Jan
SPICON 2010
Management Scholars Academy was a sponsor for SPICON 2010 annual conference of SPIN Chennai which was a well organized event by a set of dedicated SPIN volunteers. The theme this year was very timely – Operational Excellence for sustenance and growth. K.Dinesh co-founder of Infosys was the key note speaker. He shared his experiences at Infosys on persevering with the dream and the willingness to change to scale up and how the value system was established and communicated by the leaders by living the values themselves. Bala Balachandran from Kellog School of Management had the audience eat out of his hand with his crisp quotes and acronyms, timely jokes and very practical management advice.
There were many more informative and inspiring speeches in the two day conference. Agile and Innovation sounded like the buzz words of the new year. But CMMi, Six Sigma, ISO, and so on are holding post.
The closing event was a panel discussion where I was a panelist. I shared a joke which kind of summarized the message I got from the conference. Here it goes -
There was a farmer who had a few cows. A visitor asked him, “what do you feed your cows?’ The farmer replied, “Oh what else, dry grass, left overs..” The visitor said, “I am from blue cross, Animal protection officer. I am going to write a complaint about you.” Next month another visitor asked him, ” what do you feed your cows?”. Our farmer was smarter now. He said, “I buy them vegetables and fruits from the market. I feed them well cooked rice and dhal.” The visitor said, “This is funny. Half the human population is going hungry and you are feeding your cows fruits and vegetables! There are many opportunities to improve here.” Our farmer was aghast. Next month a neighborhood farmer asked him, “what do you feed your cows?” He replied, “I give them 100 Rs a day and tell them to eat whatever they want.”
Indian IT is like the farmer. The first visitor looks like the ISO auditor. The second visitor is the CMMi assessor. The third guy may be the new scrum master. (Don’t go too far with the analogy. No analogy is perfect.) The point is, the time has come, where we (Indian IT professionals) are ready to self certify our work and match it more to customers requirements than to please auditors. The quality professionals are maturing into mentors who help managers choose the right tools out of the box of best practices – models and methodologies, for the right situation, to stay in demand. That process of helping managers find the right tool and integrate into their process is organizational innovation!! Isn’t it? What do you say?
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17:32, 27.01.2010
One thing that delegats of SPICON 2010 would not forget about the panel is this cow and its feed analogy. Every one at the conference realised that it is not just a joke. I only wondered that in the third instance cow should not end up eating the hundered rupee as it is habituatuted to eat whatever is fed!
Thanks for blogging SPICON 2010!!
20:38, 27.01.2010
I really enjoyed your story in the panel discussion! Perfect end to a great conference.
21:39, 27.01.2010
//The quality professionals are maturing into mentors who help managers choose the right tools out of the box of best practices – models and methodologies, for the right situation, to stay in demand. That process of helping managers find the right tool and integrate into their process is organizational innovation!! Isn’t it? What do you say?//
Perfect!!
14:19, 18.02.2010
A good analogy. How you would type cast this to product management? ie, a Project management in a product company where you have “internal” customers and not “customers” per say. Also do you agree that the Indian Project management arena is more focussed towards the outsourced projects than building products?
02:58, 21.02.2010
I want to thank the blogger very much not only for this post but also for his all previous efforts. I found msacademy.in to be extremely interesting. I will be coming back to msacademy.in for more information.