IoT (Internet of Things) OR IoB (Internet of Business)?

Due to technology, internet has been revolutionized from boffins to geeks to masses to mobility to Internet of Things. The impact has been felt in different segments like education, healthcare, communications, business, entertainment, logistics etc. As per different sources, when population of the world is expected to be 7.6 billion by 2020, the connected device per person would go up to 6.58!

RFID, Sensors, Smart Tech and Nano Tech are few critical technologies that are contributing to IoT. With an invention, come challenges and issues – Society (People, security, privacy), Environmental aspects and indeed Technological challenges (Standards, interoperability, interfaces, governance etc). Imagine how gamification itself is leveraged creatively by people as a part of this. Yes, you guessed right. We have also started strategizing how ITSM (IT Service Management), BSM (Business Service Management) or for that matter, simply Service Management would be integrated as a part of this revolution.

Last week when I was checking into departure gate at the airport, the security guard seemed very curious to know the model of my smart phone. When I told him that it is Lumia, it appeared that he was keener to know the specific Lumia model and what benefits it offered over others! While checking in a hotel, the staff told me why he preferred Windows mobile over an Android and listed out top 10 justified reasons towards it! I am sure you seldom get surprised today when an auto-rickshaw driver asks you to check the shortest route to the destination and promises to charge based on the distance showed by Google Maps. I am not referring to the rude ones whose intention is to simply take advantage of the situation and rob you by charging 1.5 or 2 times the actual fare. Even consider how the announcements are made automatically in air-conditioned Volvo buses in Bangalore using GPS when it is about to reach the next bus stop.

I was wondering if we can take this concept a tad higher by considering business aspects. Indeed the technology aspects using RFID, Nano Tech etc continue to remain; however, applying it from business context and considering a holistic view seems more meaningful to me. For instance, tapping the details of sugarcane industry required for alcohol or medicinal business, which in turn is related with the location of where the sugarcane are grown, linking it with the climatic conditions, its impact in different seasons of the year, the water levels and availability of labor due to scarcity of water, social and economic values associated with it, the interests in farming that may hamper the business due to a change in political party in that area or due to fluctuating prices of fertilizers/gasoline etc. Similarly, one may want to extend the other end of the industry related with alcohol, the ban that may be introduced in certain states, the impact of illegal products being manufactured, change in behavioral patterns or import/export policies etc. Consider applying it to education, healthcare, automobile, banking, travel etc sectors.

To put it more lucidly, I think that we should not just merely consider IoT and develop the world around it. Let the leaders/experts in respective domains/business strategize the business aspects and then leverage IoT as per the business requirements, NOT the other way round. The saying ‘Drive thy business or it will drive thee’ is very apt in this context. I will shortly be publishing another blog or White Paper around this topic. Interested readers can share the feedback, reach out to me or keep in tuned

Sharpening the saw (focus)

One of the lessons that I have learnt few months ago is to keep evaluating the progress regularly. What I mean is that when the organization is young and small, it is evident to get involved in many activities and sometimes, that makes to lose the focus from a few critical activities like evaluating the progress more frequently.

We have been re-aligning with our vision (to be the most preferred ITSM/BSM partner for our customers) for past few months and I am glad that we have been able to come up with many creative solutions to contribute towards resolving pain areas of our customers. We constantly monitor on how the needs of customers are changing and most importantly, how they are evolving due to the changes in market. We seem to have laser focus on this and indeed have achieved a decent mastery on solutioning front.

We have always welcomed feedback and acted, where it has helped us to improve while not straying away from our vision. We are occasionally told by few prospects to consider providing the consultants in bulk. What essentially they intend to tell us is that a)they do not want to take the risk of hiring more people b)they want us to provide them expensive consultants at a very cheap price. What I do not agree is that they miss out to think of Win-Win result. Also, they tend to pat their backs assuming that they save few pennies to get inexperienced contractors only to realize it later that the cost would have been saved significantly if they would have hired few genuine consultants instead. Don’t get us wrong. It is not an attitude issue. Would Ferrari or Rolls Royce provide average cars for average price? We know that we don’t enjoy that kind of branding today; however, providing average quality service or less competent contractor does not just align with our philosophy. Sometimes, not doing what few are expecting, and which is not as per our vision, helps us to avoid getting distracted.

This has also led us to think on exploring other aspects. I am happy to share that we have not been late in acting on that. We have recently partnered with one of the best ITSM product organizations. We have already finalized in partnering with another French based ITSM product organization. We will also be partnering with another ITSM product org which is Bangalore based. While I think that partnering with such organizations would certainly help to mutually expand the horizons, we are already in discussions with another organization that has a great coverage in Middle East and APAC. This alignment will give us more exposure to bigger market while it will help our counterpart to save a significant cost by partnering with us.

And this is what I mean to sharpening our focus truly when I titled this blog. Am looking forward to share some of the lessons in next few blogs that I have learned when we went through rough patch, shortly. In fact, we have become more stronger in taking right decisions on time and strategizing the objectives. You’ll realize why I have started hating happy day scenarios as they seem to slow down the learning curve by putting us in a very comfort zone. By the way, when was the last time you had sharpened the saw?

Avoid complicating things…

Its Jason Fried of 37 Signals who said “Its simple until you make it complicated“. I agree. It really is, until one starts making it complicated. Let me share a recent, relevant experience…

eStomi had had agreed to be vendors to one of our customers to provide niche consultancy on a technology that it had decided not to work on. However, after few discussions, the team realized that the technology which our customer was requesting consultancy on, has become niche. Hence, we decided to consider offering consultancy in that domain too. The challenge was to identify expert/leader who would help us to deliver it without compromising on our quality/reputation. We learnt that one of the organization (let’s call it as XYZ) had approached our customer to fulfil the same needs. However, our customer wasn’t convinced about their capabilities and had rejected their proposal.

Incidentally, we identified to partner with the same organization (XYZ) since they had core expertise but not a strong delivery mechanism or good operational support. I met with their leader to explore the possibilities of partnering for a mutually successful model where in we can leverage their core expertise and provide consultancy to our customer. In the beginning, he had expressed concerns and had doubts whether we would be able to work together as we may be competing for the same customer. After assuring that we would never breach each others’ their trust, the leader agreed to work with us. He also realized that he stood a very little chance to get an order from our customer on his own. In the event, he also realized that the dependency is mutual and they would have to rely on us for ITSM/ITIL consultancy. I slightly differ on what Mark Zucerkberg said. I think the trick is to add the stuff, not take away. Today, we have an agreement signed between us to work collectively to grow together.

It was a win-win scenario for all the three parties as our customer was very keen to have B2B model. I think that this is the beauty of being small orgs wherein, you talk to the decision makers straight away, express the thoughts, work out a mutually beneficial solution and close the matter.

Benjamin Franklin very aptly said what I intended to share in the entire blog, in one line- “We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”.

Article submitted towards SiliconIndia CEO-City

Let us accept that any good transaction needs a proper Give & Take. If there is nobody to take, you can’t give. The same philosophy applies in business as well. I firmly believe that nobody should invoice their customers without contributing value to their business lifecycle. Vendors/Partners give service and customers take it. How can one ensure that this transaction is fair? Well, by being expert in relative domain/skills/technology. Indeed, there are other parameters to make it successful and fair. However, if you don’t even have expertise/knowledge of that skills/domain, it becomes a time consuming activity. Moreover,  it also may be considered as cheating to an extent since you learn that expertise/skills at the expense of customers while you are expected to provide services for that cost.

We tend to achieve a fair transaction by keeping our model simple. We understand the customer requirements and THEN get an expert who will be able to do value addition and yet get his career aligned by working on that project/assignment. Yes, we don’t keep anybody on bench and are candid with our customers on the timelines that we take to get the appropriate expert on board. The customer too understands the market and knows that the wait is worth it.

We start our relationship with our employees and customers with trust and confidence. We do not take either of them for granted. We respect their individuality, skills and thought process and give them enough freedom. Rome was not built in a day. We understand the process and constantly keep evaluating it periodically. We are in a process of creating world class technical leaders and consultants. When you are in the field, you have only two choices – Beat or get beaten. What I mean is that either you win or lose the project or succumb to customer antics or politics. The choice is yours. Indeed ethics and attitude come into picture that decide how you manage the situation without getting diluted.

At eStomi, the vision and mission is imbibed in all team members – To be the most sought ITSM/BSM partner/vendor for our customers. Every single employee demonstrates that they are brand ambassadors of eStomi. We do not undertake assignments of small durations. Our consultancy period, especially for Remedy is for a year or 18 months at the least. We provide technical thought leadership that helps to achieve business goals. We try to help the customer by providing services remotely, especially for OTRS consultancy, wherever possible. This helps to save the cost of our customers. Since we are clear in terms of what we are getting paid, we do not hesitate the let the customer know which is in and out of scope. We do not hesitate to ask for payments if we have really added the value. There has been an instance where in we couldn’t complete about 5% of activities due to limitations/dependency of Operating System. We never asked our customer to pay for that as there was no way to provide a solution in that case. At the same time, there has been an instance where in we decided to cut off the relationship with a large customer since the customer didn’t seem interested to oblige the payment for several months despite giving them plethora of services (worth several lacs) free of cost hoping for a long term relationship. You see, it was only a “Take” transaction and never mutually beneficial.

On the other hand, we have a set of customers where in there is a mutual admiration and we work hand in hand so much so that they do not talk to their customers without involving us being in meetings. We have been able to demonstrate our capabilities by completing their major milestones in a month or two that were pending for over year and a half, so much so that they refer us to their other groups for implementing critical projects. We even provide consultancy to organizations who have ITSM products; but not enough expertise to convince their customers on ITSM solutions. Why? Simply put, its not only that we are skilled experts and professionals, we really DO contribute to our customers’ business lifecycles.

Graceful v/s Manipulative Sales

One of the Portuguese proverb says -“Stumbling is not falling”. Well, this time I would like to congratulate one of our competitors for winning a bid to implement Helpdesk and teaching us a good Sales lesson. Although the competitor does not practice the technology we use, this incident has helped us to prepare better by considering solutions in other technologies.

The prospect first called me a month ago to demonstrate our capabilities to meet their requirements. I went to meet them to basically understand their expectations. Since they wanted to have a certain set of features on Day 1, we worked to come up with a proposal focussing only on those requirements. We set up a demo to showcase the standard features, followed by couple of more demos after they asked us to demonstrate our capabilities to quickly configure with different scenarios. We did all that was asked. Net result? They called us and told us that they have shortlisted another vendor to implement the solution in different technology! When asked for the feedback, we were told that other vendor was more proactive and had done homework of their business. It was a kind of blow since we had followed up with them and provided demos and visited their office whenever we were asked.

I then tried to analyze what went wrong. I can perhaps summarize it with below thoughts by well known personalities –

• If you are not taking care of your customer, your competitor will.
• I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, NOT manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation.
• Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman – NOT the attitude of the prospect.

I was trying to ensure that we are not overcommitting, at the same time, not manipulating either. We were very candid in sharing the details with the prospect and ensuring to give him a correct picture.

I remember showing slight discomfort when the prospect asked us to demo for the fourth time and enquired if we can include all stakeholders instead of repeating demo again. I later learnt that our competitor was all over our prospect in terms of agreeing to do anything that was required. In short, when we didn’t take care of our prospect, our competitor did, by converting a prospect to a customer! We have learnt a pretty neat lesson and would be taking necessary steps going forward. Nonetheless, we would not deviate from our core philosophy of being graceful and candid while doing sales. We did stumble, not fell down. I think it was worth stumbling though.

As Vince Lombardi said, ““The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. That’s the essence of it.”

The “O” factor

Recently, “Omnishambles” was declared Britain’s word of the year. It is defined as “a situation that has been comprehensively managed, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”

I found it interesting as I think that I could relate it with some of our customers as they seem to create such situations (omnishambles) regularly. We educate them with best practices; however, by the time we complete one aspect, we see the “O” factor being created in other area.

We have one of our customers, where they perhaps excel in being part of “O” factor. The way their so called senior leadership deals with their customers, the way they manage attrition of critical resources despite knowing that they are the most important factor in delivering complex deliveries, the way they plan and execute projects with less capable managers, the way they slip their project deliveries consistently and face the flak of their customers regularly etc undoutedly lead them to a big “O”.

Well, you may think -‘Thanks, but tell us what do you do? We face these challenges in almost all organizations’. That’s right. We have always considered our customers as our partners and a part of mutual growth. Their failures/successes are our failures/successes. We often talk to their senior leaders giving them a perspective that they may be missing. Interestingly, we are mostly considered the interface between them and their customer. Hence, ensuring ethics, we often guide what their customers expect. We often groom their managers and hand hold to help them communicate better with their customers. Many a times, team members of our customers approach our consultants seeking best practices or ‘can you help me resolve this pls?’ issues.

I don’t intend to brag about our services in this blog. The point though, is, why does the commotion exist? Occasionally, I have also observed that some managers/leaders tend to either ignore the chaos or let it die down on its own. They seem to give the message – DKDC: Don’t Know, Don’t Care; although, in reality, they seem to simply choose not to try or rather wait until someone resolves the issue. As you may have noticed off late that there is usually an item song in most of the Bollywood movies. Well… you get the point, right?

We also understand to what extent do we need to stretch/be flexible, especially, if you think that the customer is actually taking you for a ride. In short, you need to judge “O” factor of your customer before you take a final call. For instance, let me share instance of another customer…

We have had signed a contract to support one of most complex implementation for this customer. We implemented solutions for more requirements than what were agreed. We went out of our way to provide the solutions for ‘out of scope’ customizations, fix security issues that didn’t fall under support contract and help configure innumerable applications to help them move most or all of their end users to this application. We were always promised that our efforts would be paid off by awarding additional projects. Many a times, we ended up having 3 resources instead of one that was billable. Guess what? We have not received the payments even for the efforts towards ‘scoped’ activities for past few months – we now don’t see any point to get paid for the efforts that we stretched for ‘out of scope’ activities, although promised.They are not willing to consider what was signed as “In scope” activities and have been pushing to deliver more without paying additional (or even for that matter agreed) cost. They seem to unintentionally extend their “O” factor to us rather than help us to get out of the big “O”.

Yes, you can ask us the same question – ‘What do you do in such cases?’ Simple. We are very clear on our mission and vision. We have stretched wherever it is possible and to an extent we could. We have done that past 8-9 months. Guess what? We have informed the customer that we will not be able to continue providing services without getting paid. As I mentioned earlier, we partner with our customer to grow together; however, if the customer signals us that they do not care about our growth, we need to take a call. Its not that we have not tried to resolve the issues earlier. We have had elaborate discussions and have resolved many of their critical issues without charging a dime, especially when they were in dire need. Today, if those efforts do not seem to be valued as the important activities have been completed. We should have judged the “O” factor a bit early in the game. I hope you are not late. Are you?

How is your company known?

It is a well-known thought – “A man is known by the company he keeps”. It attracts immediate attention as everybody tries to ensure that he is associated with corresponding type of personalities. What about the folks/group/company on the other side though? Would they be interested to associate with you? Do you ever think that you need to ensure proper synergy to be part of that group/company too?

Usually most of the folks take it for granted that once they belong to the group/company, they need not worry how their behaviours/actions impact the company. Now, that decides how keen the company is to be known and how seriously does it consider its reputation before associating it with anybody.

We had few such situations where in we had to take a call. We often get approached by freshers and experienced folks seeking job opportunities. We give a fair chance to all to demonstrate their capabilities. Most of the times, the freshers are too excited and promise to work hard to deliver the expectations. We were approached by a group of 4-5 freshers who were willing to join us and give a long term commitment. I had decided to give them an opportunity after evaluating them post a few weeks of training.

We started training them and giving them feedback that they were not upto mark and had to gear up quickly. We didn’t see much of the improvement. We had warned them that we may stop training if they didn’t submit the given assignments with quality. We also went to an extent of moving our office close to where they stayed as they would often cite commuting challenges reaching to our earlier office and how it was impacting their time to learn. We were losing confidence in them and had given them enough heads up to demonstrate a quick learning curve. I couldn’t take up additional projects as I didn’t believe that they would deliver it with quality and I certainly didn’t want to lose our credibility with our customers. Plus, associating such folks with us was impacting the mission and vision with which the organization was formed. I had to pull off the plug and ask them to part with the organization.

Another similar incident had taken place earlier. I had entrusted a young enthusiastic person that he would be able to deliver the projects on time.  I had set the expectations and he had promised to deliver quality once we start working with customer. After taking him to the customer and following up to deliver the planned project items, I gave up and then ended up learning the new technology by working over the weekends. I had to let him go as I didn’t want to plan project deliverables based on his slow learning curve.

We are glad that our customers have frequently demonstrated that they would like to associate with us. We constantly gauge ourselves to ensure that our customers are not embarrassed to be associated with us. It is a win-win solution and turns up as mutual beneficial. If you are wondering how would we like our company to be known as? We would like to be the most sought partner/vendor to provide ITSM/BSM consultancy. Are you one of the future employees reading this? You know how to contact us

No Option is NOT an Option

Does a situation of “No option” ever arise? I think that this is an excuse given by the folks who either have submitted themselves for the situation or have resigned from trying out different solutions. We continue to be surrounded by few such folks and it really takes a toll on the team who are reporting to such managers. This blog is similar to my previous blog “Beat or get Beaten”; however, it talks of exploring options rather than passively accepting what you cannot deliver and make the entire team suffer in that process.

I intend to write a few things about a manager who is supposedly managing a team and runs into such situations often created by him. He is a nice person; however, off late that niceness has started hitting the team members badly. Indeed, it is good to be nice but I think that one ought to be professional and skilled apart from merely being nice. I had also given him a card to help him change and let him know what the team thought about him. The message said – “It is nice to be important but it is important to be nice”. Let me call him Mr. X in this blog.

Mr. X was assigned a task of delivering an important assignment that has been turned critical since past 4-5 months since its release date has been postponed twice. Firstly, the efforts were estimated incorrectly (yes, this types of mistakes leave little choice for any options). Secondly, he did not bring it to attention enough in the beginning when he was not provided with proper resources while starting the project. The dates kept slipping and he kept on seeking our help every time to resolve the issues.

Wasn’t there an option to call out for a proper analysis and then identify the risks, communicate it with customer and seek a retrospective? Well, that wasn’t unfortunately considered an option. So, you can’t call that there was no option.

Next, new requirements kept flowing and were asked to be accommodated within the same timelines. There was an option. Protest or Contest. Since neither was considered, customer assumed that Mr. X has signed up to deliver this. This repeated about thrice and every time before he went to meet the customer, I had warned him to put his foot down and justify why it would not be possible to deliver all requirements in such a short time. He had to be Mr. Nice, right? Guess what? Every time he went for customer meetings, he signed up to deliver additional requirements within the same timelines. Net result? He would come back, put additional pressure on team members, ask them to come over weekends and unconvincingly tell why there was no other option!

Since he would seldom listen to our suggestions, I had stopped providing help. I was getting more occupied with other important project and could help him only when he would ask for. One day I decided to take out time and help him since it was not only impacting him and the team; the customer was losing confidence if the team could ever deliver the assignment on time. I asked him to explain where he was finding it difficult to deliver the assignment. He was frustrated so much so that he had given up looking for any option and was merely trying to deliver the assignment whatever the customer would ask for, without even asking the team for feasibility. After listening to him, I realized that he had to take few steps without which he could have failed even if he would have planned to deliver the items. He had to take a sign off to deliver only specific items. There was a challenge to convince the customer for a sign-off. We suggested him an approach that would guarantee him for a sign-off. It worked wonders to get a good breathing space. Clearly, there was an option.

The things continued in ad-hoc fashion and the customers kept sending nasty mails venting out their frustrations for not delivering the items on time. He was asked to send a daily tracker. I learnt later that he used to bump up the status progress and send it to the customer to avoid escalations. He was also getting carried away by his manager, who was determined to deliver the project without understanding that it was in fact getting delayed because of the defects introduced due to pressurising team members!

When the team members vented out their frustrations of working on all weekends, Mr. X called up for a meeting with the delivery head. When the delivery head tried to explain the situation and stated that the team can return to regular schedule shortly and need not work on weekends; the team retorted that they were being told the same thing since past 3 years! The option of helping team members return to their regular schedule did exist – having a candid discussion with customer, explaining that there was a goof up in estimates and that it would take certain time to deliver. Its just that the option was not exercised. Instead, it was only stated that there is no option. That’s much easier for folks to state when they do not intend to work out any options or drag it as much as they can. Does any option exist for such situations? Indeed, exercise the option of disabling their logins and swipe cards to enter the premises

Beat OR get beaten

HR department of one of our customers had setup a leadership meeting to discuss customer issues and come up with solutions. I had another design meeting clash and as you may have guessed, I had opted to be part of design meeting. Halfway through, I received the call from a senior leader to be part of HR meeting!

Reluctantly, I agreed to be part of the meeting wherein I observed most of the audience was dragged for this meeting while a few others had considered this as an opportunity for forty winks and rest had decided for a live spectator entertainment.

As usual, HR tried to get few people start talking while others tried to hide behind folks sitting in rows ahead of them. As the dust settled down, few of the folks raised issue related to hike, appraisals that were not relevant for this meeting. HR realized that the meeting was not going in right direction and picked up their first target – this time the last person in the last queue. He spoke half being nervous while half of the time concentrating on his accent. He listed the issues but covered up fearing that he may be perceived as problem child. The second person in the queue repeated most of the issues and then expressed lack of support from his superiors. Slowly, one by one started getting up and started blaming the senior management and superiors for not being very supportive and passing on the pressure.

The senior leaders couldn’t help much but tried to explain their helplessness to do more about it as the trend was set from their predecessors to agree all with the customer and just do what is being told. This had had created loads of issues down the chain though. Everybody, including senior leaders to junior developers was under tremendous pressure despite working hard. What people were missing is 2 points- to understand their role and work together.

Let me explain what I mean here (which is what I shared in that forum) – Beat OR Get beaten – not in a literal sense though, I do not sign up for violence. If you would observe, I have highlighted the word ‘OR’. Why? The choice is yours. Either you beat or get beaten. I am sure that nobody likes to get beaten. Indeed, to beat, you must know your role better. It was clear that none of the folks had clarity of their roles. For instance, when mails were forwarded or copied to them, they didn’t know what to do. When status of tasks was asked, they didn’t know the answers. Why? Its because, they didn’t even know that they were not the owners for those tasks in the first place. Additionally, they didn’t know who the owners were! Worst, they didn’t ask right questions or even tried to seek clarity! Net result, the issues took time to get resolved and the pressure kept mounting.

Another thing observed was that since the project was a complex and extended to many groups, most of them tried to cover themselves whenever issues arose. They seldom realized that they all were working for one customer. It was common to point the finger to other group, not realizing that it was ending up in lose-lose situations. It was surprising to notice that the other teams missed that they were supposed to be on one side and the customer was on the other. I don’t mean to say this in terms of arguing. However, the basic fact that they had to work ‘together’ and NOT ‘against’ to serve the customer was missing. Often, I had raised this issue and observation with senior leaders to set the expectations with the teams. Due to frequency of issues raised by customer, getting the team leaders together was considered lower priority. And when the issues were not reported, that time was mostly used to relax praying for an ‘issue free’ environment!

To summarize, what I intend to state is that it is very natural not to know all things when you start working on a complex project. However, the least you can do is to understand your role, help your organization by collaborating and trying to accommodate timelines/activities to deliver quality to the project. If you are a leader, you have to have courage to bite the bullet, if required and ensure that you do not pass on the pressure to your subordinates.

Have you ever seen a sportsman getting beaten despite working hard? If yes, then he has not worked hard enough than the sportsman who beats him. I do not agree that it is not possible when someone plays politics either. One can still be careful of such people who tend to create nuisance. If you are not, you are not working hard enough! It all boils down to what you want to. Beat OR get beaten?

Achche customer services ke side effects

Our journey of managing different sets of customers with different expectations continues. We have been able to deliver few important milestones that were pending for ages. We have been able to resolve a few technical glitches that even the product organizations have not been able to. Past few weeks, we have made a few mistakes and learnt quite a bit. We have noted the lessons and educated our consultants how to avoid these mistakes in future by preparing well in advance. Also, we have been candid with our customers whenever there have been disconnects in terms of deliverables. Let me share at least 2 fruitful outcomes (that I jokingly call as side effects) resulted due to our committed services.

We have been working with one of our customers for about 6 months now. After ensuring our commitment for several months, we were referred to one of their internal group. We had completed implementing the system as per their expectations. However, at the last minute, we were asked to accommodate out of scope work for additional few weeks. We thought for a while; however, realized that the work that our customer had defined would also help us to provide enhanced services to other customers. We delivered the work packages as per expectations without making too much of noise. This enhanced their confidence in us. Side effect? We were highly recommended to another internal group and were awarded another module that accounted to revenue of nearly 25% of their first work package.

In another instance, we have been able to help one of our customers to get back their confidence from their customer. They have had been struggling for over 2 years or so. With the help of our technical consultants and our expertise, we have been able to deliver many important projects pending for a while. We helped them to introduce best practices within the team. We have helped them retain a few of their critical employees as well. Our consultants have played a key role in designing and guiding the team members to deliver the best. Side effect? Today, all our consultants are leading the teams technically. They have been made as point of contact for their respective teams’ deliverables. Our consultants are approached for recommendations and sought guidance for those projects.

To summarize, I strongly believe that outcomes of providing best services are always bound to be good. One should remain ethical and retain their feet firm on ground. Once customer displays the trust and confidence and you know that they cannot do much without your help, it is quite possible to get arrogant and start taking undue advantage. That is what sets you apart when your ethics don’t turn situational. It is easier said than done. How do we do it? I don’t think if it is difficult for us. All we do is remember the meeting when customer decided to trust and award us the consultancy and work packages. That reminds us the commitment that we promised and the best quality that we had agreed to deliver. Once this mutual trust goes hand in hand, the relationship blooms and believe me, it does get mutually beneficial as well. That is when you look forward for “side effects” rather than getting awry about them