Learnings from my Experience

Couple weeks back, I was reading an autobiography of Richard Branson 'Screw it..Let's do it', such an inspirational story, it's worth own it. His instictive approach to solve many challenges is a great wisdom to know.

This book provoked me to write some of my own learnings during my professional career

1. Trust is very important, but we must instigate a mechanism to audit for confirmation. We are in a real world where 'everything can be trusted-nothing can be trusted', the only disparity is a process or mechanism to be established to confirm the Trust.

'Trust alone is a blunder', you should 'Trust, but Verify'

2. Team without goals, Leader without empowerment, Management without vision, Organization without ethics - A sure way to disaster
I have seen/been told during my career as how these traits decipher to a great debacle

3. Fail to understand the business, most of the technical folks concentrate too much on technicality of the program but fail to understand the business need. What happens if a programmer write a software not knowing the business implication? Mr Platt is a computer science instructor from Harvard University extention school, says, the programs won't just fit for the use. Almost 70% of the projects don't meet the needs of the business at the first time, an independent survey unveils

4. Open communication - project teams and project leads need to keep the communication open with all the stakeholders (sponsor, designers, end users, project team, integration team etc.). The open communication will ensures the stakeholder needs carried in a project, else almost always the project gets derail in terms of cost and time

5. Conflict of interest - I have seen many cases where supervisor fails to draw a line between personal and business interests with the team members, in most of the cases these raise a red flag and may lead to a strain on the healthy relationships, it will have vivid impact on the project outome.

more to come...

Sameer Penakalapati