Org Struct - 1

How would you decide what kind of reporting structure suits your organisation the best? This question is especially relevant in a rapidly growing organisation. Of course there are standard organisational models available in management theories. But what would be your criteria to judge which model fits you the best?

One traditional way is to pre-determine a ratio of manager to reportees. But does this method do proper justice to maximisation of productivity?

KRAs

Is it of any benefit to publish the KRAs of your manager? So, with cascade effect, every role's non-sensitive KRA in an organisation is available for everyone else to view..

The Emotion Map

Sapphire: by the way ... i am very sad

Think Engage: for what

Sapphire: please don scorn at me ... but its just that my ex girlfriend just got married and i saw her photos so that made be feel very sad

Think Engage: you have like...

and fever and all is it

pls...

Sapphire: no no ... please ... fever is for getting drenched

this i just saw last night ...

Think Engage: hmm

Sapphire: but i realise that i made some wrong investments and wrong decision very early in life

Think Engage: what wrong investment

Sapphire: emotionally .. i am saying

Think Engage: ah ..

Sapphire: you know what ... i was trying to analyse what exactly makes you feel sad

it is sometimes very interesting to see exactly which strand of thought makes you feel bad ... it is like finding out which thread in a multithreaded java program is hogging the max memory

are you getting it?

Think Engage: hmm yeah

go on

Sapphire: like in this case, the very thought that now i do not have any importance in a person's life who, at one point in time, considered me to the most important ... this strand of thought makes me feel sad ...

Think Engage: will you feel better if you were considered important in someone elses' life?

Sapphire: no its not a compensating equation

Think Engage: no - i asked to isolate the root cause

it may be a 'need' to be loved, or it may be a need to be loved by a particular person

Sapphire: i understand ,,, thats why i am trying to give you a model based answer

ok ... what i think is this ... lets talk in terms of models

then ...

every person you interact with ... gives rise to a certain set of feelings ... emotions

now ... lets broadly categorise emotions as positive and negative

to make things simpler

then ... one negative emotion cannot be negated by positive emotions generated in another relation

whatever is generated ... remains

but ... at amy given point in time ...

Think Engage: yes - but you must also ackowledge that over a period of time, the intensity of effect it has does decrease

Sapphire: we say that we are doing good, not doing good, or maybe doing OK ... based on the wholistic map of all your emotions taken together

is this clear?

Think Engage: yeah

Sapphire: right ... and our mind is like a torch ... which hovers over the map ... whenever whichever emotion is hoghlighted, we momentarily get into that emotion

does this model sound 'sound'?

that i think takes care of the time factor also

doesnt it?

Think Engage: yeah

Sapphire: and intensity ... does not decrease ... it is just that the older emotions gets pushed towards the edge of the map ... while new ones generate at the center

so chances of them getting highlighted get lesser ... but when they ARE highlighted ... then you get into the old mode

Think Engage: hmm

Sapphire: the hopeful part is ... our mind ... the torch ... always hovers

Think Engage: so the question really is how can the torch focus for a longer period on what we want, and how soon can we push things to the edge

Sapphire: yes absolutely

you got it

Think Engage: and hash (or whatever it is called) is certainly not a solution to it

Sapphire: do you think this model is scalable to other areas of emotional intelligence?

forget that part

this is serious talk

do you think this is a scalable model?

Think Engage: it will be more complex when there are overlaps

Sapphire: what overlaps?

like?

Think Engage: you still have to deal with related people

Sapphire: yes but thats external to the system ... there will be interfaces defined ... but i am talking only about the core processing

Think Engage: hmm

Sapphire: what hmm ... i think we should develop this model to see whether it covers all areas of emotional intelligence ... then it may be possible to develop measures to fix things when they go wrong

Think Engage: how would you fix this thing for instance?

Sapphire: dont you think this can be a worthwhile introspection?

just like the way you said, then the solution is to push the older emotion faster towards the edge

what???

Think Engage: yes - i'm thinking HOW

Sapphire: yes ... thats the application part ...

and that will be different for different people ... so more important is to develop the principle behind it

Think Engage: isn't this already addressed in psychology?

Sapphire: i dont know ... i am sure this is a pretty intuitive model ... so somebody might have thought about it

btw ... i am going to put this on blog too

Think Engage: i think this is what they do in 'therapy'

yeah - put

you are btw not adding naything to itchybrains - i will now kick you for that

Sapphire: but that apart ... let us develop the model further ... iyou want

if you*

Re: Adding value to customers

I understood that you want to drive the offshored partnership engagement with the principle of being least invasive - the solution, again at a partnership level, has a low saturation point and hence the 'value addition' will be limited and in some cases, intangible.

On the aspect of the cost of change to a different service provider, this is already accomodated in the profit customers derive out of the economics of offshoring/outsourcing - so any further dcoupling will not be a good business model from the offshore partern's business perspective - you then don't have stability in your business parternship if you can be 'replaced with least effort' - although this might be an objective from the client's perspective!

The question still remains then - how can 'value addition' be realised by the foot-soldiers?

Response to below

In an IT services engagement, a lot of clients resources are used up at manageing the engagement. In order to ensure peace of mind, complex control mechanisms and checkpoints are built to ensure timely and business compatible solution delivery from the IT services company.
This is quite akin to having very highly coupled modules in a programming parlance. For the client's point of view, this is doubly frustrating. First, because there is a 'cost' of maintaining the services partner. Second, because of the high coupling, BAU is no more BAU!!! More often than not, the client's processes and structures change in order to accomodate the service provider. Result? Cost of changing to a new service provider is even higher, at times so much that the client is forced to maintain the engagement even though it may not yield satisfactory/profitable results.

Why can the IT services companies not have this as one of its goals? Why can they not deliver solutions without minimum or no changes in the existing structure of the organisation? I remember a couple of years back Larry Ellison dented Red Hat's Linux support business in a very bad way - just by announcing that Oracle will make every Linux patch released by Red Hat backward compatible to the version of Linux run by his client.

In fact, I think this is more of a business culture rather than business strategy. Does any company say "We are like water, we will take the shape of any vessel you pour us in, but we will still quench your thirst". A culture like this, can trickle all the way down to a developer. Needless to say, to become flexible, you need much more intrinsic strength than to become rigid!

Adding value to customers

Organizations in the IT services business differentiate by the amount of value addition they provide to the customer - apart from the occassional consulting assignments where the services organization's years of experience may be used to add value, how can the rest of the working crowd achieve this? How can developers add value to the client?

Policy implementors or People managers?

Managers in today's IT services organizations wear (or atleast, expected to) different caps at different times - policy implementors, people managers, field-managers to grow business etc. But, when it comes to it, the only cap often seen is that of policy implementors - has managerial responsibility in IT organizations narrowed down to being administrative in nature? Is it even fair for us to expect a single person to be able to execute so many roles, with fundamentally different perspectives? Will they deliver justice to all perspectives in the long run?