Thought for the day!

Simple rules: Be curious like a kid, asking questions about everything, and remember that there are not definitive answers in our lives. ~Unknown

SBI Credit Cards - Impressive Customer Care!

The title might seem contradictory to many residing in India! :)

However, I am just sharing my experiences with Customer Care department of SBI Credit Card. Thinking of SBI, well as a government body in India, one would have expected getting a card that's just working and nothing more! I am happy to say I was proved wrong. I just got to know, its Customer Care department has been outsourced to GE and I must congratulate the team out there for doing an excellent job of doing  what's expected out of them - 'Customer , Care'!

The representatives I have talked to, not just one but each time, I have felt delighted & appreciated at being a customer in every sense. They way they talk, the way they solve your queries and most importantly the way I just need to call once (yes you read that right!) to get it all sorted out!

It's been really really long since I have had that elevated feeling talking to any Customer Representatives of any industry or category for that matter. And for Credit Card it's just like after sales service, which usually is the cause of failures for small to the biggest of big hot shots.

I think every CC needs to learn and take lessons from this team on how to do the job!

I just wish the team best of luck and wish them more business!

Professionals should plan for a house early in their career

As an IT Professional, I have noticed that most of us plan to ‘invest’ in a decent apartment, if not bungalow. Following are the points I have noted from my personal experience which might help you in your ‘Home Plan’:

Plan for a house early in your career: Well this is a tricky & bold at one hand but wise, according to me, at the other! Prices of construction is an ever growing process and it’s never early or late to make a decision on investing in them. In a professional career we can assume our income to be growing* year on year basis

I do not want to kick off my career with a loan!: That’s how most of you would feel initially. Is it a good way to start ‘investing’ early in your career with an amount that you loan from bank? To answer this, there are two parts to it; First, if you are planning to invest in high risk area’s like market funds, then the answer is NO. You are better off without investment than to plunge into with a debt burden on your head. However, as an accounting background person would say, Land is one of the asset class which has appreciation instead of depreciation since its scarce/limited! Therefore, construction done on land is bound to the same rule in long term, if not short term! That’s one of the major reasons we are seeing multi-storied construction (High-rise apartments) instead of ground level constructions (bungalow like)! There are various risks involved, however less as compared to investment in market instruments/funds.

What about EMIs you might ask?:  It becomes difficult to manage the EMI’s along with your other expenses. At least that’s how one would think when looking at their monthly income & expenses put together. However, the sooner you can put behind the thought of ‘EMI as burden’ the better it positions you for your future. Consider the EMI to be an amount you would be putting in your Provident Fund account. The benefits of booming property value & reduction in tax liability are both available here as well, if you compare it with interest earned on PF and deductions you get for income tax calculation. I would also say we can compare it on the point of ‘risk free’ investment here as well, if you will! A simple rule as per financial advisors would be to ensure your monthly outgo on EMI is approximately 25% of your post-tax income. I do agree to this calculation. And to add on to this, if you buy home in initial days of career, you might very well end up with paying almost 50% of your income as EMIs. This would set you back for few initial years on your luxury spending. Considering a fixed increase in your income at a rate of ‘minimal’ 10% p.a.*, you could easily bring the percentage of EMI down to 25% from 50% in a mere 5-6 years of time! Now is that a long period to put some luxury spending on hold considering you started your career say at the age of 22? Well that’s left to be decided by individual’s choices and priorities.

Please note that opinion noted above is my personal choice that I have made/experienced and are strictly mine. And I am in no way a financial expert offering you a  set of magical mantras of investment!

*Well I am not considering recession and assuming you work reasonably good to be put out of job J

Thought for the day!

Futuristic thinking in IT is a tricky situation. You got to be planning enough to accommodate possibilities of future changes, and yet be delivering what’s expected as of today!

Agile Productivity???

First off, this is my 100th post, and I am happy to reach this milestone!

Now to the post, today I am just going to leave you with a question to think about and  to leave your thoughts in the comments section -

In the world of Agile, where we aim in rectifying/identifying mistakes at early stage, should we be bothered to do productivity analysis at the end of a project? Should agility be followed there?

Must have in today’s Modern Offices…

Here are few things that I feel we should start seeing in offices - 

1.       Laptop’s Instead of desktops – Well this is debatable. To me Laptops are better solution with portability & Go Green message. If it has to desktops then it shouldn’t be a ‘Pentium X Inside’! For God’s sake get an updated PC; At least a dual core if not quad or Core iX. And yes not to mention about the CRT monitors which is so energy hungry and should be replaced with LCD monitors (unless you are in a heavy photo-shop business that is).

2.       Do away with phones – No I am not talking about mobile phones that employees’ bring to work J. With 24x7 internet connectivity and computers in front of us, companies should be avoiding costs of hardware phone. There are numerous solutions already, and yes VOIP is the way companies should be looking at.

3.       Do away with wasteful stationery in style – Provide Tablets to employees. There are many cheaper options of Tablets available in the market and not to mention about the bulk ordering bargains that companies might get. We should be looking at saving Paper. It could be provided to employees as a ‘Welcome Kit’ and it could also contain the soft copies HR manuals and other related documents handed out during induction sessions.

Check out this Info-graphic - http://visual.ly/enterprise-tablets

4.       Wi-Fi – There are offices which still do not have this and it’s so not happening. IT offices campus should be a strictly Wi-Fi zone, though a protected one!

I’ll ensure that I provide all these in the company I would own one day!

Leave your thoughts on your must have for the modern day offices or you plan to provide in your company one day.

A Leader Should Know How to Manage Failure

(Former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam at Wharton India Economic forum, Philadelphia, March 22, 2008)

Question: Could you give an example, from your own experience, of how leaders should manage failure?

Sir Kalam: Let me tell you about my experience. In 1973 I became the project director of India's satellite launch vehicle program, commonly called the SLV-3. Our goal was to put India 's "Rohini" satellite into orbit by 1980. I was given funds and human resources -- but was told clearly that by 1980 we had to launch the satellite into space. Thousands of people worked together in scientific and technical teams towards that goal.

By 1979 -- I think the month was August -- we thought we were ready. As the project director, I went to the control center for the launch. At four minutes before the satellite launch, the computer began to go through the checklist of items that needed to be checked. One minute later, the computer program put the launch on hold; the display showed that some control components were not in order.

My experts -- I had four or five of them with me -- told me not to worry; they had done their calculations and there was enough reserve fuel. So I bypassed the computer, switched to manual mode, and launched the rocket. In the first stage, everything worked fine. In the second stage, a problem developed. Instead of the satellite going into orbit, the whole rocket system plunged into the Bay of Bengal . It was a big failure.

That day, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, Prof. Satish Dhawan, had called a press conference. The launch was at 7:00 am, and the press conference -- where journalists from around the world were present -- was at 7:45 am at ISRO's satellite launch range in Sriharikota [in Andhra Pradesh in southern India ].

Prof. Dhawan, the leader of the organization, conducted the press conference himself. He took responsibility for the failure -- he said that the team had worked very hard, but that it needed more technological support. He assured the media that in another year, the team would definitely succeed.

Now, I was the project director, and it was my failure, but instead, he took responsibility for the failure as chairman of the organization.

The next year, in July 1980, we tried again to launch the satellite -- and this time we succeeded. The whole nation was jubilant. Again, there was a press conference. Prof. Dhawan called me aside and told me, "You conduct the press conference today."

I learned a very important lesson that day. When failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came, he gave it to his team. The best management lesson I have learned did not come to me from reading a book; it came from that experience.