A consultant is an enabler. Our success lies in the ones that we have enabled. So making our customers successful (not ‘happy’) should be our ONLY objective. In order to do so, we need to understand their business, their success criteria, their limitations, their teams and even their boss/sponsors. With the above, we should put ourselves in their shoes and do what we think it takes to be successful.

In fact it is pretty much the same of an employee. An employee’s job should be to make their boss successful. The moment they look at it that way – they know what their boss is looking for and they are pretty much tuned to do the work that their boss is doing – making them an ideal candidate for being promoted into their bosses shoes.

And funnily enough the definition also fits into what makes a software successful. The software should make the sponsors of the software be successful in their initiative. Most software fail at this stage. If the definition of success is “I want this software to make me a lot of money” or “I want to make my customers happy” we are already set for failure. If we want to “Make the process of collecting data simpler so that we can be more efficient” or “Make the application web-based so that it is easier to manage and scalable by a factor of 10″ we know better what are are aiming to do. So the definition of the project/software/employee/consultant etc should be a measurable outcome in a given time. This forms a great way to get started with interesting projects. To put it simply :

Make your sponsor ‘successful’

In an ideal world, we define some specifications of what we want from the product and when we match those, we deem it as ‘done’. But as a business sponsor, things are never really done. In order to progress or even to get the product to be used, we need to break it up into multiple releases – with the definition that each release is ‘usable’ in some sense.

For StudiDesk – we built the player, then we built the compiler, then we integrated the TTS technologies. So are we done – not by a long shot. In order to take it to market now I think I need a few more things :

1. An ‘admin’ website where we can manage the learning process (basically a lite LMS)
2. A reporting dashboard which lets us run reports.
3. A pricing and operational model – this must be simple and easy (and the admin site should reflect this)

The above with minor touch ups in StudiDesk itself is good enough to ‘go live’ with what I would think as the first major release of StudiDesk.

The StudiDesk pricing should offer the following : For a very base price, it should start putting content that is shared across the organization (newspapers). For a bit more, it should provide content focussed on specific tracks (magazines). Note that we dont ‘learn’ from newspapers and magazines – but they are important to get an awareness. Once we know what we want to learn – we pick up a book. At this time, StudiDesk should provide for deeper learning with training courses. An additional option is workshops that focus on actual implementation walkthroughs.

Would this make more sense to customers? I hope so.

In reality, getting a great solution is just the tip of the iceberg. The solution needs to be understood by the team working on it, the testing team needs to figure out how to test the solution, the admin team needs to figure out how to automatically configure it for multiple environments, the IT team needs to figure out how to manage it and all this would probably need to work with multiple versions (1.x to 1.y) and bug-fix patches all together.

Getting a software development act together is much more complex than just getting a technical solution. Knowing and getting the technical solution is probably one of the key elements of the whole process. To give a metaphor – it we now have a great way to get more mileage from our cars and make the process of driving easier – its great. But getting that idea out through the manufacturing process out into the hands of people is a whole new thing altogether. A quick read of how the Tata Nano was developed gives an insight into the process of engineering the solution.

At a high level that is the thought that we’d like to to focus on – from Research through Academy and Consulting into actual Engineering. But that’s all on paper. There are a ton of things to do before we get there.

When i quit my job back in ’04, I was not sure what I really wanted to do (I’ll talk about my stints with the various companies and why I quit to start on my own in a separate post). I took on some trainings and some consulting assignments. When we got Microsoft – India, Redmond and Singapore – as clients, I was comfortable.

But I soon realized that I can’t do independent consulting and training forever. I wanted my ‘company’ to be something more. We started incubating a product idea – we called it InfoDesk and then later StudiDesk. It is an online learning platform. As always – we had a context that we were working within and I think that a lot of what we did made sense in that context (and most of it does not make sense out of that context).

But in the coming days, I see Asthrasoft as a company that helps others build great software. We see ourselves as an enabler and not as do-ers ourselves. In order to enable others – we need to have the capability to execute – and that’s something that we’ll work on.

We would take on POCs, consulting and architecture/design mentoring on the path to building successful software. We would leverage StudiDesk as a platform to share our technology related content that we generate – and use it for trainings, consulting and mentoring.

When we started StudiDesk, I realized that it has the potential to be a business by itself. But in order to realize that dream – it first has to be a viable and sustainable business within the Asthrasoft eco-system. Only then will I be comfortable of taking it outside of the Microsoft technology space.

2012 is the year where we want to be know as the company that provides affordable and effective online Microsoft trainings (more about this later).

Now when I want to solidify all these identities I’m not sure what I should be doing where – and I’m not comfortable with multiple identities. It’s just so easier to live with one single identity. When you are a start-up, it’s tough to separate oneself from the company. So when I stand up and present at a conference – do I ask people to link up to me – where?

I think what’d make sense is to promote “asthrasoft” as the central piece of all things related to technology. So I think it would be great to tell people to follow blogs.asthrasoft.com/categories/tech and to follow asthrasoft on twitter and also to LIKE the asthrasoft page. That way I can drive all traffic to these pages. And the benefit to people would be when I get more ‘tech’ folks to start blogging and promoting in the same space. That way they don’t follow ‘ME’ but follow all things technical.

So guys and gals – DONT connect to ME – as in praveen, please connect over to asthrasoft – if you are interested in “Making IT Count”.

In fact, the more I think about it, I realize that this is a constant struggle with me. I need my mails, my tasks, my contacts,  my calendar, my notes, my documents etc – all to be organized based on how I work. But they rarely are. Thinking back I realize that it’s because I dont know HOW I WORK. Most people who are successfully organized first have a way they work and then set up a system that mirrors it. In fact this is one of the reasons that software fails.

Rather than get/build software for the way we work, we sometimes change the way we work based on the software. Large ERPs force us to do this. Our daily software – emails, documents etc force us to do this. But it is not all bad. When newer technologies like tablets foray into our world, we need to let them change the way we work.

Let’s get back to me – I need to figure out what it is that I want to do (as part of my work) and what is it that I want to write on as part of my blogs. Is it all technical stuff? Is it about running a IT company? Is it about start-ups and incubation? Or is it about me – where I am, what I’m doing and what I’m thinking? I know that a lot of people like to keep their work and personal lives separate. But in my case, they’re all mixed up. So the first thing on my plate is to decide what this blog is going to be able – for which I need to organize it.

A quick background – I have been working in the software industry since ’94 and have worked at a few larger companies (CITIL – now Oracle Financials, ADITI and Orbit-e). Since ’04 I have been on my own doing independent training and consulting – primarily for Microsoft. I guess in ’09 I settled down to work with a few other clients and to also attempt a software service on our own – studidesk – an online learning platform to learn more about Microsoft technologies to begin with.

With the whole background of consulting with different companies, I get to see a lot of different scenarios. While some are pure technical – this doesn’t work the way it should kinda things – a lot are more around the RIGHT way to do things. Both here in India and even in the US, I find that we are struggling to bridge the gap between technology and the right way to implement it.

One thing that we have to be careful with consulting is the context of your problem. If you ask a F1 pit-stop crew about your car, you are bound to get a lot of ‘feedback’. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get to your work on time or go out somewhere with your kids. There are time and cost elements to most things. Just like the iPad – with all good things being said about it – is not the right device for all (I still dont have one even though I have been a Mac fan and I’m leaning more towards an Android device), a great technology might not be the right choice for you. So I believe that we ought to spend more time on the context of the problems than on the technologies.

I have been a strong proponent and have been urging Microsoft that as part of events like Microsoft TechED etc, they should work at bridging this context (instead of saying what Sharepoint does and what its features are – I think we should say what is a business problem that can be solved using which features of Sharepoint). But I understand that its easier said than done.

This blog is my thoughts and attempts at “Making IT Count”. I think we have great technologies at hand. But the ‘successful’ software are not one that ONLY bank on great technologies. They have a great eco-system that is completely in line with what the business wants to do with it. Let’s face it – at the end of the day the software has to ENABLE business and not be the business by itself.

So with that being said, let me get started with my thoughts and posts about “Making IT Count”