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Do Indian outsourcers have trained, experienced
and qualified personnel to manage large-scale projects that they
are continually bidding for? MOHAN BABU writes that as Indian
companies look to scale up the value chain, hiring and nurturing
quality project managers will assume greater importance
An interesting item of research published
in Computerworld (US) caught my attention recently. It was about
the acute lack of project managers in IT departments in the US.
This research really hit home since failure of many of the “gloom
and doom” projects I have been involved with are more attributable
to the lack of proper project management than to any other major
cause. Meta Group, the Stamford, Connecticut based IT research company,
was recently quoted saying that more than 75 percent of 219 IT executives
interviewed this year indicated that a lack of in-house project
management skills was a major issue for them. Similarly, another
rese-archer with Forrester Inc concurred with this research saying,
“A lot of unofficial training is going on where people take
on the role of project manager.” However, most executives also
concurred that providing project management training to IT focused
staff was a big “challenge”.
In the years that I have spent in the field,
I have noticed that techies, especially the hard-core, hands on
types, are management agnostic and run miles away when “project
management” or “quality assurance” is mentioned.
So much so that the current trend towards XP (eXtreme Progra-mming)
where “self managed” teams work directly with users to
build prototypes and take modules to production in smaller cycles,
may be an effort to minimise the overheads generally associated
with project management. Perhaps one of the reasons why some companies
lack PM skills is because they tend to hire IT professionals from
the same pool of talent, with similar skills, feels Martin Colburn,
CTO of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc.
A major reason why some techies abhor project
managers (PMs) is probably because the PMs try to go by the book
and try to insist on structure in the project, even when deadlines
are tight. Ignorance of the basic need for project management among
techies may be another reason for this yin-yang between managers
and techies. Many technicians do not have the basic skills to coordinate
projects and think modularly about their individual work allotments
or codes, sometimes at the cost of overlooking the “big picture”.
Trained and qualified project managers
are expected to bring this “big picture” view to projects
they manage. This is especially true of large-scale projects where
smaller development teams work on individual modules and someone
needs to coordinate the efforts of such teams, analyse the risks,
mitigate them and ensure that the deadlines are met and the deliverables
conform to the specifications laid down in the initial analysis,
satisfying the end users. Maintaining a “big picture”
view while fighting daily fires, ensuring the focus of the entire
team, is the forte of a skilled and trained project manager. Interestingly,
those in project management roles come from varied backgrounds,
not necessarily from a development/ techie background as many envisage.
Some PMs are also qualified in formal project management methodologies,
especially the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) prescribed
by the Project Management Institute (PMI, ) one of the foremost
bodies in the industry. The organisation also conducts a formal
certification exam and PMI certified project managers continue to
be in demand.
Indian outsourcers at risk?
While thinking about project management,
I was wondering if Indian outsourcers have the PM bandwidth to manage
large-scale projects that they are continually bidding for. Many
project managers working for large Indian companies have risen from
the trenches, growing from developer to tech lead and then project
management. While they may have a very strong technical background,
many lack formal training in all the aspects of project management.
As the Indian companies look to scale up the value chain, hiring
and nurturing quality project managers will gain greater importance.
This is especially crucial since the available pool of managers
will also be wooed by the multinationals entering the Indian IT/outsourcing
marketplace.
Opportunity in disguise
This renewed focus on project management
in the industry, which is slowly starting to get out of the slump
of the past few years, may be an opportunity in disguise for Indians
and Indian companies. The opportunity is to leverage our technical
skills with the right project management training, enabling our
techies to manage large-scale global projects. This PM capability
will also enable Indian companies to bid for larger international
projects up the value chain if we can show our execution capabilities
and management prowess. In the process, we may also be able to “export”
our project management expertise to China, Philippines and Ireland—other
hotbeds of IT outsourcing.
Mohan Babu is a US based software consultant
trying to find the ‘sweet spot’ where IT meets business.
E-mail: mohan@garamchai.com
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