Software People Stories

This conversation between VK Kumar, a seasoned architect and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting brings to light Kumar's narratives on

The solid grounding that formal and structured training can give

His initial work on one of the first globally successful products from India

What he learnt about practical use of technology from a consulting role

Becoming an architect

What cross-over cables taught him

Challenges of working in a distributed team

Making meetings effective through a practice of readouts

A good practice related to architectural governance

Some key aspects to be considered for resilient architectures

The cyclical nature of architectural models

Whether being an architect - as a role - is more stressful than other roles in software development

Architecture and Agile

What he finds as an effective tool for communication for architects

Whether an architect is an individual contributor or a team player

Kumar Venkataramiah, is a senior architect at a reputed financial telecommunications company. He specializes in application architecture, design, business continuity and performance. He has close to 40 years experience in the IT industry and has expertise in transaction processing, message switching, networking and databases. He has managed several IT delivery teams. He has no hobbies and enjoys his free time.

In this conversation, Veena Ramagoplan, Co-Founder and Director of Inroads Leadership Development and Chitra from PM Power talk about Veena’s variety of experiences such as 

Overcoming careless whispers and successfully leading a team of 50 sailors on a 250km trek

Facing cultural experiences while handling global transitions

Being exposed to people management at a very young age, handling the media glare, and being in the Limca book of records

The importance of self belief & responding with action to counter biases and how to gain respect through your actions

Learning how to be assertive and respond when people remark derisively

Balance with empathy in any environment

What helped her transition to corporate life

How to work beyond a job description

Stakeholder engagement instead of stakeholder management when handling work transitions to India

Why she chose to “give back”

Her message for people on how to balance their lives

Ms. Veena Ramagopalan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/veena-ramagopalan-75052b9/?originalSubdomain=in) has a versatile experience of over 25 years in the  corporate and defence. She is an ex-Naval officer from the first batch of women officers of the Indian Navy. Thereafter, she worked in various companies including Philips for over 13 years, holding senior Strategic & Leadership roles.

Veena has enriching corporate career, her experience spans across Strategic & Process Consultancy, Business excellence, Quality Assurance & Quality Management, Delivery and Program Management.

As part of her corporate career she has handled global and cross-cultural teams, led and been part of various transformation and change management journey in the organization.

Veena is Co-founder, Director of Inroads Leadership Development .  She is passionate about coaching and mentoring leaders and professionals. She loves connecting with people to share her experiences and support them. She also enjoys engaging and inspiring women leaders and professionals, and to help them accelerate their leadership abilities and integrate in organizations.

Listen to another interesting conversation between colleagues J Veeraraaghavan and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, as JV's shares his experiences on 

Various role transitions in JV’s career and how he handled them

The motivation to excel in the responsibilities he took up

How his core strengths of communication, interface with people, being able to talk the language of the customer, being a good listener helped in getting new responsibilities and challenges

Learning on the job

Realizing that an all round exposure was needed

Product engineering, automation and tools

Learnings from a transition from a services organization to a product organization

Learning as a teacher

Taking exploratory approaches as a coach

The experience as a small fish in a big pond, from a big fish in a small pond

The urge to give everything your best

Going with an open mind and trusting your own skills

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

Episode: Banana Peels and Monocultures

Stories from an Agility Coach

Listen to Viktor Cessan, agile coach, share his stories, in a conversation with Sivaguru from PM Power consulting, as Viktor talks about -

How he got into software

His first startup, even while he was in school

Starting as a content handler

Understanding the challenges of working with remote teams

Using feedback to improve one’s style of working

How learning from others fueled the desire to share

Connecting with the organization or teams when you start engaging

His approach of using a discovery stage to get a first hand feel as a coach

His experiment at Spotify of removing all managers

The importance of empathy for a coach in a multi cultural team and being sensitive to diversity in the team.

His impressions and experience of working in Bangalore and being adventurous with food in Mumbai

The back story behind his podcast

His thoughts on where Agile in the enterprise is headed, and the role of coaches

Viktor Cessan has 13 years of experience from the software industry and has for the past 8 years coached agile, organizations, and teams. Viktor spends his time helping companies design systems where organizations, teams, and individuals become healthy are able to make an impact and achieve business goals and he recently published a free case study on when he coached agile transformation at Avanza Bank in Sweden.

Since being introduced to agile methodologies in 2007, Viktor has been a Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach at companies such as Spotify, Avanza Bank, King, and Nordic Entertainment Group.

Viktor runs trainings and workshops on a wide variety of topics such as agile team dynamics, both introduction to and advanced product ownership, self-management, leadership, and management. Feel free to connect with Viktor on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/viktorcessan/) , Twitter (https://twitter.com/viktorcessan) , or have a look at Viktor's esteemed Website (http://www.viktorcessan.com/) .

In this episode, Gopal & Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting are in conversation as Gopal shares his rich experiences through several anecdotes based on  - 

The first transition from an individual contributor to a ‘leader’

Understanding the style of letting others do work

Managing peers and allowing your natural instincts to play a role

How one can manage divergent priorities between individuals and team aspirations

Significance of opening up and talking

Managing customer expectations

Managing one’s bosses… and their bosses

Being empathetic to understand the other person’s compulsions

Nurturing a positive, trusting relationship

The importance of feeling secure and confident.. And liking people for what they are

Handling escalations

A simple formula to be at peace with one’s environment and enjoy life

In this episode, Chitra from PM Power Consulting is in conversation with Padmaja Narsipur, Founder and CEO of Clearly Blue Digital where she shares her journey and experiences on -

- Starting a career in Software and how she became a tech writer.

- Moving to being a solopreneur 

- The Clearly Blue Story

- Having to bring her career to a halt *& discover new things to do;

- Free lancing and the hamster wheel

- Self management & time management

- Discipline of free lancing to enjoy flexibility

- What it takes to be a good tech writer 

- Creating a workplace that she wants to come to & for anyone who wants to work there

- Capitalizing on information assets through a digital & social presence online; beyond likes & shares; building brands, 

- Defining user experience and managing media channels

- Harmonizing with AI, balancing information, tech and nurturing one's imagination

- How businesses need to navigate the digital world to build better products

- Message for aspiring entrepreneurs

- On being a mother 

Padmaja Narsipur heads Clearly Blue Digital, a Bengaluru-based content design firm with practices in content marketing and e-learning. Her background is in Computer Science and Physics. She has previously worked with Intel Corp at Santa Clara, CA, after which she enjoyed a solopreneur career as a Consultant Writer and Manager in technical and business-centred projects for some of the world's biggest firms before launching Clearly Blue. Padmaja is a passionate student of human interactions with technology; and about the ways we learn and grow. She lives in Jigani (rural Bengaluru), with a supportive husband, three teenagers, one unruly puppy and a riot of serene guppies.

In this episode of the Software People Stories, Visweswaran SK (also known as Viswes) and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting uncover fascinating software experiences from Viswes around -

How he started software development using punch cards

Writing utilities for spooling printouts

Exposure to database systems while working on a commercial application

Developing a database system on SN computers

Hackathon like approach for the dev team

Learning to work within 256 kB!

DECUS-C compiler: a community contribution : 

Knowing that the code one wrote was being used after 10 years!

His personal style of programming: from working within limited computing resources

Testing when you have control over all pieces of code environment and when you do not

Of chief programmer teams versus Agile ways of working

Implications of Big Data on database thinking

Is there a need for some standards for data interchange

Technology that needs to adapt to senior citizens

Here's also an introduction from our guest, in his own words -

My name is Visweswaran S.K . 

 

I am a graduate of IISc Bangalore and a post graduate from IIT Madras, I have been in the software industry since mid 70’s. 

 

During my active life in software industry, my key interest was in DBMS related technologies. I had the opportunity to actively work in not one but two full fledged Data Base Management systems. I was also primary  architect for the designing and implementing the Data Base and Reporting System for a very large web based application. Experience in those projects were both challenging and rewarding !!

 

Having worked in  various software projects big and small, recently decided to retire from active software development and spend more more time enjoying small things in life like listening to music, reading books, travelling and tending to terrace garden . I also spend some  time putting some of the things I have learnt in software by managing a small website for a temple, creating a spreadsheet to manage my investments and by helping neighbourhood elders with their day to day digital challenges!! 

 

I am also trying to arrange and cleanup my large collection of old photographs !!

Listen to Hima Patel from IBM Research and Chitra from PM Power Consulting as Hima shares stories from her passion around artificial intelligence and machine learning through some fascinating experiences. She talks about -

Building intelligence, beginning with a book

Image processing experiments and fun with friends 

Research and Software, partners in crime

Invention & Innovation

Data lakes, silos, federations and marts - making sense for business

Languages of business and analytics, working hand-in-hand

Managing people in research

Explanability of machine learning models

Experiences as a research manager

The power of believing in yourself and not giving up.

Hima Patel is a research manager at IBM Research Lab and leads a team of researchers that work in problems at the intersection of machine learning and NLP. Her passion is to work on research areas that help solve real business problems. Prior to IBM, she has spent time in research groups at Shell, GE and brief stint at Visa where she has worked on varied research problems spanning from object detection in medical images to anomaly detection from  multivariate sensor data collected from machines. She is also actively involved with the organization of Grace Hopper India conference for last four years and is also an executive committee member for IEEE Computer Society, Bangalore Section. She holds a B.E. in Computer Science from GCET and M Tech in Information and Communication Technology from DA-IICT.

Listen to this conversation between Sridevi Devathi from HCL and Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting as they talk about Sridevi's career and journey around -

How she started as a developer and then moved to quality

Moving into estimation and setting up the estimation CoE

Different generations of software architectures / models and various models for software development

Some challenges that have continued to bother teams over the last couple of decades related to estimation

Relevance of historical data based on standard estimation models, in the new and emerging approaches to develop software

Her thoughts on using AI/ML for estimation

Use of Function Points in the Financial Services industry

Relevance and utility of structured methods for estimation for startups

Effectiveness of Agile approaches including having the right coaches even in uncertain problem domains

How art [or a hobby] can be a stress buster as well as provide motivation

Sridevi comes with 24 years of IT/Software industry experience, of which she has spent 21 years with HCL. She has worked across Quality, Delivery Excellence, Process/Estimation Consulting, Presales, Project Delivery/Management and Software Development areas. She has been a trainer and consultant in Quality, Project Management and Estimation areas; and is managing HCL Estimation COE for past 10 years. She has participated in few industry forums, and was a panel member in two recent ISMA conferences.

You can reach her via: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridevi-devathi-b4638018/