“IT consulting is a field that focuses on advising businesses on how best to use information technology to meet their business objectives. In addition to providing advice, IT consultancies often implement, deploy, and administer IT systems on businesses' behalf.”
The key phrase here is “meet business objectives”. This is the center point of any services company on the paper. This phrase will be imbibed into almost every literature associated with services or consulting IT firm. Be it the “documented” values page or training materials or induction problems or in fact the annual reports. Now, it looks like such a harmless and simple phrase. The person who must have thought and coined it must have been very intelligent and foresighted. But then Communism when conceptualized was supposed to have set right all the wrongs that the world has seen. We all know the history. Why did we go there? It is because a phrase that looks so simple and logical when misused can be a very powerful weapon just like communism was in the hands of several tyrants.
Remember the day you got out of your reputed colleges and joined one or the other services firm. I am sure all do. Now, there were some lucky ones who got into product development. Let’s forget the chaos theory and ignore this small natural disturbance to the normal process of one joining a services firm. Almost in every services firm the inductee gets some initial training. This training will help him understand how the real world works and also he is made to believe that he will work on the things that he was trained for. Don’t laugh guys… You all thought that it would be like that!!! Then you get allocated to a project. It has no relation between what you were trained and what the project is all about. As a fresher one takes time to realize what he is getting into. The famous phrases used by manager to tell the more persistent guys are “It is the best learning opportunity you will have”…. “One has to be flexible to make it big in the industry”… “You stick with me and you will go places”… Poor chap, falls trap in many cases. That’s how the resource allocation happens. Business needs, client needs… Bull shit right… I mean to meet client’s business needs you need the person best suited for that job or the one who has the attitude to get that work done… But then the one who is free is taken and put into that and the client is informed that he is the best and then… show just goes on…. This is what happens with lesser experienced people…
What about the ones who have been there and done that? It’s not much different but then the way is handled well might have been a paradigm shift in the IT management when it was first thought about…
Imagine a person who is joining a big firm after working in smaller firms and has already proved his mettle. He is an expert in his field of work. So this big firm hires him and promises him things that he can’t get in the small firm like higher pay, onsite or designation etc etc… The person who is joining knows that it will be difficult to get all this, but then joins hoping that at least his job will be safer and his expertise will take him places. Very logical I must say. Logic and rationale can be used to resolve or fight issue with “Sense”. What will you fight non-sense with? It is the most underestimated intellectual or rather foolish power. The power of non-sense!!! So when this person joins, he is treated well, generally and then asked to take session on the knowledge that he has so that his “visibility” increases and he can climb the ladder faster. Poor chap, his confidence is boosted and he takes all the sessions and explains many things that he knows… Meanwhile a very good project comes in. Before he realizes in front of his eyes people who he trained use the jargons that he taught them. They portray that they are experts and grab that project based on there contacts with the top management. What happens to this guy? He is been named as an expert trainer. Funny right? The best person for the job is training people and the project is getting screwed. Today’s recession has added to this. When one goes to the top management with his concerns of the job role he is playing and the under utilization of his skills; he is told that the times are bad and he needs to be flexible. Does the story end here? No sir! There is more… As it had to happen, the project in which the blue eyed boy managed to enter gets screwed up!! Nothing works… The client is furious… All this for the value “Focus on client’s needs”… So some big shot pitches in… Calls all the managers and asks them who can fix this… Definitely, our poor chap’s name comes in… He is appointed as “Subject Matter Expert” and sent to this screwed up project to fix it. Timelines are in-human. The reasoning, again “Client Focus and Business Needs” have forced us to take this decision bla bla bla… Would the project be screwed up in case the person best suited for the job would be put in that? There are a plethora of different ways the experience and expertise is wasted other than the one pointed out. Like, put that person in a previous version of the same technology; put that person in a role that is just to look over the happenings; put him in a pseudo-management role with power on just paper; etc etc etc… At the end of this all, the entity that loses in the long run is the software service industry as a whole.
“IT consulting is a field that focuses on advising businesses on how best to use information technology to meet their business objectives which closely aligns with the implementation expertise that the consulting company boosts to have. In addition to providing advice, it often implements, deploys, and administers IT systems on businesses' behalf in order to fit in “there” people who eventually screw up and allow the company to use more people to fix and thus make more revenue”
Good one.
ReplyDeleteAs a remark, the most important quality we look for in a person is 'learn-ability' :)