The Deliverable

The Deliverable -|  Experiential Insights to Succeed in this Digital Age    | - Welcome to 'The Deliverable' blog. This is an end-to-end sequential compilation of one hundred nuggets meant for a wide spectrum of readers touched by Information Technology (IT) including students and IT professionals. Happy Reading! Chapter Topics Prologue Part 1 Introduction 1.    IT Boom - It Happened Once! 2.    Decades of Transformation 3.    Band-Aids and Paradigm Shifts 4.    Software - A Pervasive Phenomenon 5.    You Consume What You Create 6.    You Can Mine! Part II – Getting Ready 2.1  Knowing the Needs and Wants 7.    The Neighborhood Restaurant 8.    Can They Be Different? 9.    Requirements Are Owned by Our Customer! 10.  A Physician Who Can Hear You Well 11.  Specifications:  In Which Format? 12.  The Specification Myth 13.  Ten Key Things 14.  The Weak Links 15.  Con

Epilogue Two years ago, I was involved in coaching three project teams.   All put together that was a group of sixty engineers.   We observed and practiced several small steps to improve over the first three months.   Considering the pace of each team, we worked together and identified certain medium-term improvements.   For this, I had scheduled meetings with each team. In one of those meetings, we had a white board session to collect inputs from all team members.   There were more than fifteen distinct ideas and suggestions.   Some of them were advanced practices or implementation of state-of-the-art tools.   But none of those were unfamiliar to the team members. Dedication, teamwork and regular practice would take them there.   One of the volunteers in the team noted down all those fifteen items and read it out to the team.  During my concluding talk, I asked one of the team members. ‘So, Ravi, what do you think are going to be our next steps starting tomorrow?’

100. The Runway The runway in front of you needs lot of groundwork in this evolving landscape. How are you preparing yourself? This book aims to help you in this journey.   That is what I wrote in the start of this book. I am going to explain the metaphor ‘the runway’ here and take it further to connect with the journey of IT professionals. When you are learning something, you have limited resources such as time, money, etc.   These constitute your runway.   The runway you have to learn, prepare, practice is limited. You need to be aware of what is in store for you and get ready. Else, how can you deliver? You are working on a technology platform or domain.   You don’t know when the next leap is.   Your runway in the current platform is never an infinite path.   How can you anticipate and prepare? You need to improve your anticipatory skills to make the next leap. Competition can and will challenge you. It may make your runway shorter.   You may have to take your

Part 7 Delivering the Bad News Bad news come in different forms. The effect of bad news can be different in different situations. In professional life, sometimes you hold the responsibility of delivering the bad news.   When it comes to delivering the bad news, there are two parties involved – the giver and the receiver.   Understanding the proposition of these two parties and delivering it right is as important as delivering anything else.   That’s the reason I decided to write a chapter on this topic. 92. What is the Proposition? Sometimes you win and let the other person lose irrespective of how you deliver the bad news.   Your organization is right-sizing and you need to let one of your team members go but your position is secure.   Or one of your product lines is closing and you need to lay off a bunch of engineers. When all this is going on you are getting promoted or you were promoted recently. That is a win-lose. There can be a situation where you lost one

Part 6 Workplace Challenges 77. Visiting Cards One of the projects I contributed to during my initial years was a contact management system. It was about porting the whole system from dBase II to dBase IV.    Starting mid-80’s until mid-90’s dBase was a very popular database management system. In fact, it was one among the first and most successful database management during those days.   I had some experience in dBase and UNIX and that is what qualified me to take up the porting project.   If you know, most porting projects are one-man projects.   As you can guess, I was the only team member on my project.   And that too on a part-time basis.   I spent 4 hours per day and attempted to complete it in five days. When I started on this project, I could understand that the earlier system was developed by someone couple of years ago but it was not implemented. There were no active users. There we no bug reports.   I moved the code base to dBase IV and resolved all compatib