Software People Stories

Today is a special day for us @ Software People stories where we are commemorating 100 stories completion and we decided to do an experiment with live guests and a panel discussion with 4 of our past guests in Software People Stories comprising of Gopal from Global Automation, Neeraja from Jobsforher, Jacintha from Enquerro and Sukumar from TinyMagiq. All three co-hosts Sivaguru, Chitra and Gayatri also have participated in this special episode that we recorded on International Podcast day. Please expect some overlap conversations as this was a live panel convo which was largely unscripted with three questions forming the base part of the conversation.

Highlights of the conversation

Sivaguru spoke about the origins of the podcast and how he wanted to capture the evolution of technology and the developments and it transitioned to real life stories and anecdotes that were never told

Gopal being the very first guest of our podcast spoke about being ready for experimentation and how he had always been moved by audio right from the initial radio days and how the focus on the topic stay right from origins of Quinoa. Gopal shares his ability to understand topics in audio medium far better than in any other.

Chitra spoke about her penchant for the platform and wanting to be an RJ and how it has been a very satisfying experience. She shares her chance conversation with Neeraja to come onboard. Chitra also shares how the platform has helped to get ideas and implement them in a sustainable way.

Neeraja shares her experience with Podcast and how she used this podcast to share her life journey in all her speaking engagements. She felt that the hosts made her at ease and how some of the clarity in impromptu has been unnerving at first and found it great with clarity. Neeraja also shares her experience with using audio as a medium for storytelling and how she’s talking to more people as the in person shyness is slowly come down

Gayatri spoke about her interest in digital tools and ability to move away from her comfort zone and how nice it is to talk to people and connect with long lost relations. It is also wonderful to see emotions flow. She talks about listening to podcasts has pushed her fitness and hosting podcasts has made her a better listener.

Sukumar shares his experience on coming on board and how covid has made him a convert of this platform. He also shares how he’s used recording training materials and made the online training for conversations and questions. This has fundamentally transformed or flipped the art of teaching. Sukumar shares how hearing or recording audio is the most natural way to record anything as there is no real changing of information. Its coming as-is from one to other.

Jacintha shares her experience with giving an audio message as part of her Onmobile job and taking it further to provide a daily audio message on positivity. She also shared her experience in COVID using gram vaani to teach disadvantaged students, cooking using network of volunteers for migrant population and continuing her consulting work from her home. Jacintha added that how podcasts have become like honey flowing in your ears and this would be here to stay.

We also heard stories from the audience

More wishes from all our past speakers and audience please visit below

http://pm-powerconsulting.com/podcast-100-episodes/

In conversation with Jayant Swamy, Program Manager and Author of many books with Gayatri Kalyanaraman from PM Power Consulting

He started his career in finance with a CA, went on to do his MBA from IIM Bangalore, and learnt his penchant for teaching

While doing his MBA Jayant swamy taught MBA students art of presentation and persuasion skills

• Jayant Swamy has coached MBA aspirants in public speaking and taught finance at local B-schools

• Jayant moved to the US in 1998 and works as a management consultant and corporate trainer

• Jayant is known as the program manager who is also the glue that hold the team together.

• Jayant ponders over two project implementation experiences and says how continuous learning has made him the person to be sought out for problem solving

• His deep expertise in Finance and management made him the perfect conduit to interact, translate and influence program outcomes

• Jayant shares his interest in writing stories and how he started unsuccessfully during his college days. He didn’t lose sight of it as time progressed. He has authored many books and has 2 under the works. More about Jayant’s books are here www.jayantswamy.com

• Jayant shares his experiments in storytelling in his corporate career be it creating reports or saying a story via the presentations

• Jayant narrates his teaching experience across decades starting with aspiring entrance exam students to a professional training for the University of Washington

• Jayant talks about staying true to program management while pursuing many interests in storytelling, IMPROV and teaching at the same time.

• Jayant talks about compassion for fellow human beings and bringing empathy in every transaction as a key message

You can reach Jayant at the below address

www.jayantswamy.com

In this conversation Harsha Mutt is sharing his career story with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting where Harsha talks about

*Lessons from role transitions

*A Bangalorean, helping his father run a printing press during school days

*Studying Engineering and cost accounting, in parallel

*A career choice to join Infosys, that he is very happy about

*Learning basics of computer science and languages from the founders of the company, as a trainee

*His first major transition in life - moving from Bangalore to the US, from a day-scholar, cycling from home to the first flight overseas

*How this was like hostel days, learning about new countries, cultures and people

*Handling the first major transition in its stride, by not having any fear or inhibitions

*When work is play, time passes quickly

*How an introspection for annual planning helped him evaluate and consider options outside his first employer

*About the many ‘firsts’ in his career with Infosys

*On a daring approach to get re-immersed in the Indian ways of life, on returning from the US after a long stint there

*The three main differences in his work scope, when he took up a job in HCL and what he learnt from that

*What he learnt in becoming an investor and entrepreneur

*How learning management concepts on campus and actually adopting these in practice are different and difficult

His tips for entrepreneurs on what it means to ‘live within one's means’

*His story of the transition to being a coach from doing things by oneself

*The value a coach can bring in with an outside in or a ringside view

*His current interests to pay it back or forward

*We conclude with his advice to both entry level and mid-career IT professionals

Harsha brings more than three decades of General Management experience serving as Head of strategic business units, and from multiple global assignments.

He is a mechanical engineer and a management accountant.

He started his career at Infosys, building commercial software solutions to leading US companies in retail, distribution, manufacturing, telecom and financial services, and went to become a business leader leading multiple accounts and teams.

He completed an Executive Education Program PMD at Harvard Business School.

He went on to play a leadership role at HCL Technologies heading Technology and Operations for Capital Market Services.

He is an accredited Executive Coach from Coaching Foundation India and actively coaches a select few CXOs each year.

He started his entrepreneurial journey with Lukup Media Pvt Ltd, playing role of CFO and Board Member, which has since been wound up.

He has enabled projects, teams, and businesses to scale multi-fold and grow.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshamutt

Tune into the conversation between Chitra from PM Power Consulting and Nitya Krishnamoorthy, a seasoned IT veteran and leader. Nitya shares her journey and experiences on

-Career choice, supporting parents & wanting to be far away from Biology

-Start of career and 10 years as a technologist

-Personal and professional transformation and taking a break in the middle of her career

-Transition from an Individual Contributor to manager to IC again and managing teams across countries

-Recognizing her own passion, strength and belief in “anything is doable”

-Building capable, extensible and scalable teams

-A complete shift in her view of people thanks to the mode of remote working

-Messages for freshers on patience and working on pretty much everything

-A few of Nitya's special interests

Nitya can be reached at - linkedin.com/in/nitya-krishnamoorthy-770a6486

In her own words:-

"I am a fun loving, passionate and self-driven individual with over 18 years of experience transforming people, processes, businesses through my project management and business operations skills. It's been an exciting journey working with brands, companies and businesses helping them transform their Digital processes and thus also evolving, learning and transforming myself."

In conversation with Tech Executive and Principal consultant from PM Power Consulting, Zafar Ahmed shares his experiences with Gayatri From PM Power Consulting on his journey. Zafar draws out his 4 decades of experience as 4 phases in a cricket match with one exciting inning built over another.

Started as a passionate programmer in Tata steel working in their transformation

In the second innings, became part of IT services revolution shifting base to US and owning a start up

He moved to India in early 2000s and headed technology in Hughes software where he learnt the ropes of management, leadership and went through a transformation within

Zafar is currently in his 4th innings where he wants to share his rich learnings as a leadership coach and a consultant in PM Power Consulting

Zafar shares his many defining moments in his career starting with his focus in becoming part of Tata steel and completely falling in love with software

He shares a story on how he stumbled upon agile transformation and became a student and internalised the mindset over practices

Next big defining moment is his understanding of leadership style and his transformation along with an agile way of working.

He talks about being a taskmaster and how he transformed later as a people’s leader away from his task orientation

He talks about setting long term goals in his career as one of his misgivings and not taking enough risks in his career

Zafar signs off with a positive note on covid situation and how technology has changed each and every human being on earth.

Zafar can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/zafar-ahmad-4704b76/ and https://pm-powerconsulting.com/experts/zafar-ahmed/

Gayatri can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaya3k/

In this conversation, with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, Ramesh Emani shares

Starting his career with Tata Burroughs and after 3 years moved to Wipro Infotech, at that time - and stayed on for 25 years

Being bitten by the entrepreneurial bug when he was almost 50, with a desire to have a startup before he retired

How he became a manager in his second project itself, with less than 2 years of experience and had to manage most team members who were senior to him

His principle of spending only 50% of his time in ‘management’ work and take up some individual contribution goals as well

His tips for sharing the workload with the team(s)

How he chose areas where he can add greater value and started focusing on them

The importance of getting an executive level understanding of technology

That one should always be a student, in the tech business

His experience of being a business leader - getting and servicing a large account and being the first sales person in the US for his company

What he learnt and why he enjoys the role of a Business Unit head

About being comfortable with ambiguity and making the ambitions, possible

How and why failing is not failure and being ready to take calculated risks 

About how he picked up healthcare as the domain for his startup

Why you need more doers in a startup

The role of meetings and how to carry the team with you in an organizational transition

What retirement means to him and his hobbies

His secret to avoid burnout

Ramesh Emani can be reached via https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramesh-emani-4053a4/

PM Power Consulting is launching its second book soon, 5 Tantras of Enterprise Agility.

Tune into this conversation to listen to the how the book evolved through the story from the author Paramu Kurumathur, the product owner J Veeraraaghavan and Sivaguru.

Episode Sub-Title: Living the Product Leaders’  Dream

In conversation with Product Management Leader, Krupa Natarajan where her software experiences with Gayatri From PM Power Consulting on her journey

Started technology journey with fervor to learn and curiosity about Technology

Transformed her thinking during the dot com bust to understand value delivered by her and for the customer

Established a career as a product leader after spending many years in the engineering side

Engineering driven products have made our life smoother, as a product leader I see what else is possible?

Product needs to fit in the users’ ecosystem and life completely.. Else the product wouldn’t stay in the market

Understanding of 3 levels of users in the enterprise and creating a value prop early and continuously has been valuable

In the consumption driven software economy, you will be outdated quickly if you don’t adapt

Living the product manager’s dream as one doesn’t have to worry about maintaining number of versions or having a perfect feature set due to the shipping constraints.  

Its liberating to know that one can make small changes and see how user reacts and hence take several small bets along the way and has become less risk averse

Staying in the wave of technology enablers and providing the needed features for enterprise customers has been quite enriching

Consumers have more gadgets today than a CEO of the organisation. Envisions that would change and AI will be given in everything that we do

Always ensuring that you wow people’s expectations beyond their dreams and out of the box and not just meet or exceed them doesn’t cut work. This has been her guiding principle 

Krupa can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/krupanatarajan/ 

Gayatri can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaya3k/

In conversation with Coaching Guru, Sivakumar from PM Power Consulting , he shares experiences with Gayatri From PM Power Consulting on his journey

Discovered passion in a cascading manner by way of experimenting

Current full stack developers and enjoyed starting in software as a full stack engineer

Software projects are social organizations that needs to be nurtured

Understanding of fulcrum and levers that you have to balance people and capability development

Stories of two contrasting software deliveries

One with a large development project that started off with great fanfare ends up in legal tussle

Second that starts with many SLAs ends up with customer accolades

Bridge between the two lies alignment of vision, trust and teamwork

Changes are evident now in business investing energy and effort in technology teams 

Stakeholder and People management - two sides of the same coin to manage culture, communication

Can you become a person of influence - providing support, person of values and continuous beacon to facilitate conversations

Highly momentous time personally to let go of control and let the team do their work

Being a coach, Shiv points out various dimensions he’s found to add value based on the situation - as a mentor, agile custodian 

Imparting learning through story telling and case study nuggets

Experiment early and understand your passions like Shiv has found passion for writing caselets/stories/monographs

Find an unforgiving mentor to hold you to high standards or an uncomfortable mirror early in your career

Shiv can be reached at https://pm-powerconsulting.com/experts/sivakumar/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/sivakumar-subramanyan-1a78101/ 

Gayatri can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaya3k/

In conversation with Coach Extraordinaire and Technology Executive, Arun Swamy where his software experiences with Gayatri From PM Power Consulting on his journey

Multi touch point start in software - as a research assistant, contract job after doing MS and finally landing US Army related work

Returned to India to seek stability and part of the growth wave of product companies

HP taught the value of Org values and profit being a side effect

Proud to be part of two generations of agile way of working - initially in 1990s for small project development and later as EVO in a more formal way

HP also saw challenges in org upheavals and learnt to stay in the web portal specialization

Proud of being part of a product sunset which was executed in a least risky way

Moved to be a leadership coach based on his experience of being a coach 

Coaching Stories based on his strengths on communication, empathy and staying impartial

Understand what hat you are wearing a mentor, coach or a friend

Fall in love with your work but do not romanticise it by staying realistic

Staying truer to process and design and continue to adapt with technology

Arun can be contacted at 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arun-swamy-843410/

Gayatri can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaya3k/