Here's a conversation between Sairam and Sivaguru of PM Power consulting as they uncover facets of Sairam's journey from when he began working in film technology and film manufacturing to his extensive experience in software design and development. Sairam has worked alongside industrial engineers which helped him to learn, understand and associate his thinking with JIT, Lean, Kanban, BPR etc.  He has adopted IID [Incremental and Iterative Development] – (unknowingly) as early as 1994, to turn around a thrice failed software project, which further helped him later to establish contacts with some of the thought leaders in UML, IID, Scrum and XP.  For the last over 15-years, his focus was on applying these alternate software development models to data intense projects like Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Big Data & Analytics.

Listen on as he shares stories around -

How unit card readers helped him pivot to software from being a chemistry professional

Scientific programming to MRP 2

Having the advantage of being close to his customers

Taking up a project that nobody wanted to be part of, as a one-man army

Learning from the success of the project: secret - keeping extensive notes

How that helped in the conversations with Craig Larman to decode the success formula

Characteristics of industries where repetitive processes are most suited

Applying concepts of incremental work in exploratory [R&D] situations

How even a simple program development may be incremental and an analogy of [old style] film processing

The anti-pattern of measuring team velocity

The concept  of shared understanding

Advice for aspirants to the industry, particularly students