Software People Stories

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches and from some of our clients as well.

Listen to this quick monologue from Gayathri Kalyanaraman from PM Power Consulting on

Be organized, get things moving, as a home care taker

Allocate rooms for house members and give space to each other, better still time box it

Taking care of your health, with early morning and late evening walks as a scheduled activity

Continuing with online events as a facilitator, creating virtual break out rooms and facilitating collaboration with proper tool handling

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches and from some of our clients as well.

Listen to Sethuraman, Delivery Manager at Metric Stream share his perspectives with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting on -

Managing a support team

Customers understand BCP communication

Experience with him as an individual working from home to an entire team working in a dispersed mode

How to start and end the day

Handling range of team maturity from face-to-face discussions to now getting onto skype or teams [or webex with customers]

We will know our productivity better in a few days

3 things that help

Trust the team

Give them guidance: week plan, daily goals

Have SPOCs for smaller teams

Send everyone: team + management: what is the EOD achievement

This is a special series, Dispersal, focusing on the aspects related to forced, dispersed working from home.This captures perspectives from PM Power coaches.

In this episode, listen to Paramu Kurumathur talking about

- Dealing with lonliness

- Worries and anxieties about the future and no one to talk to

- On what leaders can do

- How teams can continue daily practices of scrum and keep with agile values

- what the future of remote working can look like

- Remembering to have fun through this current situation

In the third episode for the women’s special in the month of March, Gayatri from PM Power Consulting talks to Shalini Chaudhary, Head of Technology Caspian Systems about her journey and challenges and learnings across -

Understanding algorithms for making tea

Social conditioning and wearing specs to create a geeky self

Moved by the full page ad from Infosys to join the software industry

Creating a lightening resume 

Moved from developer mindset to testing and customer mindset

Feeling powerful as a quality gateway

Story of importance of integrity in one's role

Keeping lights on when apps were down, technology leader experiences

Location strategy of moving 9 cities across 3 continents

Understanding your priority and believe that you are adding value to the org and speak your mind

Be able to accept consequences 

Creating working agreements with spouse makes relationship stronger! 

Soul searching and what emerged from there

Pay it forward model in all three dimensions

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches.

In this episode, Chitra shares her views with Shiv on

- Why this mode of working feels like a disruption

- Dispersal in nature v/s whats happening now

- What teams can do - in terms of holding each other and creating virtual circles of trust

- What individuals can do - in terms of acknowledging what they are feeling, sticking with routines and doing at least 1-2 things each day

- Looking out and appreciating nature around us with hope that this too shall pass

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches.

In this episode, S Srinivasan or Srini as he is popularly known, shares his views on

- The word from agile values - "over"

- What people can use "over" as to discover a higher order purpose

- Loss of water cooler moments & side-bar conversations

- Formal remote work mechanisms would work, but..

- Social distancing and isolation

- Planned banter & a sense of belonging

- Inducting new joinees into an organization at this time

This is a special series of episodes, called Dispersal, in view of the ongoing pandemic, that has caused what we believe is a widespread dispersed working from home. Whats working and whats not, how are people feeling and other insights. We share perspectives of PM Power coaches.

The first one, by S Sivaguru is captured via his blog here (http://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/tips-for-a-suddenly-dispersed-team/) . He shares perspectives on

- Distributed v/s dispersed teams

- Tips on time planning, Home planning and work activities

We'd love to hear from you. Please do write in [email protected]

In the second episode for the women’s special in the month of March, Gayathri and Chitra from PM Power Consulting are in conversation with Jacintha Jayachandran, Author, Coach & HR professional and Sushma Joshi a communication & employee engagement specialist who have worked for tech companies. They share stories of their non-IT roles and working with IT professionals and cover topics such as  -

Coming to IT by accident; the journey from pharma and journalism to IT

Understanding the vocabulary and language 

Culture shocks and back to work after a decade, stepping from a victorian era to plush officers

Building relationships versus being pushers, connecting with business to build partnerships in IT

HR in IT as partners in governance rather than policy or process makers

7 blind men and the elephant, perceptions about the role of  communication & employee enagement  

Importance of respect and understanding roles to becoming a powerful collaborator and active listener to enable the right culture

Software people love their data points and HR can bring more agility leaving aside ego

Moving  towards a  Narrative 2.0 where we can do career pacing. 

Discovering and enabling women’s core strength work 

The empty nest syndrome and tapping into an ecosystem to pace and chart alternate career graphs

Having role models and getting success with happiness is key

Networking a super-critical act and starting with your local organization 

Staying authentic to yourself and expecting the same from others without judgement

Our guests -

Sushma Joshi is the Employee Engagement, Culture and Experience Leader at Symantec in Pune. She is also a passionate DEI evangelist. Sushma started her career as a journalist with the Maharashtra Herald and came to the IT world after a break of a decade when she joined Nihilent Technologies and later Persistent systems. She has spent the last 13 years with Symantec where she has a diverse set of roles across such as a global content strategist, communications consultant to the leadership team, partnering with engineering product groups to drive innovation and driving employee engagement.

Sushma has a BA (Hons) in English from University of Kolkata and Bachelors of Communication and Journalism, media and mass communication from the University of Pune

Jacintha Jayachandran

In a span of 25 years in professional life, she has been an integral part of and led teams in defining best in class talent management practices in organizations such HP, Infosys, OnMobile and in the past 10 years as an entrepreneur has co-founded 2 organizations; Transcendix a Training and Development organization and LeadNOW an organization enabling women to start, stay and soar in their careers by providing research based solutions.

Jacintha is a seeker, a learner, a human in the pursuit of living a meaningful and authentic life, also an entrepreneur, author, teacher and public speaker; who has inspired over 40,000 participants in various learning and coaching engagements across organizations and domains and geographies.

She is Trustee and chief volunteer at HopeWorks foundation which is currently impacting 500 girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to live , learn and grow with Hope.

She has also served as the evangelist trainer , member/head ethics committee and compliance and coordinated all Posh related processes at Infosys Technologies, Infosys BPO, OnMobile Global Ltd. Eli Lilly, SFL, Enquero Global amongst others.

She recently co-authored and published the book Words Matter aimed at women and girls.

Jacintha is certified in change management from Cornell University, certified in conflict management through mediation by Meta culture and is a post graduate in Social work from Bangalore university

We begin our special series for the month of March in celebration of Women's day with 4 episodes. 

In this one, Maggie Imbamuthaiah Managing Director of Anita Borg India India is in conversation with Chitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting where she shares her experiences and perspectives on

Bringing technical women together through stories

How women easily fall into an isolation trap

Discovering and working with exceptional women

Cultivating a place for support for entrepreneurs - a possible way to sustain in future

Sustaining businesses & innovation, creating safe spaces to be vulnerable and thrive

Balancing passion and practicality through diverse capabilities 

Having a personal board in addition to a company board; in addition to having a solid revenue model, watching costs and getting the right talent

Picking up comp sc in college and liking creativity in programming

Joining Infosys in its early days and cutting teeth with software development

Starting in tech, learning personas through OOP

Liked being an interface between technology and business

Why design thinking and solutioning remain key skills

Her personal transformations through yoga and being a teacher of yoga

Focusing on the present to be purposeful

Future of tech and what to be watchful for, asking the right questions and bringing one’s concious self to work

A Message for listeners

Maggie Inbamuthaiah (https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggiei/) is Managing Director of AnitaB.org in India.

She works with various community and Technology organizations to advance careers of women in technology and on the various programs including the flagship event Grace Hopper Celebration India (GHCI - https://ghcindia.anitab.org)

She is  a big believer in equal opportunities across gender, social status and backgrounds.

This has led her and her friends to create Mandram (www.mandram.org), a platform to curate ideas and talks in native languages so that they can reach people across the social diaspora with no impediment of language. 

She was the Co-Founder of Employee Experts (www.employeeexperts.com) and MyCampusDays (www.mycampusdays.com). A great learning experience that helped me work on end to end aspects of running an organization from people to sales.

In her corporate career spanning ANZ, Infosys and Dell Computers, she has led many global Technical/ operational projects and and led virtual teams across Asia.

She has a Post Graduate degree in HR Management and Organizational Behaviour from University of London (College of Birkbeck) and am a Computer Science Engineer from NIT, Tiruchirapalli.

She writes regularly on the technology, gender and social equality and occasional philosophy on LinkedIn and various other topics on my blog "A balcony with a view" at https://maggiei.wordpress.com.

She is a runner, yoga practitioner and teacher and an environmentalist at heart.

In this conversation, Mani Ratnam, Senior Vice President at Strategic Education Inc shares his  thoughts and experiences, with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, related to:

The transition from being a techie to someone visualizing and creating a larger impact

How wanting to take ownership of the impact helped in this transition over time

Getting guidance from many experienced mentors and learning by doing / failing

Using a data driven experimentation approach, based on some formal models such as lean thinking, six sigma etc

Understanding the user personas and their challenges when designing the key value propositions for the company

Why data alone is not sufficient to make decisions

His views on delivering knowledge not just in tie, but also just enough as needed at that moment

The significance of a culture of innovation 

Encouraging teams to take risks

How to help new team members think team results above individual contributions

His thoughts on work life balance

Getting teams aligned to a larger goal

His perspective on the future of IT as a career option, and his own learning in this career

Mani Ratnam is a Senior executive with deep business and technology experience leading Strategic Business Transformation initiatives and Operations. His Specialties include: Strategic Planning, Information Technology, Product Development, Big Data, Analytics, Customer Experience, Operations, CRM (SalesForce).

He can be reached at: www.linkedin.com/in/mani-ratnam-6812044  (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.linkedin.com_in_mani-2Dratnam-2D6812044&d=DwMFAg&c=bzqg8wBG-gmCffjjhiRy9RUbPhJ6AtQiizA-WVtoiSk&r=sXnBnMpFCw7fwo0iMNgQ1knmlCaviVvmE-p5pRkTjh0&m=dNRh88K60K8BHElfY2Tal5hihHqfrvYAS79U2VkyJy0&s=oydhc4HDRCi4YTyWTzqJ7YcGo2jc5bCFSr52PTSHiaM&e=) [email protected]