No More Deep Slumber In Meetings

No More Deep Slumber In Meetings

Kolkata, 7^th August: Do you keep falling asleep in meetings and seminars? What about those long and boring conference calls? Is there a solution to this? The answer is a big “yes”.

After a recent research conducted by a group of consultants, a solution to this painful problem has been found. “We observed and analyzed around 100 Software Engineers, before arriving at this solution”, said P. K. Bihari, Head Consultant.

In a recent World Wide Software Engineer Conference held at Kolkata, Bihari explained his simple solution, “Before (or during) your next meeting, seminar, or conference call, prepare yourself by drawing a square. I find that an A4 is a good size. Divide this card into columns - five across and five down. That will give you 25 blocks in all. Then, write one of the following words/phrases in each block:

synergy, strategic fit, core competencies, best practice, bottom line, revisit, expeditious, to tell you the truth (or "the truth is"), 24/7, out of the loop, benchmark, value-added, proactive, win-win, think outside the box, fast track, result-driven, empower (or empowerment), knowledge base, at the end of the day, touch base, mindset, client focus(ed), paradigm, game plan, leverage.

Now during the meeting, you need to keep your ears open for what the speaker says. Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words/phrases. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout BULLSHIT!”

Organizations are now embracing this plan with open arms. “This is really a very nice plan. I think it will be for the betterment of the employees. I think that now I can concentrate better in the big meetings that are held once a year”, feels Himadri.

Here are the testimonials from other satisfied "Bullshit Bingo" players:

"I had been in the meeting for only five minutes when I won." - Koushik
"My attention span at meetings has improved dramatically." - Kamales
"This is cool! Meetings will never be the same for me after my first win." - Abhijit
"The atmosphere was tense in the last process meeting as 14 of us waited for one word" - Amrit
"The speaker was stunned as eight of us screamed 'BULLSHIT!' for the third time in two hours." - Bimales

Though it’s good news on one hand, there are some adverse effects too. “I am not exactly sure where all the A4 sheets are disappearing to. The printers are all stark empty,” said the Head of the System Administration Department. However, Bihari claims, “These are just the teething problems. As more and more employees participate, this problem will slowly vanish away. It’s just that the demand is more than the supply.”

- Internal Correspondent

Lower Cost

For Indian software industry one of the biggest challenges is to reduce the operational cost to cope up with the increasing salary.

To lower the cost we often start focusing on stop providing facilities (like shuttle, subsidized lunch etc). We start pressing hard in reducing electricity, telephone bill etc (to the extent paper cost) instead of focusing first on the facts which have bigger impact on lowering the cost.

We often forget the reason why we are here in the industry – Managing Information. It’s very hard to be successful in trying to manage other’s information without managing your information first.

Manage Information

We ask people to be efficient. But the fact is that to be efficient we need an information framework first. This framework doesn’t cost extra – what you need is a company culture and vision to manage your information. You need

• Initiative from the top management.
• Tool to manage information which comes free – thanks to open source initiative.
• Your small time which in turn saves lot of your time and company’s money.

So what you need after this? Here are few examples:

• Company wide there should be single information system - how diverse the projects can be.
• Make sure you are amending the existing documents – you are not creating duplicate documents. So it'll good if your document management system tool is intelligent enough to detect the duplicate documents being created (to some extent).
• Inter project communication is very important so that the existing modules can be reused by other projects. This saves lot of time and money. Of course while designing you need to have the vision to create components which can be reused.
• As web 2.0 getting matured, younger employees continue to push and expect employers to offer use Web 2.0 technologies (wikis, blogs etc) on the job. Use these to maintain all troubleshooting information. This really helps to find the resolution quickly. It saves lot of time – in turn money.
• You should be having as much as employees with less than 3 years of experience. To get the work done with these lower salaried developers, you need to do following:
  

1. Maintain checklists to avoid mistakes.
2. Maintain standards – if possible some utility to check standards. You’ll find many off-the-shelves coding standard checkers which can be modified as per your need.
3. You need tech leads who should be able to resolve their technical issues quickly – should be able to guide them and train them.
   

Having said all these, it always takes time to build a culture!!