A few days back we got in touch with a customer who had stopped working with us about 3 years back. After the initial pleasantries, he wrote back asking me the following:

What would you say has improved in the past couple of years that’s
enough reasons for our company to choose Srijan as its outsourcing
partner?

Can you send me the latest processes and rates?

What all went wrong? What all was broken at our workplace?

The customer had stopped working with us (this was about 2-3 years back in 2005-2006) for several reasons including delays in delivery from our side, lack of overlap hours for him to manage projects effectively (he’s a very smart application architect, programmer, sales person, and manager – all rolled into one – and since he had to work with our team closely in odd overlap timings he was certainly getting stressed), our Project and Resource planning problems (lack of skills and tools), and also too many overlap projects which led to shuffling across projects.

We were just about get strong on our feet with TYPO3, and all of a sudden we had these BIG projects coming our way, which we ofcourse took on, miscalculated the effort estimate, and then there we were calling on our best developers to develop across both projects shuffling between the two and somehow hoping without plan to be able to deliver them both.

We had delivered several TYPO3 projects till then and quite successfully as well, but primarily they had been all small ones.

Anyhow, we delivered the projects in good shape and they are live, but the customer had moved to explore another outsourcing setup in East Europe – partly also to have better overlaps with US timings, apart from a dedicated team.

Life’s about “becoming better”!

Here’s what I wrote to our customer:

Improvement and “getting better” is a continuous goal for us, as should be for any individual or company. We’ve constantly been striving to improve all these years – technically, in terms of methodology and processes, and with our people values and practices.

False propaganda by companies

Truly, if there is one thing we can say we’re striving for in our lives – it is to become “better human beings“.

Why should this be any different for companies? Why must companies find it difficult to acknowledge their weaknesses and continue to write about themselves in fantastic flowery language, about how good they are and how great there processes are. Why must customers (and prospecting employees) expect companies to share such false propaganda on their websites, and not accept their “human-ness”, and that they do make mistakes, but are willing to work on them, together with their help.

Responsiveness and “continuous learning” is most important

I was speaking to my coach recently, and mentioned that with God’s grace, we now have a team, which gels very well together, and that we have excellent chances of doing very well, as we are willing to work together with each other and towards common shared goals. He successful team must also be willing to “work together” and “learn together“. How true! Is it not?

Learning is about continuously improving ourselves, learning from the mistakes and challenges that we face. It is about “responding” to problems, effectively and in time (immediately, or, as soon as possible).

Srijan, I must say, is responsive to it’s customers and associates. We may falter, but as a practice, we’re learning to become better day-by-day – and together!

What is right about Srijan?

Let me explain what all has changed at Srijan.

• We’ve gained much deeper experience in developing applications on TYPO3 and on other open source frameworks. We do heavy duty projects and products on Drupal, Symfony, Flex, Ruby on Rails and Django/Python.
• This has been possible with “people” carrying on with Srijan over the years and passing on the knowledge, owing to us being able to create win-win situations with their career, monetary growth, and treating all our people with love and respect.
• We’re constantly evolving our structure, and methodologies to make timely project deliveries and of better quality. For instance, we started using SVN quite some time back, and are currently working out a way to have a DEV-QA-PRODUCTION setup so as to ensure that developed code passes through a formal QA process before going into Production environment for client demos. This is a milestone based release, so customers keep checking application development as the work is progressing. The unique thing is that such an environment which is typically forced (and thus taken for granted) in Rails applications, is being implemented for TYPO3 as well – and we do not know of many companies following such a process – even in Europe.
• Our number of Project Co-ordinators/Managers has increased; thus developers and Tech managers do not have to manage requirements, quality checking, etc. and can focus on development and mentoring their co-developers
• We’re about 20 developers+managers team now, with about 14-15 actively in PHP (TYPO3, Drupal, Symfony) related projects
• We’ve invited a Drupal guru, as a consultant, to mentor our team on Drupal on a weekly basis, thus helping get past the learning curve, instead of struggling over the same ourselves leaving a trail of failed projects behind. Thanks to Jacob Singh – http://www.civicactions.com/team/jacob_singh – is an American living in New Delhi, and one of the leading contributors to Drupal, and a fantastic “trainer”, with over 9 years programming in PHP, Python on a host of applications; having managed $500,000 projects with small teams. He’s expensive for us in terms of money now. But for the success of Srijan – he’s god sent.
• The key element here is our real big push for internal trainings. We have a sort of an excellence group, which is training all others (and each other) on – software development best practices, TYPO3, Drupal, CSS, Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex
• We’ve picked up competence and skills in Adobe Flex, and are writing our first BIG project. This happened after a LOT of time investment in our very loved (and rather, spoilt!!) Interface Architect, who is passionate about anything on front-end. What we now produce is not just ordinary stuff, but some top-notch work on Flex
• We’ve got a partnership going with a German company – www.crocsystems.de – who is now a major customer for us, and a very valued partner. We’ve made visits to each other in the last 6 months, and are constantly working on getting this partnership to work for both of us. This is a leap forward for us, as we’re now known to European customers when we build projects – and a climb up the value chain for us
• We’ve developed competence in Ruby on Rails and in Django/Python (although the latter remains restricted with only a few people, and very little focus from us)
• Also, we’ve diversified into writing some products, including some excellent work using GPS devices; please see http://blogs.srijan.in/author/buckycat/
• We’re working on institutionalising our profit-sharing methodology, and making our Project Reviews a simpler and more regular – this allows us to continue with our stated goal of equitable and participative growth for all of us at Srijan
• We’ve made a group of 5 innovators, who will have both our working Saturdays each month, off for them, so that they can together spend time in researching or building interesting product ideas – our own customised version of Google’s research culture
• And here’s a very BIG one for us. All projects are being planned in Srijan now using a very nice multi-project planning tool called ConceptDraw Project. It’s been a boon for us, in terms of providing realistic timelines to customers on starting and completing projects. This has been a big pain area for us earlier.
• We’ve also increased our price of working to EUR 25 to EUR 30 an hour (for Europe; we maintain variable pricing depending upon economic situations of the regions) thus allowing us to avoid overloading people in our requirement to keep our cash flows going. Therefore, we now actively refuse projects, even while maintaining healthy profitability.

Ah, so we did away with all our problems?

All this does not mean that we do not have problems.

We still have problems of Resource planning and allocation, lack of proper planning and incorrect estimations, sudden spurts in projects leading to people getting overbooked, people falling ill (etc) throwing tight project schedules off-track, developers having to switch between projects, etc. – BUT we have LESS OF all these problems; AND we are CONSTANTLY working on IMPROVING practices and policies to make them REDUCE FURTHER.

What does all this mean to a customer?

We’re responsive to circumstances and situations; and ever more responsible to our customers and our associates!