“Murali is not the Project Manager for this project. He is the Technical Team Lead for just our team only. He and Satish just interviews people and report the results to the PM. Raghu is the PM and he decides the people for each project team under his portfolio,” said Himesh.
“But I thought Murali is the Project Manager,” said Vinay.
“Murali is the Technical Team Lead for our team. And Satish is the Technical Architect for our team,” said Himesh.
“Both Murali and Satish doesn’t get involved in anything related to technical work for this project. And that fellow Satish, he is a namesake Architect. He has nothing to do with creating the Architecture for this project,” said Himesh.
“And what about Shanthi?” asked Vinay.
“She is just a time pass. She barely does any work. She will pretend to be busy and avoid work. She is a big time pass,” said Himesh.
“All these guys come around 11.45 in the morning and usually leave by 6.45 in the evening. They will spend around one hour for lunch and thirty minutes for tea break. Murali works like a manager. And Satish will check our progress and ask questions just like our client does in the weekly status meetings. He just oversees us. That’s what he does. And you know that Shanthi. She pretends she doesn’t know anything to avoid work. She will act blur. If you ask her anything about project work, she will say mostly like, ‘I’m not sure ya. I don’t know ya. Check with him. Check with her.’” said Himesh.
In the afternoon, Murali came to their seats and started discussing the daily progress.
He said, “This client is a very big client. Client is aggressive in the project time lines. This project is marked as high risk project and closely monitored by the higher level management. Company wants this customer account at all costs. Make sure no escalations are raised from the customer side. We will have a daily progress meeting. If your work gets blocked for some reason, you have to be proactive and take the initiative and reach out to the concerned people and get things done. All tasks assigned every day by Satish should be completed on that day itself. Stretch yourself and make sure to complete the assigned tasks on that day itself.
Guys, you have to sit in the front seat and drive the things. This is a highly visible project. You will get lot of visibility to the management which will help you in your promotion.
I will be reviewing your performance every three months and provide you feedback.
Client has informed they don’t want any of the resources to take leave till the end of this project.
We will now dial in to the weekly status call. Satish dial into the bridge now,” said Murali.
Murali went back to his cubicle.
Satish then came to Vinay’s cubicle and used the phone there. He dialed into the bridge for the conference call. He then waited for the customer to join. Everyone pulled their chairs near to the phone.
Murali joined the call from his cubicle.
“Hai, this is Satish. May I know who has just joined?” asked Satish.
“Hi Satish, this is Anna. How are you doing?” asked Anna Howard.
“Hai Anna. I’m doing fine. We have Murali and the team in the call,” said Satish.
“Hai Anna, this is Murali. How was your trip to Dublin?” asked Murali.
“Yes it went great. I had to attend to lot of business there. How’s the progress there?” asked Anna.
“Satish, can you update on the progress?” asked Murali.
“Ya. We had started working on the POC activities. Himesh and Vinay are working on that,” said Satish.
“Murali you were not in the call on Monday? Two months for POC is not acceptable. I cannot afford to wait for that long. We have five resources in the team. It should be completed in one month. It should not take more than that,” said Anna.
“Yes Anna we will target to complete in a month. If we can complete by that time it’s well and good,” said Murali.
“Are you telling me we are in the first week of POC and nothing has been done? Perhaps we should discuss and take a step back,” said Anna.
“Vinay and Himesh are working on the POC. They will update you the progress regularly. We will track the progress and see how it goes. I have to join another meeting now. I will drop off now. Satish, please continue with the status updates,” said Murali.
Himesh thought Anna’s voice was so aggressive that even people who were confident of completing work within timelines would lose their confidence if they work with her.
Satish spent the next ten minutes walking through the progress of each activity. He then told Vinay and Himesh to update on the POC activities.
Himesh briefed about the progress in POC. Vinay explained his initial design for the POC. The call got over after another ten minutes.
Chapter 4
Vinay and Himesh both continued work on the POC. Vinay used to check the status of the IS ticket for ODC door access everyday both morning and afternoon. The ticket was pending with Jeetender from IS team. He tried to reach Jeetender many times in the last ten days. He called his mobile and landline numbers but Jeetender never picked up the call. He sent many emails but nothing happened. Satish told him it will take time.
In the afternoon when Vinay checked the status of IS ticket, he was shocked to see the status as “Rejected”. The reason mentioned in the ticket for rejecting was “Web security course version should be 4.2.1 and not 4.2”. He immediately accessed the online course and found that only version 4.2.1 was available. He could not find the version 4.2 which he completed two weeks back. Vinay sighed and went on to complete the course for version 4.2.1.
Satish told him to raise another ticket for door access as the rejected ticket cannot be reopened. Vinay got the ODC door access exactly twenty days after he originally raised the first ticket. He was finally relieved after he can access the door without standing there for five to ten minutes every time.
Vinay and Himesh focused on the POC.
He asked Shanthi if she can take up work on building the Graphical User Interface aka GUI part.
“I’m fully loaded with creating the Use Case specification documents. Most of my time will be gone there. Check with Satish,” she said.
When Vinay asked Satish, he replied, “No. I’m busy with environment set up for the different geographic regions required for this project. I’m also working on the Architecture documents. You can divide the work between yourself and Himesh.”
Vinay and Himesh worked between fourteen to fifteen hours every day. Himesh took up the work on the GUI as well. They both worked full day on Saturdays and sometimes half day on Sundays.
Himesh liked working with Vinay. He was amazed at the speed Vinay picked up things. He was astonished at the frantic pace Vinay worked. He found himself unable to match him in any area.
Himesh realized Vinay can just outmatch and outpace anyone if it’s anything related to software work. Himesh was also concerned. He once asked Vinay, “What if we cannot achieve two hundred TPS?”
“Don’t worry I will find some way to do it,” was all Vinay replied.
“But will it work?” asked Himesh.
“It will work,” said Vinay with full of confidence.
Himesh thought, “He is full of energy.”
He just wished everyone around him worked like Vinay.
Each issue, small or big, they discussed and researched together. They debated different approaches and finalized ideas and everything was done in a matter of minutes. They worked synergistically. Himesh pitched in where Vinay lagged behind. And Vinay would directly work on Himesh’s PC to get him up to his speed.
Himesh got stuck a few times as he was also new to Xorbiz, clueless and unable to proceed.
“I got stuck here,” he would announce.
Vinay would then work on that in Himesh’s PC and helped him to move on while Himesh continued with Vinay’s work in Vinay’s PC.
The first build of EMG gave only twenty five TPS. The other build for SMX yielded forty TPS.
“Let’s have a team lunch today. We will all go to Three C restaurant,” said Murali.
Three C was just around the corner of the main road. It had a buffet lunch and cost two hundred and fifty rupees a head. It was a five-minute walk from the office. Everyone met at Three C.
They went for the first round with the items laid out in the buffet. They chitchatted for a while talking about cricket, finance and politics. The talk was mostly between Murali, Satish and Shanthi.
Vinay and Himesh spoke very little.
“Why it’s called Three C restaurant?” asked Himesh.
“It’s for Chilli Chicken Curry,” said Shanthi.
Murali said, “What Vinay, Anna is asking how come another project is getting two hundred TPS but Vinay is getting only forty TPS?”
Vinay had heard that before from Himesh there was another project completed one year back by another team. They got a TPS of two hundred. But Himesh had said the two projects cannot be compared.
“It’s like comparing Apples with Oranges,” Himesh had said.
Vinay remembered Himesh telling him then, “The size of their transactions is very small. And they have only two types of transactions, a query and an update. That’s all. Their requirements are very different from what we have here. It’s bullshit comparing these two projects. The people at the higher level, they don’t try to understand anything. They just compare numbers. I can write thousand records to a file and claim I have reached thousand TPS. We can’t compare because those are very different types of transactions.”
Vinay replied to Murali optimistically, “We will try with few different techniques.”
“You have to be at the top of things man. This project is crucial for us. We don’t have much time left. Put more efforts. If we don’t meet at least two hundred TPS we will lose the project,” said Murali.
After the lunch was over, everyone immediately returned to their seats.
After sometime, Himesh saw Shanthi carrying a laptop bag.
Himesh asked, “Oh you got a laptop.”
“Ya. Now I can work from home. I can connect from home for three days a week. I can come to office for two days a week. I already discussed this with Raghu,” said Shanthi.
Himesh thought, “So now you have good reasons to avoid work and run away from work. How convenient for you”
Every one received an email from Satish with subject “Team lunch expenses”. He stated the lunch expenses total and asked each team member to pay two hundred and fifty rupees to him.
Sometime in the evening, Murali started his usual work secretly. He right-clicked his mouse on the Tamedview software icon in the Windows tray bar. A menu popup showed up in the screen. He then clicked on “Connect To”. He typed in the IP address of Himesh’s PC. IP stood for Internet Protocol and each PC had an IP address when connected to the computer network.
Tamedview was a tiny software application that was installed in each PC of Holtezent. It was used for remote monitoring and controlling PCs connected to the network. It could be identified by a small icon in the tray bar in Windows. The icon would be an image of two solid-filled triangles intersecting somewhere in the middle. One triangle would be green color and the other in red color. The IS team usually used Tamedview to remotely connect to PCs and carry out software installations and in resolving IS tickets raised by employees.
Using Tamedview, Murali could remotely monitor and see another PC’s screen from his PC. Using Tamedview’s monitoring mode, no one would be able to detect Murali was viewing their PC screen remotely. He had got the user id and password to login to Tamedview from his contact in IS team.
He usually used it to peek into Himesh’s and Vinay’s PC screen to see what they were doing. He did that once in the morning and sometime in the afternoon every day.
There were only fifteen working days left to complete the POC. PicoEMG and TeraSMX had lent their server hardware for this POC for exactly one month only. So after fifteen days, that hardware would be gone.
In the daily progress meeting, Murali asked, “Vinay, What’s going on? You still didn’t reach two hundred TPS? You have to work it out. We have only fifteen days left man. You have to go into the root of the problem and solve it.”
Satish said, “Vinay, get in touch with the other project and see how they have reached two hundred TPS. Check with them how they are handling things.”
“We got two approaches. We have already implemented one approach,” said Vinay.
“We don’t have time for experimentation and doing R&D. We have to understand the gravity of the situation and work towards it. Talk with the other project team and get the details,” said Murali.
“Sure we will do that,” said Himesh.
Later that day Vinay and Himesh discussed with the other project team how they had achieved two hundred TPS. They went through their designs and found that none of it was relevant to their current project.
“I told you. It’s a waste of our time. It’s using something called ZubeXdo software and its transactions are not even similar to ours. One simple query and one update,” said Himesh.
Chapter 5
In the weekly status meeting, Nitesh from Dochamk Bank joined the call. Nitesh worked as an IT Manager. As usual, Satish walked through the Excel sheet containing the status of each activity. Whenever anybody asked any technical questions, he would ask either Vinay or Himesh to answer. He would then ask Vinay to explain the work on the POC.
And as usual, Vinay observed Murali dropped off from the call after the first ten minutes of the meeting. Vinay knew Murali gave some petty reasons like “I have to join another meeting now”, “I have to attend an audit discussion”, “I have a meeting with the IS team for infrastructure setup”, “I have to attend a project management report meeting” the list went on and on. Murali was very clever to schedule such meetings to overlap with the weekly status meeting. He would always cook up something. Vinay thought he was very good at that.
Vinay and Himesh would then explain the POC work and what work they were doing then.
Nitesh asked questions like, “What is your achievement this week? How are you planning to go about closing the gap for the transaction rate?”
“I don’t see any value-add here. You guys should take up some extra work and do something extra. I mean you should take steps to walk that extra mile,” said Nitesh.
Nitesh said, “Vinay, I see everything is progressing in a casual manner. The team is working in a very relaxed mode. I see they are very relaxing. I’m not satisfied with the progress so far. I’m quite disappointed with the results. We have fifteen days left to complete the POC and you are saying the best we have is forty TPS. You should be knowing if we don’t get at least two hundred TPS, this project will get scrapped.”
“I don’t see the team picking up pace or understand the tight timelines we have. I would like to see some solid results next week,” said Nitesh.
Murali was listening to all this from his phone in his cubicle. Though he had said he was dropping off the call to attend another meeting, he actually didn’t hang up the phone or dial in to another conference call. He had put his phone on mute and he had a head phone plugged into the phone. He was listening to each word Nitesh was saying.
Satish said, “Yes Nitesh. Vinay and Himesh will update you regularly about the progress.”
“Ya sure we will do that,” said Himesh.
Himesh realized that no matter how hard he and Vinay worked, the extent of their efforts would not matter much to anyone and even less so to Nitesh and Anna.
“Why don’t they just cut this SMX configuration out and concentrate on only EMG? We will have time to at least try out the three approaches,” said Himesh to Vinay while they were discussing in private.
“If only if they realize how hard it is for us to build for two platforms at the same time,” said Himesh.
Vinay slowly r
ealized Himesh was biased towards EMG configuration.
“I’m going to use hardwired technique and rebuild the SMX POC. It will raise the TPS to at least hundred TPS,” said Vinay.
“What’s hardwired technique?” asked Himesh.
“It’s a way of writing spaghetti-like code. You reduce use of arrays and function calls in code. You will get one big monolithic code. It will be slightly faster,” said Vinay.
“Why are you doing that for SMX? Why don’t you do that for EMG?” asked Himesh. His face showed concern and disappointment that Vinay wanted to try out things with SMX and not EMG.
“It’s clean to do that in SMX. SMX is compact and highly structured. EMG has so many features. It has become a very big system. I feel it’s not efficient in handling certain things…it’s kind of like bloated software…slow, you know what I mean,” said Vinay.
“TeraSMX is a monopoly. It uses very proprietary hardware. PicoEMG uses hardware based on Open Architecture Set. If you try out things only on SMX configuration used in TeraSMX hardware, it’s not fair for EMG configuration used in PicoEMG hardware,” protested Himesh.
“I see so you want EMG and PicoEMG hardware to win the TPS contest. You can be frank with me,” said Vinay.
Vinay used hardwired technique and rebuilt both POC configurations. EMG now yielded eighty TPS and SMX gave one hundred and twenty TPS.
Only ten days were left to complete the POC.
Vinay worked over fifteen hours over the next few days. During night he would think about using new techniques like equivalence partitioning, orthogonal sets and using multiple instances of back-end systems. During day time, he would apply those techniques and rebuild both POCs for SMX and EMG configurations and document the results. Sometimes he applied a combination of techniques and analyzed the results.
At tea break, Himesh said, “The client thinks five resources are working on the POC but only two of us are doing the actual project work. We are working very hard and sweating it out. These guys Shanthi, Murali and Satish are enjoying.”
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