PETER PRINCIPLE and NIIT of Yore
You haven’t heard of the Peter Principle have ya? You will be surprised when you learn more, you actually know this one, and to top it all, you are SUFFERING the consequences of this PP! (Errr maybe YOU are also the cause for someone being miserable beyond belief?! Think about it dude /dudette!)
I won’t tell you too much on this Peter thingie cause you know of the Googly-woogly thing called Google! Buuuttttt, we can’t have you wandering all over the WWW can we? So here it is:
In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence".
An example: you have Ms.Champa Chameli who was a very good writer, next she is made a lead writer, SFSG (so far so good!) she continues doing a great job, she is made a Team Leader, parties all around! And then a new project comes along and the management decides that this is the precise moment when Champa needs to be praised to the skies not just in words but in kind with action and what better way then to make her a PROJECT MANAGER(PM)!!! And then there are some ladies who walked into NIIT wearing saries, looking very impressive, complete wih MBA/MCA degrees and go on to directly becoming managers! That sounds very reverse-sexist! But I don't belive that, idiots, fools, intelligence is gender, age, caste, color ... insensitive.)
BTW there are many routes to becoming a PM in NIIT (in fact a promotion in any damn place). It all depends on your Kaarma, your PR skills, your boss's PR skills, the boss's competence level, your rapport with ze boss, your visibility, lack of visibility, your manners, your clothes … you get the drift.
Please to be noting that I haven’t mentioned anything yet about your competence, abilities, skills …. Ah! You think she is coming to me. Nopes! I ain’t gonna do no such thing sweets :-)
Whhhhhhyyyyy you bawl?! Cause it doesn’t really matter u sweet naïve kiddie! The moment a person reaches a place in the corporate hierarchy where they are really screwing things up, they STAY THERE!!!! And screw up some more . . . I saw two of my very good and competent friends taking the fall for no fault of theirs!!!
In NIIT we had a real eclectic mix of weird “persona non grata”s. Now that was a place where you LIVED!!!! People fought, had affairs, got married (I mean not right there but found life-partners), got divorced, ….
People join a company and leave a manager. In my case (and maybe in yours too …) I left an entire (mis)managed style!!!
I loved that place but it was killing me:
- My personal life was non-existent
- I would wake up and reach Okhla
- Live on the sick cafeteria fare of alu-toast, thaali, maggi . . .
- Battle PTD (Project Tracking Database), SMRs (Senior Management Reviews), confused managers who tried to bluff their way thru
- Unrealistic matrix pressures
- Good people being labeled C players
- Brown-nosers being called A+
- Your PM not doing enuff PR, …, irony= Your boss is not really fond of you or even has an iota of your welfare in his/her heart but HAS to hold on to you (they have their agenda after all); won't let you go to another manager - who promotes her people to the skies!
- Being sent to the US as a consolation prize
I was called a commando, fire-fighter, type A, adrenalin-junky,… but with no real appreciation and no light at the end of the tunnel, constant fights at home, an unkempt home, going in a kamikaze cab back to GGN at 2 am in the morning, collapsing after each deadline, filling out NCS (Non-Conformance Sheets), all while tolerating so-called ISO audits by people who weren’t doing real project work but all this stuff (I know that’s important and esp. in an SEI CMM level 5 company but at what cost?), tracking things to closure (I hated this phrase!) . . . I wanted out.
FUFs had screwed up a project BIG-TIME that was part of her core-competency! So after salvaging Sun, Rags was packed off to HP to do one module! What a fib that was! The client decides that I was the stuff her dreams for the project (and my nightmares) were made of (I lost this sentence structure! And btw now it’s okay to end a sentence with “of”)!!!
From one module, I get 2 courses, meanwhile 2 people collapse, and Ash, Bang, and I shoulder the entire mismanaged screwed-up project! I lost my most favorite teamie to mind-games people played with her. My own friends did that and to date it I am mad about this. Bad resource allocation – imagine handing an HP (techy as heck) project to a Social Butterfly?! I am flown off to Singapore to fix / kick-off round II of project HP!!!!
This was a project where I worked with Happy for the first time, of whom until then I had a very unmentionable opinion ;-) We all nearly died, Ash's dad nearly threw her out of the house, Bang kept falling ill, I nearly died twice driving back home with a drunk/sleepy cabbie, ... Happy used to stay with us (a huge rarity! why would a PM do a night-out?!!! and here there were people like me - I would always have to stay back - regardless of my designation / classification ...), we did so many night-outs that we burned-out! FUFs walked out of the project or maybe she was shown the door? Happy takes over the HP junkyard!!!
Ash was a friend for quite sometime but we worked together for the first time, Bang actually started writing in HP, and explained XML tags to us - Ash and I went mad laughing on his head-para-para!!!
So here you have a single-sourcing, an XML-based project, where you are a co-vendor with Mastek for HP, a constantly changing team, I rejoined work after some serious medical stuff, DGs was in the US, the padosi team was winning "BEST TEAM AWARDS", I was being sermoned to that "You can change the world, you are a born (ring) leader, ....spiel, spiel, spiel ... !!!
Happy proved what a fantastic manager he was, we three (and Sri too actually) slogged and delivered the goods, we saw XML in action and got multiple outputs from the same XML!!! AAG and Loo were happy. All was fine in the world ... or so we thought.
Then we all quit ... Suchu turns to social service, Sri went to one of the Noida crappy joints, Happy goes to Kash (still wonder why?!), Bang goes to Kol, Ash goes to Cadz, I join Ajeeb-O-Gareeb.
Now the management of NIIT has decided to have a collective shift in email address and has gone to GE!!!!
I leave this post for my Sun and HP teamies to share their tales of woe and why they quit the place and love it and hate it forever.
Every statistic was green, the company follows Six Sigma, still something was rotting ...
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