to use open source About the value proposition of superior performance for the lucene search engine, from his startup How github is helping small companies and developers Need for and possible implications of creating new ways of developing software Zero cost reviews in open source Trends influencing the software development process, including the limitations of hardware Challenges in computing posed by large volumes of data - and dark data The need to look beyond the von Neumann model of computing His career advice to those aspiring for careers in IT or are looking at the next stage of growth Rinka has conceived and is working on a Technology Startupcurrently early stage.  He has previously defined and implemented product road-maps, managed multi-million $ contracts out of India and has participated in Industry Forums his company representative.  His technology and domain experience is in the systems software and protocols which covers various processors (ARM, ATmega, x86, VIA, Alpha, Sparc, boards from Motorola, Arduino & TI), various OSs (VxWorks, pSOS & various flavors of Unices) and both Datacom (TCP/IP & IPv6 stacks, WAN & Routing protocols) and Telecom (ATM, ISDN, etc). His specializations include architecting, product and technical management organization management, delivery and people management .

In this conversation between Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting & Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirit Foundation, Sharad shares several off the beaten track perspectives on His multi-threaded career navigated via multiple s-curves How to create innovative software products, a dual immersion necessity If you read it in the news, dont follow it! Solving problems through different layers of work happening in different realms - the apple and android battery case. Understanding your personality archetype and going from good to great. Developing a contrarian mindset Sharad's has three decades of experience in the Internet, Enterprise Software, and Digital Infrastructure markets and is a prominent voice in India's technology ecosystem. Sharad is a passionate evangelist of the software product ecosystem in India. He co-founded iSPIRT Foundation, a non-profit technology think tank devoted to making India a product nation. Earlier, he Chaired NASSCOM Product Forum in its formative years and was a member of the NASSCOM Executive Council from 2009-13. Sharad co-founded Teltier Technologies Inc., and is an active technology angel investor with over two dozen investments. He was also instrumental in the success of India's first IP focussed fund, India Innovation Fund. Sharad has held several senior R&D executive positions with leading technology companies, including Yahoo, VERITAS Software, Symantec, Lucent Technologies, and AT&T. Zinnov gave him the R&D Visionary Award in 2008 for his work on creating a strong MNC R&D footprint in India. Sharad is a member of SEBI's Financial and Regulatory Technology Committee. He has also served on RBI's UK Sinha MSME Committee and National Digital Payments Committee. Sharad got interested in kernel software development while doing his Electrical Engineering at Delhi College of Engineering. He started India's first Student Minicomputer Club in 1984 as served as the Chairperson of the IEEE Student Chapter.