This article was addressed to Tech Mahindra employees. It was written to boost the morale of people who were un-necessarily scared of layoffs as they were on bench. It found appreciations from Mr. Sujit Baksi, President Corporate Affairs, Tech Mahindra Ltd.
It comes in everyone’s IT career at least once. It’s one of the necessary evils of IT industry. It’s a period when you don’t have any project to handle. Yes you guessed it correctly – its bench. People do a variety of things being on bench. Fathers start dropping their kids to schools as they get flexibility of flashing-in. Once considered night riders in their projects start going home on time. For some professionals it is a time to relax & celebrate, for some a time of distress. Indian IT companies have, on an average, 20% people on bench at any time. This article can incite strong responses considering the recession time & global financial meltdown. But its purpose is to explore the possibilities of how IT industry can utilize these man hours.
The foremost step that should be taken is to integrate people on bench. Generally the associates who are released from their role are unaware about who are the other ones getting released. This is due to huge number of projects & resources working on them in any IT company. Then the next step is to develop a mechanism to utilize their time effectively. The leadership for both these activities should be taken up by somebody on bench. If we deploy someone like “bench manager” who can dedicatedly work with people on bench, we will end up investing more resources. This is undesirable. Bench strength will be best managed by someone on bench.
In our company, we can take many initiatives like enhancing each other’s knowledge by discussing situations/problems that we faced in our projects. We can organize sessions for teaching each other the technologies or sharing domain knowledge & giving learning credits to those who attend it. ESG might help us framing such program. I have seen many associates sincerely enhancing their technical capabilities by utilizing their precious time in library. It would be great if they can share their knowledge with others. The purpose of doing all this should be to improve each other’s competence so that we can contribute more effectively to the projects that we will be put on. We also need to improve our general awareness & to form opinion on issues of international interest. There is a huge scope of improvement for all of us in this regard. For example, we don’t know about Israel-Palestine problem, or when & why India liberalized its economy or what is CRR, repo rate, reverse repo rate, or what FDI in retail is etc. In our formative years in IT this kind of information doesn’t have much significance but as we grow in the organization & have to take decisions to strategize future course of action, this learning developed on bench might prove to be handy.
As another example, take the case of acquisition of Satyam by Tech Mahindra. This is a benchmark for Tech Mahindra, Satyam & Indian IT industry as it has saved the livelihood of 40000+ Satyam employees. It has uplifted the respect for corporate governance of Indian companies to the height it deserves. This deal was executed by our leaders & they executed it to perfection. There are many things that we can learn from this deal. There is huge amount of information available on Tech Mahindra website as well as on Mybeat regarding this deal. When will we read this? When our project deadline is two days away? No. This is to be read when we have ample time on bench. This information will definitely help us a lot at a later stage in our career.
I still remember the first day of my ITP training in Tech Mahindra when we were addressed saying – “I want to see you people first growing into young techies & later into young business leaders”. This transition from techies to business leaders will not happen overnight. In my opinion it is best to work towards improving leadership skills whenever we get opportunity on & off projects by taking complete ownerships of the tasks assigned. We can work towards this on bench too by working on our communication skills, trying to address large audience, improving our business GK etc. I am a TG1 & when I have written this article I am on bench. I think I utilized my time effectively while writing this. Your thoughts are welcome.
The foremost step that should be taken is to integrate people on bench. Generally the associates who are released from their role are unaware about who are the other ones getting released. This is due to huge number of projects & resources working on them in any IT company. Then the next step is to develop a mechanism to utilize their time effectively. The leadership for both these activities should be taken up by somebody on bench. If we deploy someone like “bench manager” who can dedicatedly work with people on bench, we will end up investing more resources. This is undesirable. Bench strength will be best managed by someone on bench.
In our company, we can take many initiatives like enhancing each other’s knowledge by discussing situations/problems that we faced in our projects. We can organize sessions for teaching each other the technologies or sharing domain knowledge & giving learning credits to those who attend it. ESG might help us framing such program. I have seen many associates sincerely enhancing their technical capabilities by utilizing their precious time in library. It would be great if they can share their knowledge with others. The purpose of doing all this should be to improve each other’s competence so that we can contribute more effectively to the projects that we will be put on. We also need to improve our general awareness & to form opinion on issues of international interest. There is a huge scope of improvement for all of us in this regard. For example, we don’t know about Israel-Palestine problem, or when & why India liberalized its economy or what is CRR, repo rate, reverse repo rate, or what FDI in retail is etc. In our formative years in IT this kind of information doesn’t have much significance but as we grow in the organization & have to take decisions to strategize future course of action, this learning developed on bench might prove to be handy.
As another example, take the case of acquisition of Satyam by Tech Mahindra. This is a benchmark for Tech Mahindra, Satyam & Indian IT industry as it has saved the livelihood of 40000+ Satyam employees. It has uplifted the respect for corporate governance of Indian companies to the height it deserves. This deal was executed by our leaders & they executed it to perfection. There are many things that we can learn from this deal. There is huge amount of information available on Tech Mahindra website as well as on Mybeat regarding this deal. When will we read this? When our project deadline is two days away? No. This is to be read when we have ample time on bench. This information will definitely help us a lot at a later stage in our career.
I still remember the first day of my ITP training in Tech Mahindra when we were addressed saying – “I want to see you people first growing into young techies & later into young business leaders”. This transition from techies to business leaders will not happen overnight. In my opinion it is best to work towards improving leadership skills whenever we get opportunity on & off projects by taking complete ownerships of the tasks assigned. We can work towards this on bench too by working on our communication skills, trying to address large audience, improving our business GK etc. I am a TG1 & when I have written this article I am on bench. I think I utilized my time effectively while writing this. Your thoughts are welcome.
