The Lost Generation of Indian IT Managers

I drive a good 25 Kms/16 miles from home to work in Mumbai traffic everyday. So while I may rely on tools like Google maps, navigator to help me plan my commute based on traffic, I still have to make adjustments to my route as I drive through. For those who know Mumbai and India, you know that you have to be prepared for at least one surprise every day in India. So it could be a road which has suddenly been dug up, or there is a protest at the toll booths, or there is a religious procession which could throw all tools and plans for a toss. But as long as you stay focussed on the destination, you will make adjustments based on the situation. And some of these adjustments may be risky like driving on the wrong side as well!

While I don’t recommend compromising safety just to meet the end goal, the point I am trying to make is that project management is also no different than driving in India. We may put up a broad plan to start with, but what we need to realize is that making adjustments to the plan are extremely important as we go through the journey.

The same principles apply to any sport as well.

All books may provide the science behind driving and playing, but the execution of all this requires art, judgement and experience.

This is where I believe the art has lost to the science of project management in Indian IT companies. The evolution of this has been no different from the Indian education system. The examinations oriented approach to education was put in place pre-independence since Indians were only expected to follow orders, and not apply their own thinking. Similarly, Indian IT was pushed into some kind of quality certification processes during the services era of the Indian IT. They were told what needs to be done, and were also told how to do it. And the presumption was that if you followed everything as prescribed, it would be ok. This is where art of project management lost to science.

In science, everything is accepted as a fact and there is not much scope for anyone to apply their own analysis, judgement. The jobs were restricted to following a set path, and as soon as we hit some dependency, we become helpless. We need someone to come in and resolve the dependency before we can move forward. This fueled the already bureaucratic culture that we Indians are so used. What was supposed to be the means to an end were taken to be the end in itself. There was constant nagging for not following a certain process, and this killed the self esteem of everyone at the receiving end. Everyone lost the ability to manage and deal with unknowns, ability to take risks that are typical of any complex business. And now the same institutes which pushed Indian IT into ‘follow the orders’ culture, is expecting a completely different mindset – to take an incremental approach and move on with unknowns.

This is where small and medium businesses in India score hands down against the larger organisations. Everyone realizes the need for developing a problem solving mentality, taking incremental approach with some unknowns, and focusing on the end goal. I believe this has always been the DNA of small and medium enterprises in India all along. What is typically referred to as ‘Jugad’ or frugal engineering, is at the core of operations in small and medium enterprises in India. Of course, to scale up, we need to do more than this. And that is where ‘design thinking’ may help, which is a more glorified and professional approach to problem solving.

But what happens to the lost generation of Indian IT managers, who have been rendered irrelevant now and may be struggling for survival. There is a need to re skill them to instill an attitude which says ‘if there is a problem, there has to be a solution’. If we have to leverage the experience of almost 2 decades, then we need to invest in this generation.

You ought to love the Indian small and medium enterprises for carrying this attitude and approach for generations. And that is why we say “small is beautiful, and big is just that – big’.

There is an urgent need to reinvent ourselves as managers, just like there is an urgent need to reinvent Indian IT business model. And the key would be to ‘think big, act small’, ‘Big in ambition, small in execution’.