In this conversation with Santhana Krishnan (SK), coach from PM Power Consulting and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore SK’s journey

Fascinated by computers through the eyes of the Tamil writer Sujatha 

Started as a tech entrepreneur setting up ERP for a spinning mill  

Worked closely with different persona of users and ensuring usability  for tech agnostic members. Learnt true sense of agility by continuous integration, deployment and feedback

While building India market for ThoughtWorks creating a trusted relationships as an important construct and that starts with genuine understanding of the risks and sharing with the customer to gain trust on the capabilities 

Key metrics for agility - concept to cash, ability to recover from failure

Agility in the Education field is a passion - look at adaptable syllabus and emerging models to use during crisis such as lockdown, floods

Using concept maps, knowledge graphs to trace the learning curves of students and create a personalized learning experience

Learning and Keeping beginners mindset to see convergence of AI/ML with concept maps and knowledge graphs

SK can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/santhana-krishnan-ganapthy-01815b4/

In this conversation with Meera Chari from IEEE and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Meera’s journey

Started as a computer engineer with curiosity and need to learn 

Meera spoke about entering the electronic commerce world as a product engineer 

Learnt from a mistake made during prod deployment made her acutely aware of software development need to be supported by disciplined infra management

Layers of software along with security, latency, firewalls’ importance in problem solving

Understanding big picture moved Meera from software engineer to an application architect and enterprise architect

Disaster aware and fail tolerant application architecture based on a disaster that struck in the US East coach

Sharing her experience in creating company’s IT roadmap and decisions and parameters behind them

Cloud migration experience on critical business process that are deep rooted in enterprise applications

Entire Economy moving towards API dynamics powered by SaaS solutions

Cloud maturity is constantly changing by way of continual progression. This is leading to creation of new roles that are enabling cloud maturity and migration

Key takeaways for listeners - Listen to your customer, keep an eye on big picture and being curious about technology user or an innovator

In this conversation, colleagues Srinivasan Sundararajan (Srini) and Chitra from PM Power Consulting are talking about Srini’s experiences and stories around -

- A product of circumstances

- Education at IIT Madras in Mechanical engineer, introduction to computing and problem solving by working across departments at IIT

- Developing backup software in a manufacturing company and early lessons 

- Examining data above and beyond

- Risk taking, evaluating and owning your decisions

- Transition from corporate (helping with solving a problem) to being an agile coach (helping people discover the solution)

- Being a coach, facilitator & enabler & managing deliverables

- Owning one's decisions

In this conversation with Thiagarajan (Thiagu) Ramakrishnan and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Thiagu’s experiences around ML journey

Worked as software engineer in IBM,  ML Engineer in TeraData and Principal in Dell now

Started the ML fascination with coursera course by Andrew Ng

Research papers and meet-ups are a way of working in emerging technology on the multiplicative curve

Benefited from the power of meetups to get clarity in way forward and continues to contribute in conferences, meetups and the likes

Now working on creating ML platform and creating an abstraction layer for the users

He learns ability to see big picture from seniors and takes one-step-at-a-time as a clear difference in mindset with millennials

EQ 2.0 as an inspiration and Deep Work to improve high performance

ML implementation in check clearance and how a Phone image and an API has solved the manual verification

Looking forward toward appropriate product fitment and timing of the need while launching products

More Information about Thiagu can be found here https://www.linkedin.com/in/thiagarajan-ramakrishnan/

In this conversation PM Power colleagues Ramki (Ramakrishnan Sethuraman) and Chitra explore Ramki’s experiences around

How he got into software and IT

Early programming days in C on mainframes and becoming a DB2 expert

Change in mindset towards the what and why v/s how first

Building performance into a system for a solid foundation

Experience in the financial sector; at the forefront of adopting technology

Essence of client interactions, empathy, value and understanding

Playing several roles in his career and the importance of each of those roles

Entrepreneurial lessons

Being serious, passionate and having gratitude for his career

In this conversation with Karthi (Karthikeyan) Swaminathan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/) , Vice President and GM of Tact.ai and Gayatri from PM Power Consulting explore Karthi’s experiences around

Collaborations with doctors started in college

Started working with products to customize and working closely with users

Part of the open source movement and solve fellow developers problems

Lost opportunities around cloud investments in the tool space

Medical professionals creating an empathy for the end user by the developers in a big area of focus

Staying focused with road warriors problem in Tact.ai with edge computing, AI and data

Last decade has seen a tremendous shift in the designer/XD / Product talent

Talks about rural students empowerment as a movement

Embrace your journey with an open mindset

Create space for the team to flourish their skills and mindset

He can be reached via https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/  (https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthiswaminathan/)

This episode is an accompaniment and  a broad spectrum exploration of experiences and narratives as collated by Sivaguru from PM Power consulting, during conversations with people across IT/Software and Non-IT businesses on how they responded to the needs of business with covid-19 changing the environment.

The complete report is available here (https://bit.ly/7lockdownlessons)

This episode, a conversation between Sivaguru & Chitra, delves into and across the findings shared in the report. The exploration includes -

- Backstories in preparations for changes caused by the pandemic 

- What really happened even when a few large companies had a BCP in place

- What was the thinking behind the unravelling of responses of companies in a series of phases comprising sensing, focus and response

- How did leaders ensure that rallying around a purpose was achieved, remotely and how were employees engaged and how their work rose to another level inspired by a greater purpose

- Creative approaches to sustaining or managing business 

- The sense that a collective approach to discovering easier, safer things to share & increased empathy alongside the survival instinct

- Though we all appear to be alone, we are certainly not alone; a contrast and take on how we associate ourselves with a mission and purpose and how the system in turn supports people and organizations.

We would love to hear from you and your experiences. Please reach out to us at [email protected]

Please also see this blog http://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/7-lockdown-lessons-on-agility/ for an overview of the report

Rajiv Puranik, VP platform engineering and cloud operations at Vocera Communications & Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting are in conversation as Rajiv shares

His professional experience with Twillio, Apigee, Yahoo before Vocera covering corporate, engineering roles as well as startups

What developers should know, when building products, the ‘-ities’, beyond the algorithms

A personal devops horror story 

How developers can have empathy of what happens after code is written

Devops is the first line of defence, and engineers are the second line

About differences in the safetynet, depending on company size or areas of operation

His tips for techies taking on leadership / managerial roles to be effective

His mantra for scaling as a leader

What the forced work from home implies for individuals and leaders in their approaches to work

How one should move to a nurturing style, even if starting with a directive approach, to develop others

Why quality is a business metric

What is acceptable quality

Making decisions when there is ambiguity

The impact of AI in decision making and leadership responsibilities

What he enjoys most about his career

When it comes to career decisions, the one question everyone should ask themselves

Rajiv can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivpuranik/

Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting is speaking with Badri Narayanan, Vice President of HCL Technologies Ltd

Geography and culture aspects of IT delivery plays a critical role in not just UX/UD

Communication/ project mgmt and various inter dependencies

Roll mapping of local talent in critical roles and having close business relationship are key things to put in play for long term success

Bridging cultural differences in Japan was around having additional business analysts with bi lingual capability to understand specs and pair program with the developers to ensure gaps are reduced

German teams needed accuracy in functionality as much as the accompanying documentation

Change in expectations in IT landscape with integrated business & IT

Several changes have happened from owning small functions in y2k to smaller SDLC parts to owning entire app stack we have grown quite a bit

Digital tsunami needs dual crossing with owning IT and making IT more valuable

IT Decision are continuous and not be outsourced to only a nuanced role

Conscious relearning is required to re-equip ourselves in the new digital world in terms of technology and soft skills

Business outcomes would need to be innovation led and internal teams/systems need to be delivery/engineering led - Dual engine 

Learnings from failure and crystalize them to the next level seems to be the way forward to accelerate the art and marry the engineering discipline

In this episode, Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting is in conversation with Jayantha <> who shares his life as an engineer and working in Europe amongst other things such as -

- Telecom engineering to data engineering

- Getting help and guidance in a new place and new company

- From his lens of how software has evolved over generations

- designing products for different customer segments

- How data engineering folks work with other people like product managers and business folks

- The importance of understanding users of the product even for data engineers

- Understanding GDPR while working on personal data

- What different views of data down a funnel can reveal and recognizing anomalies

- Transitions from telecom engineering to a services company and then a product company

- How agile practices need to chosen to suit ones needs

- shares thoughts on people considering an IT career and moving to Europe for work

Telecommunications Engineer turned Software Professional turned Data Engineer working at Omio in Berlin as a Senior Data Engineer and Lead of the Business Intelligence platform team. 

Formerly worked at Thoughtworks in Bangalore. 

(Hobbies are guitar, sports and art)

LinkedIn | jayantak | linkedin.com/in/jayantak/

Instagram | mellowcolour | https://www.instagram.com/mellowcolour/

Twitter | mellowcolour | https://twitter.com/mellowcolour