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!!