How to keep IT professionals tune in with times?

As seen in the last blog, the expectation from the IT professional has increased manifold. He is no more the technical geek. If we take the cross section of Indian IT business we will find that more than 60 percent of the revenue comes from maintaining legacy systems for their clients. What has that to do with our software professionals? A lot. From a commercial stand point, for Indian IT companies these maintenance projects are a significant segment to reduce their costs. You may ask how. These projects run for years and provide ample opportunity to try out new resource mix by inducting fresh graduates and non-engineering graduates (read reduction in salary costs) and thereby improving the organization’s bottom line. Compared to a new green field project the number of “billed” rookies in a maintenance project would always be substantially higher. As these resources would be maintaining systems that are live and contributing to the business of their clients they cannot just start tinkering with the code. They need to understand the overall architecture of the system, understand or probably learn new software languages (as most of the legacy applications would have been in some 3G languages), understand the existing coding structure, understand the original business need, develop skill to elicit requirements (for the new ticket items), arrive at decisions on what to incorporate and what to leave out for future releases, develop the skill to document these requirements, understand the impact of the current changes to the existing system, write code, write test cases (generally these small teams cannot afford to have separate testing teams) and execute both unit and regression tests and deploy them as well. These processes are neither taught in their colleges nor do they undergo these as part of their induction training program when they get recruited. You may argue that the business has been doing good so far and this model has not adversely impacted the client’s business in anyway … so why bother? This argument may soon fall apart as the clients get to understand the outsourcing model much better and would ask more for the same. Because the IT professionals lack any formal training in handling maintenance projects their productivity get greatly inhibited. On an average, if you look at the ticket resolution per resource per month it would hover around 6-8 tickets.

Can this improve? Definitely. The first step in this journey is to understand at a broad level the various skills the maintenance resource has to grapple with. The second step is to plan learning programs to groom these resources holistically on all these skills. The third step is to figure out how best to train them without compromising on their billable time. All of these and more in my next blog… Till such time ….