Why I love to work together with colleagues in India!

My first business trip to India was very special as it started at the 26th of November 2008. I planned to stay two weeks for knowledge sharing and trainings. Actually, I stayed only two days due to the fact that Mumbai was facing a series of terror attacks.

For me it was crystal clear that I had to come back as even during this short stay I was already fascinated by India. Since than I have been more than fifty times in India. I learned a lot in the last 13 years and the collaboration still gets better.

Currently I’m suffering a lot that due to COVID-19 I’m not able to visit and work in person with my colleagues in India.

Let’s have closer look on what is essential for my dedication to India:

People

For sure it’s about the people: They are simply amazing! Over the last year I made many friends and was honored with a lot of invitations to dinners, parties, weekend trips, weddings, etc. The outstanding hospitality is something that I’m not so used to as a German, but once you are part of it you realize what you might have missed in the past.

By the way we also try to be as hospital as our Indian friends once they are in Germany. We show them our country and culture. From time to time, I even prepare an Indian Dinner for them. As Indians are very polite, they always praise my Indian food as very good (but I know that it’s nothing compared to what you can get in India).

Working together is also a great experience and I always find it very friendly and helpful. Typically, it’s solution oriented and the variety of knowledge is tremendous, but I will go into details for those aspects later in this blog. Having a Chai break from time to time is common and you can easily broaden your network during those and by the way enjoy the pleasure of a nice drink combined with a snack (e.g. a Samosa Chat). Those informal meetings help you to learn to know each other and build trust.

As the IT Business is very people centric this fits very well to the Indian Culture and I strongly recommend building up your network and stay in touch with your Indian colleagues. Over time you can “convert” a colleague to a real friend and to be honest working together with friends is always more fun than just working with colleagues.

Solutions everywhere

I’m fascinated how electricity works in India. When you look at all those cables and how they are connected as a German engineer I always doubted that it will work, but it’s proven that it works!

To look at it from a more general perspective: In India they almost always find a solution for a given challenge. Sometimes it might not be perfect or just provisional, but it will somehow work. To sum it up: There is always a solution!

That helps a lot for the typical challenges in the software industry. In application development it’s necessary to fulfil the given requirements. This includes the functional and non-functional ones. In Germany we tend to over-engineer solutions. This is typically not the case in India. It’s key to find the right balance between a provisional and an over-engineered solution. Joint design and architecture sessions are a best practice. In the virtual “new normal” joint whiteboard sessions during solutioning are strongly recommended. We must learn from each other and come up with a solution that fulfills the requirements.

Don’t misinterpret this with there is no “No” … this behavior is dangerous especially in the software business. One must overcome the state that you take everything for granted and you must listen carefully to clearly understand the signals of “major doubts”. Key is that you have a trusted relationship and your colleagues don’t hide critical topics.

Knowhow

In a huge country like India that is a global player in IT the amount of people working as IT experts is enormous. The available knowledge correlates with this. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right expert, but you can be sure that there is at least one.

At Capgemini more than 150.000 (1,50 Lakh) Indian colleagues are working for customers all over the world. This means that “everything” comes together in India (Sectors, Countries, Technologies). This is the perfect starting point to have all the knowledge in “one” place. We utilize our large offices in Mumbai and Bangalore as Innovation Hubs and consolidate the knowledge. Especially the cross-sector innovation, i.e. projecting ideas from one sector to another (e.g. from automotive to life science) can be very fruitful. Thinking outside the box is key once you want to disrupt and innovate. The topic cross sector innovation is very well described by Roman Vullings (see https://www.ramonvullings.com/) as “Idea DJ”.

As knowledge management based on tools is still a challenge in 2021 the personal networks help a lot to find the right experts. A few calls are typically enough to get to the right contact.

Scale

Size and the possibility to scale is unbelievable at least from a German perspective. I once was in Mumbai in one of our offices when a fire alarm took place. We had to evacuate the building, and everyone was supposed to meet in front of the building. Actually, it was only a test, but seeing all the people on the street was amazing!

There are so many talents around that you can quite easily ramp-up huge teams. It’s essential to have well working onboarding processes in place. You can do the math to understand why this is the case: 150.000 employees with 10% growth and an attrition of 10% equals with 30.000 new joiners a year. During COVID-19 this is even more challenging due to the fact that the traditional ways are not possible anymore.

Besides the onboarding of new joiners it’s also crucial to form working agile teams and have a focus on scaling them.

Food & Nature & Culture

I love the food and now a days I’m able to prepare some of the dishes by myself. The great variety makes it always possible to try out new things. It helps a lot if you can cope with spices and are not scared of exotic flavors.

Besides the food India also offers a lot when it comes to nature & culture. I strongly recommend travelling around and learn to know the different aspects of those.

The best combination of food and nature for me is Goa! Just enjoy some nice sea food on a beach with your feet in the sand. Perfect day on a weekend in India … by the way Goa is in between Mumbai and Bangalore and sometimes you won’t get direct flights from Mumbai to Bangalore, but instead one with a layover (in the best case over a weekend) in Goa :-).