When people are empowered, mentored and aligned, their involvement increases, and perspective expands. Project Shakti is designed for people to achieve personal and company goals.ย 

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A Collaborative System of Corporate Life

We have been working on multiple initiatives to achieve the transformation we want. Two major objectives are: (i) to ensure excellence in delivery to clients and (ii) employee empowerment. This led us to working with industry leaders in the space of best practices in project delivery, talent upgradation and designing objectives and key results for every individual in the organisation.

Tenets of Project Shakti

Align with values and culture

Making sure that all of us live by and practise values, and escalate violations, without fear or confusion.

  • Project governance: Our first focus area, which we started on in May-June 2022. We reviewed all aspects, including internal weekly review, external customer-facing governance meetings, risks and issues tracking, escalations, interventions, etc.

  • We organised three full-day sessions in May, June and July 2023 with our leadership team of 20+ officers to introspect on our values and arrive at a set of behaviours.

  • Orientation programmes are being conducted across the length and breadth of our teams to bring out the impact of these values.

  • Chat sessions where leaders are getting together with smaller teams and discussing the implications and subtle shades of each value, in practice.

  • Policies and standard operating processes are being reviewed to ensure that none of our working methods become roadblocks in our path to live our values.

Follow industry-best practices

Covering an entire basket of best practices over a wide battlefront stretching across most areas of our business

  • Project governance: Our first focus area, which we started on in May-June 2022. We reviewed all aspects, including internal weekly review, external customer-facing governance meetings, risks and issues tracking, escalations, interventions, etc.

  • On the technical front, technical STP (Standards, Tools and Processes) is another big initiative, where we are creating standards and rolling them out, project by project. All PMs and Chief Tech Leads (CTL) are being trained in these tools, including Git branch-merge processes, static code analysers, automated testing frameworks, and two dozen other items.

  • On the technical front, technical STP (Standards, Tools and Processes) is another big initiative, where we are creating standards and rolling them out, project by project. All PMs and Chief Tech Leads (CTL) are being trained in these tools, including Git branch-merge processes, static code analysers, automated testing frameworks, and two dozen other items.

Talent

Our company runs on talent the way we need air to breathe. If talent is insufficient or stretched thin, there is no Remiges.

  • We have a Talent Acquisition (TA) group with five full-time members. They are among the most hard-working groups in office, connecting with a hundred applicants a day or more.

  • We have the industry leading TA management system, extended and customised for our requirements

  • The HR team is adopting service level norms to respond to queries from our officers. Nothing will go unanswered or fall through the cracks.

  • The HR group builds teams with the right mix for the demands of each project. It responds to changing requirements fast and proactively plugs gaps which arise.

  • Officers between projects are actively tracked, either for learning programmes or for rapid induction into new projects. The open pool position is monitored every week and all PMs are notified about available talent.

  • We rotate engineers out of long-running teams and assign them to other projects proactively to broaden their exposure and prevent stagnation. This is part of a planned growth programme for them.

Learning and Development

The lifeblood of our talent is continuous learning. Our assisted learning programmes are built around assignments. Learners do them, reviewers review them and provide feedback.

  • We are constantly running assisted learning programmes with assistance and review sessions conducted by both internal CTLs (Chief Tech Leads) and external teachers.

  • We encourage engineers to sign up for courses conducted by Udemy and Coursera, log those learning hours, get their expenses reimbursed.

  • We send our engineers to technical conferences organised by our partners (IBM, RedHat, AWS, EnterpriseDB) and industry giants (Oracle, Google, Azure). Each engineer conducts a brief online all-hands session to share his insights afterwards.

  • We strongly encourage engineers to complete industry leading certification programmes in cloud technology, databases, networking, and other areas.

Rewards and Recognition

Rewards and Recognition is a set of formal processes to identify exceptional competence, commitment, achievements, or adherence to values, and celebrate such stories.

There are short-term and long-term performance awards, for which nominations and stories are solicited from the entire company. Award cycles are annual and quarterly. Our favourite ones are those which celebrate notable stories of values being upheld in the face of adversity. Go Remiges!

For technical officers, we have the Rising Star programme. Tech Leads and Project Managers nominate young officers for this programme, and they go through an intense process of comprehensive evaluation to evaluate their potential and attitude. If they are selected, they are put through a totally separate fast track for sharp technical growth, always under the close mentorship of one of our hand-picked technical leaders. They grow in one year what a normal career can offer in four.

Objectives and Key Results

Objectives and Key Results Re-designing project management processes to deliver tighter teams and better projects:

Scrum for fixed-scope projects, where sprint teams work through a burndown chart. And Kanban queues for maintenance teams, where sprint teams pick up sets of user stories from the head of the queue and new tasks get appended to the tail.

  • Any fixed-scope project starts with a detailed, well-crafted WBS, which then becomes the burndown chart.

  • The project manager structures the burndown chart into sprints.

  • The team organises itself under a very low-overhead daily standup call, which keeps everyone in sync once a day.

  • All code is checked in daily into Git, and issue updates in the task control system make all progress visible

  • Peer review of code spreads the ownership of each code segment from the individual to the whole team

  • Sprints are run as watertight mini-projects and the output of each sprint is given to the client for UAT.