People started circulating lewd comments his performance was not up to the mark. Each of them had different demands for their projects. He could not meet any of their expectations. He was only able to pick up bits and pieces in each of those projects and struggled to perform in his job. It was beyond his capacity to meet the demands of everyone. The level of focus and multitasking required for the job was simply too difficult for him to handle. He grew tired and exhausted.
He regretted his decision of coming to onsite. The golden years of onsite assignments were long gone.
“This is not what I wanted,” he thought.
He then booked his flight ticket and planned to depart by end of that winter. He cooked up some compelling reason.
“I’m getting married.”
‘It’s ok. You can get married and come back,” told his BEM.
“No. The girl is already working there. So I cannot come back,” he said.
“It’s ok. She can join Holtezent and come with you here. We will find some onsite assignment here for her,” said his BEM.
“Never again”, thought Puneet.
Chapter 14
“Ashutosh, can you tell us how this Agile method works? What kind of challenges you faced before?” asked Vinay.
Ashutosh started explaining Agile methodology in detail to Vinay and Himesh
“In Agile, a Sprint consists of a set of tasks. Each Sprint is for three to four weeks. Stories are tasks assigned to each person. Each Story has to be completed within the specified time.
As a person starts work on a Story, he gets to know more specific details of the tasks which are not known at the time of effort estimation. This amounts to additional work. But the catch is you have to finish the work within the specified end date. So you stretch and work extra time every day or work on Saturdays and Sundays, it’s up to you,” explained Ashutosh.
“What did you do when you are faced with tight timelines that you could not meet?” asked Vinay.
“If you find additional work is involved and you cannot complete within the end date, just discard those hidden requirements and the additional work,” said Ashutosh.
“What do you mean? Discard that additional work because you could not meet the end date?” said Himesh.
“Why bother? Why try hard and explain? It’s a pain to explain every detail of the additional work involved and how much more effort it will take to someone who will turn only a deaf ear to you. And the next day they will ask you the same questions, pretend they didn’t understand. They will even say that you have to plan and work efficiently to meet the end date and not ask for extra time. They will pass snide comments like you have to grow up.
They will make it as a big fuss. They, the higher up will talk like why additional effort needed, it should be completed within estimated effort. They will talk like you are not working and sitting tight. That will be the indirect comments on you. They won’t directly tell in your face. It will come through Raghu and Murali.
No matter what work you do, they will make you feel bad. If your work gets blocked and you are unable to proceed or if your work gets delayed because of somebody’s fault, they will make it look like you are responsible for that. No matter how much work you do, they will make it look like you are not working. They will pass lewd comments and say ‘you didn’t follow up, you didn’t ask, you didn’t check…you didn’t work with proper planning.’
You get the message right. You know what I mean. You have to read between the lines. They expect you to do the work of two to three people. That is possible if you work at least eighteen hours a day. But they will pay you for nine hours only.
They will not accept or consider your additional work. Your additional hours of work will not reflect in the actual efforts of the tasks in the Agile portal. If you took more than nine hours to complete a day’s work, Agile portal web site would still show the work as completed within the estimated efforts hours only,” said Ashutosh.
Ashutosh said Agile methodology was making life very difficult to survive for the team. While it provided a very good tool to efficiently track the work of each resource in the project, it was more suitable for projects that didn’t require R&D work.
Ashustosh went on in detail how the project used many technologies which were new to the team. There were many areas of work that would require R&D that were not clear while doing effort estimation. Due to high-pressure from the management, the team had to give some effort estimation for all the tasks that also fit within the already fixed timelines of the project. If the estimation exceeded a timeline, the team was told to cut short the estimation and complete the work within the timeline by stretching and working extra hours and by working on Saturdays explained Ashutosh.
Ashutosh explained further. He said Agile methodology didn’t encourage teamwork in any way. As each person’s work would be scrutinized in the everyday morning status call, people concentrated only on their work and stopped helping others. When someone got stuck in their work unable to proceed because of gap in his technical skill or the task required some R&D to be carried out, there was no one coming forward to guide him or help him out. People were more concerned that they would get blamed for any delays in their work or would be made responsible for somebody’s work. Such was the team spirit Agile methodology created within the team. Even hardworking people like Vinay, Himesh and Ashutosh struggled to cope up with Agile methodology.
“Certain people are good in certain kinds of work. They may be slow or weak to pickup things in other kinds of work. In teamwork, this will complement as well as provide cover to one another. But in today’s world of corporate greed, this kind of teamwork is overlooked,” said Ashutosh.
“What about other ways of developing software?” asked Himesh.
“In Software Engineering, there are many different software development methodology and software design models. A development methodology defines how to develop software right from gathering requirements from the customer for the software to be built, to designing and building the software, to testing and deploying the software for the customer. There are various process-driven methodologies like Waterfall methodology as well as an approach like Agile methodology with more emphasis on customer interaction.
A design model on the other hand defines how to specify the requirements which were gathered from the customer and then create a high-level design model of the software without actually creating the software itself. There are various approaches like Object Oriented Analysis and Design techniques, Unified Modeling Language and Use Case driven approaches. I think, for this project, a combination of Use Case driven approach and Unified Modeling Language is chosen as it is better suited to work with customers with non-IT background,” said Ashutosh.
“Why these jobs have come here?” asked Himesh.
“IT firms like Holtezent specialize in providing these services and supply the staff for doing the IT jobs to its clients like Dochamk Bank. This provides a mutually beneficial arrangement between Holtezent and its clients. IT job had become a demanding and stressful job due to the high-level of collaborative work involved, tight project timelines, reduction in number of quality staff and fewer number of resources deployed to increase profit margin and under funding in project budget due to budget cuts at client end,” said Ashutosh.
“Look at the work environment. You might get blamed every hour for no fault of yours. Imagine if you are shouted at for somebody’s mistake. This is a business environment where each minute counts. Each hour is paid and the work expected from you is at least two person’s work. This is a blame oriented work environment where they always suspect you are not working and slacking out,” continued Ashutosh.
“Not everyone will have the emotional quotient to sustain the emotions and stress involved while working in this kind of blame oriented work environment. Not everyone will be able to adapt and survive in this work environment. Just think of it, doing at least two people work, sweat yourself out every minute and abso
rb all the blame thrown at you. Some people might get fear to come to workplace and work the next day,” said Ashutosh.
“But we have to. There is no other way for us,” said Vinay.
“Yes that is why we are doing it right now. But how long we will be able to survive in such a harsh work environment?” said Ashutosh.
“What is this emotional quotient?” asked Himesh.
“It’s just a measure of your emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is how good you are in reigning in your emotions at the workplace. But having a good emotional quotient doesn’t mean you can overcome stress at workplace. It will at least enable you to stay cool and have some sanity in a hostile work environment,” explained Ashutosh.
Vinay had written around ten KLOC of code for one module but the logging and reporting functions were not ready yet. Himesh was working on those functions and he would take another three days to complete. Vinay had already reported the status of the ten KLOC code as completed, but refactoring the code to use Himesh’s functions would take another four days work for him. When Vinay explained this to Nitesh in the status call, Nitesh cut him off saying Vinay had to stretch extra hours every day and complete the work and those four days work would not be counted.
KLOC stood for Kilo Lines Of Code which referred to a thousand lines of code. Ten KLOC meant ten thousand lines of code. Refactoring of code referred to changing the structure of code, data, function calls and modules. As more and more functionalities were implemented, more details would emerge and it would become clear that certain code and data had to be restructured for a better design.
Ashutosh told Vinay and Himesh that usually design was carried out in the design stage and would result in two levels of design, high-level design aka HLD and low-level design aka LLD. No matter how much work was put into designing in the design stage, it would still be revisited when the ground realities change which happened often. There were many times during design stage one file format was given but when they started working on a module, a sample file was given to them which differed vastly from the file format given earlier.
Vinay, Himesh and Ashutosh found that many tasks assigned to them were estimated as four hours. But when they started working on those tasks, they found that R&D work was required and they could not complete within the estimated hours. When they raised this concern to the management, they were told that efforts had been estimated by SME team who had prior experience in these types of projects. They were told to stretch extra hours every day and complete the work within the estimates given and estimated efforts would not be revised.
SME stood for Subject Matter Expert. It referred to the experts who had expertise in the underlying technologies used in the project and had worked in similar projects before. Nowadays the term was loosely used and anybody with little bit of hands on claimed to be an SME.
Vinay, Himesh and Ashutosh thought there was a mystery surrounding the SME team. Ashutosh suspected there was no SME team. He also suspected the estimated efforts were laid out by Nitesh and few other executives from the business team. The term SME was used to give authenticity to the numbers. The management would also handpick someone and say this was the SME. Nobody could question them.
Management told them failing to complete within the timelines would be considered as performance issue with the resource.
“Consider this as an opportunity to prove yourselves. If you talk about revising the estimates or if you cannot complete within the timelines, it will be considered as negative thinking, negative attitude. It will have an impact on your appraisal. SMEs have estimated and reviewed the estimates and they are correct,” told Raghu in one of the internal team meetings.
Raghu told the team to work on another subproject as well and he had told them not to tell Nitesh or Anna about it. The team had a hard time juggling work for the two projects and meeting the timelines for the CDSTP project. They got severe blaming from Nitesh for even the smallest slip in the deadline and were unable to explain the delays in the deliverables.
In the cafeteria, Vinay, Sana, Himesh and Ashutosh started discussing about the project.
“How can we work on multiple projects and still meet the deadlines imposed by Nitesh?” asked Himesh.
“It’s getting difficult to focus on any particular work. I’m getting overloaded,” said Vinay.
“This is corporate greed at its best. If we switch between multiple project works, if we multitask heavily, we will lose focus on any particular work. This will impact our productivity and so we will be slow in doing our work. Not everyone will be able to cope up with this way of work. You will soon burn out. It’s only a matter of time,” said Ashutosh.
“What is corporate greed?” asked Himesh.
“Corporate greed is trying to make use of one person to do the work of two or three people. What this means is he has to work for more than nine hours a day and must complete the work of two or three people. But he would be billed for nine hours only. It’s basically getting somebody to do additional work every day.
For example we are asked to work on multiple projects but Nitesh will not know about our other project work. So he will think we are not working fully.
The greed also comes through other demands like value additions cost savings, etc. you name it. Again the idea is to get you to do extra work every day or make you work more than nine hours each day,” said Ashutosh.
Chapter 15
Vinay was walking near Metro Plaza to meet Sana there in the food court on a Saturday morning. They had planned to have food and then go for the new movie in the cinemas there. Vinay suddenly halted. He saw someone very similar to Himesh in the distance. He was just coming out of the main entrance of the Octos Towers Tech Park.
Octos Towers Tech Park was located opposite to Metro Plaza. The Tech Park was like a mini town. There were ten tall towers laid out in each turn of a long and winding Bezier-curve like eighty feet roadway. Each tower had hundred floors and they were all connected to each other through long bridge pathways. The entire mini town was cramped with many companies, stores, shops, food courts and movie halls. Each tower could easily dwarf the entire capacity of the Holtezent campus. There was shuttle service every ten minutes taking people through all the towers.
Vinay had been there before to attend interviews. Vinay thought what Himesh might be doing there. He had to hurry to meet Sana or they would miss the tickets for the new movie.
Later in office, Vinay saw an email from Sumathi.
“Who is this Sumathi? Why she is contacting me?” said Vinay.
“It’s given in her email signature. She is from Delivery Process Group. Murali might have told her to contact you who else,” said Himesh.
“What she is asking…’Please send the following documents and artifacts for commencing the audit by EOD. We will do project audit by this week and project management review by Monday’. Wow this is one big list of documents she is asking…Risk Management Plan, Disaster Recovery Plan, Project Plan, Project Continuity Plan, Quality Internal Audit, Quality External Audit, Project Contract and Statement Of Work, PM Checklist, KT and Process checklists, previous Audit report, previous project management progress report, Project Release Tracker, Resource Tracker, Software Engineering Methodology, Defect Prevention and Casual Analysis, Defects Reports, Customer Feedback and Rating, Project Team Trainings completion status,” said Vinay.
“Good. So you are working as a team member, team lead as well as managing the work within the timelines. You are also carrying out the work and activities our manager is supposed to do. And now you are the single point of contact for whoever wants anything from this project be it any document, project metrics and any other data,” smiled Himesh.
“I don’t know why Murali has referred her to me. I’m already overloaded. All these documents project manager should prepare and give it to her,” said Vinay.
“Ya. Why you have to involve in this project audit and project management review. We have already lot of wo
rk pending which we are struggling with. It will take lot of time to prepare all these documents. How can we send all these documents by end of today?” said Himesh.
“How many work I can do in a single day? I’m only one person and I can do only one person work each day. I’m already getting exhausted with all the work and activities I’m doing. I will get burnt out if it continues like this,” said Vinay.
“Don’t worry. We will share the work and send her whatever we can complete by today,” said Himesh.
Sumathi had asked for various documents and artifacts to be submitted to her every month end.
An artifact, also known as a software artifact, was a tangible item created as part of the project work. It could be a document, script, code or files. A deliverable contained a set of artifacts to be completed and handed over to the client as agreed in the project timeline.
Nitesh had stumbled on a portfolio level plan when he was browsing through the project plan documents in Dochamk Bank intranet web site used for document management. The portfolio plan clearly laid out the various dates for all the projects. It also specified which technology group would take over support and maintenance after the project was deployed into production as well as what would happen to the existing team handling the current system.
Nitesh checked the entries corresponding to CDSTP project. It said “Support & Maintenance to be handed over to Technology Architecture and Solutions Group”. In the comments section he saw, “Legacy Systems Group currently headed by Nitesh to be disbanded after take over by TASG team.”
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