Getting groomed as Team Lead/Tech Leader and Engg Managers

 Getting groomed as Team Lead/Tech Leaders and/or Engg Managers, is what many Senior software engineers would aspire to achieve as they advance in their career. 

Even if you happen to focus on Technical Architect role, a key to success will be how effectively you communicate and work with people. So, leadership skill is key to greater success and improved productivity

As you begin to start your new journey as Leaders, here are some of the challenges, that you might face:

• You are afraid of losing friendships just because you’ve become Leader to the same people you’ve worked with as a team member up until now.
• You were the techie/geek in the team, and additional leadership burden might slow-down your tech skills. Also, who can fill your shoes and take up complex jobs that you used to take up until now.
• You try to convince your team that a specific best practice is a good idea, but no one really adopts it, and you don’t know what to go about it.
• Your team doesn’t have time to do anything but catchup with release deadlines and solve production crisis situations
• You think that your team will never be able to be one of those “extereme programming” teams you kept learning about. 
• Finally, You wonder that if you had better people in my team you would…...

You are not alone in these thoughts. A lucky few of us had good mentors to teach us what to do in these situations. So here i am, passing on the tips to future Leaders and Managers on how to lead software teams to greater productivity and effectiveness.

As you learn the art of Leadership and Techniques of Improved productivity in Software teams, you will feel not only empowered to change things for the better, but you’ll also be equipped with a set of tools and techniques to help you think through and overcome tougher challenges during your time as a Team Lead/Tech Lead and Engg Managers.
The underlying philosophy of imparting such techniques works like this saying, "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

We at Toboc.com, are committed to grooming our software leaders and managers, and such trainings are helping us in achieving high productivity teams (regardless of whether the team is following waterfall or Scrum model)

If you like to learn more on coaching your young leaders, please write to me.

Global pricing tips for Online Products or SaaS services

Global pricing of your Online Product or Subscription is a challenging subject.

Most SaaS companies keep once pricing that is in dollars, which makes it expensive for developing countries like India

So, depending on the purchasing power of the country, you may have to lower the price for that country, this is very a challenging task.

Also, the customers who are clever can cheat, by declaring their country as India, though they may be operating from US!

You could introduce a IP based auto country detection to solve this to an extent, but is not fool proof

Offshore PreSales - tricks of the trade

Like every profession, 'Offshore Pre-Sales' In india also has it share of tricks of the trade.

• Pre-Sales and Business development works closely with Tech Architects and Tech Leads. Unless your project is unique and out of this world! Pre-Sales along with Tech team, will fit your project into standard architecture or 'framework'. This helps in re-using the proposals and also helps in quick turn-around to queries from the prospects. 
• Ballpark figure- typically a range with low and high end is offered to you, to assess your purse. Ball parks are used in variety of scenarios, but always ask for more details when ball park is thrown on how this number was arrived at!

IT Outsourcing to India? - Bargain hard and get thinkers

Planning to outsource IT project to India? - The series of blogs will help you to get some honest tips and tricks that will help you achieve success while working with IT firms in India.
For ease of communication, let me term you as 'client' 
Some queries you as the client may be going through, in your mind will be
"  How do get the offshore team balance right?  "

• While working in software services firm, i happened to work with some very sharp IT heads who does all the heavy thinking, and also with others who does the implementation with/without the big picture/detailed picture in mind. Delivery Heads of Software Services typically ensures that your project gets at-least one of such member 'thinker' in your team. If you are outsorcing work to India. Please do ensure that, you have that 'thinker'- who does the think through for your specific business needs. The best situation would be to have someone capable your client's rolls.

For a well balanced team of around 12 members, you should be looking for atleast three top notch thinkers within the offshore team, one for BA- Business Analysis(BA), Project Management (PM) and the third one other for Tech Leadership and Architecture (TA). If the project is smaller, you should be looking for a Technical Manager- who can play PM, BA and Architect role all by himself. Remember this is a hard find - but this is the crux of the team that you cannot compromise.

•  Offshore Companies typically infuse fresh graduates with few months of orientation into big projects, and bill them at the same rate as that of 3-5 years Software Engineer. The cost of such juniors will be just 5-8$ per hour, and in turn they can get billed at say $20 or more. So here is where smart clients do, they are always ready to pay premium billing rate for 'thinkers'. Billing rates for senior level 'thinkers' will be typically 30% higher. I have seen many smart clients, who bargain hard to get them. 
• If taking juniors in the team, do verify the resumes, get the interview done by your personell or by one of the 'trusted thinkers' from offshore team.

  Here is the catch-
  Offshore firms typically cannot allocate 'thinkers' full time in to your project alone.
  Thinker are fewer and are needed in all the projects being delivered for several different clients. So 'thinkers' work part time, but would end up getting billed full time for each client!

IT Outsourcing to India - Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M? Scrum or Waterfall

Planning to outsource IT project to India? - The series of blogs will help you to get some honest tips and tricks that will help you achieve success while working with IT firms in India.

Some queries you as the prospective Client may be going through, would be "Should i go Fixed-Cost or T&M contract or Hybrid or other? Scrum or Waterfall "

Most IT developers in India, if given a chance, prefer building things with quality in mind, sort of “craftsman ethos”. Any other mode of work, gets blamed to time-pressure, so self-estimation tends to be more effective. FixedBid projects doesn't allow the room for self estimation, as the project is, already signed for a dollar amount and timeline before it reaches the team that is going to work on it. So, i would recommend "Scrum Process model in T&M" as the ideal way to outsource to India

•    Typically small to medium IT firms would like to work with you on a T&M model. The large part of risk is on client. If you are signing up for more than 8 to 10 FTEs and that too for a period of say, 1 year or more - the risk is lesser, you are likely to get a solid team of smart professionals. But, Scrum is the process model that helps you mitigate under delivery risks. The catch is to find services firms, with maturity in delivering through scrum. 

       Scrum means, you would need a smart product owner at your end, who can drive the project in an Agile model, with weekly scrutiny of time-sheets and work products, it does work, but it takes a lot of hard-work on client's part.

Remember that, in India you will find highly dedicated resources who works in a firm, just because he/she "likes" the project and the reporting head at client end. It is important you play a hard cop - soft cop role carefully. Remember that, if you go too hard with Account management team and too nice with delivery team, it will eventually spoil the relation.

My first blog

Been a while, thinking about blogging about my experiences, thoughts and ideas- I am someone who started as hardcore .NET programmer - all the way to tech architect, tech manager roles and IT director role.

Last 5-7 years has been rather interesting, as i worked with larger teams, enterprise class multi-million projects, entered into building a product development from scratch to finish etc...

In my posts, i intend to give you a honest sincere views on Creative Designining & Creative Designers, Programming and Programmers, Project Management and Project Managers, QA - the myth and facts,  Business Analysis and Business Analysts, IT Infrasturcture teams and how it all works together in a structure woven through a process centric (or adhoc structure) of Indian IT Service sector.