Don't blame the CWG OC, blame it on our DNA

Recent headlines on CWG Organising Committee's gaffes and subsequent tarnishing of India's image in the eyes of the world, triggered me to introspect. I am not a regular blogger, but accumulated thoughts were strong enough for me to write this. On introspection and reflection, I found behavioral similarities in most of the domains executed by Indians and feel nothing wrong in being frank to infer that this is how we Indians are and it runs in our DNA to make us exhibit the common trait in whatever we do at work, at home and in public life. We cannot just rest by laying the blame on the CWG OC, the Contractors, the Project Management etc. If at all we have to change, we have to change our mindset, our upbringing, our hard-wiring of mind as we grew up. Strong processes and management will help to some extent as a catalyst, but cannot change the way we think and behave. Another way to force change would be enforce a disincentive - more on this later.

At the moment, lets look at some of the real life scenarios( personal experience included) and I am sure you will agree, that we all have come across similar instances in the recent past, that confirms the "behavioral DNA theory". One of the CWG officers - was it Mr. Bhanot? expressed his views from the bottom of his heart and got severely ostracized by all and sundry. I also carry the same risk, by making this inference.

Project Deliverable's in IT industry:

The Indian IT industry makes claims to have reached maturity with mature processes tried and tested over the years. But has it really? What is impeding it?. Lets dig deeper. A quick reflection of the recent projects in which I was involved either as a manager, a team member or just a spectator, gave me lots of examples which are very similar to the CWG mess. The projects are declared to be completed & delivered by the project manager, but according to the end-customer who is the recipient of the final project deliverable, it is incomplete. Isn't this exactly similar to the scenario of the project deliverable's at CWG. Haven't you come across this situation in most of your project deliverable's ? I remember one project, in my career, which landed up in a similar mess as the CWG and provided significant learning's. I was a practice head of software services, and one of the project we landed was extremely futuristic in technology, the business model was fixed price unlike just headcount billing and to add to the complexity had strict delivery milestones. We were thrilled of bagging it and patting ourselves. The project in short, involved building a Media Player and TV player on a next generation mobile phone platform for a Japanese customer. Mid way thru the timeline, we realised that things are note going as per milestones. We still pursued with vigour, and as we started missing milestones, we realised that we had not even agreed on the high level design in spite of continuous communication at engineer level with the customer. The project was finally delivered, albeit later then stipulated, and with less then agreed product specs. Post mortem revealed a number of improvement areas namely Project Management and coordination with multiple development sites, timely raising of red flags in project review meetings, Highlighting all kinds of risks and detailing mitigation plans. Another learning was a need of an anchor Domain expert with responsibility and accountability. We were not able to change our attitude from the mode of "we will do whatever customer asks us to do" to the "consulting" mode. The most important learning summary was we as a team, failed to rise to the occasion until the last minute, not until the customer threatened to pull the plug of the project. Can we see a common trait here and similarity with the CWG facilities project? we needed to castigated by outside world before we admitted the mess.



More examples follow...

Misplaced Priorities in IT projects

All my IT industry friends will agree that, project slippages are most common especially with project outsourced to India. We take pride in having built strong project management skills and processes and believe that we are years ahead then our nearest competition China. But the facts are different. We take pride in processes whereas China delivers the project in time. Which is more important ?. Don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that Process is bad, but we should not miss the forest for the woods. China delivered the Beijing games with immaculate precision. We twist the distort the project with the objective of achieving the right process metric results.

In most cases, in our eagerness to meet delivery timeline and avoid penalties, we deliver half baked goods. Then we spend more time, money and resources to correct it, and satisfy the customer. Processes are meant as guidelines to manage the project, but we have learnt the art of managing the process itself. Lets take a most common example of how IT projects are tracked, especially that of new product development( closer to my space). The on time delivery, within stipulated costs are continuously measured at all levels. But most often due to various organisational pressures the priorities get shifted. Instead of focusing on the product and product quality itself, the team starts focusing on diluting the deliverable's to meet the objective of On-time Delivery and Costs. Not only this, the quality also suffers. We fully realise that the product so shipped will be unready for selling in marketplace, and most probably fail in the market place, but we don't care as the risk of "product" ownership is with the end-customer. All the learned project managers and management talent is focusing on strategic and tactical tasks to work the system to claim On-time delivery and score points on the project metrics.

In the CWG scenario, the service providers are our own Government agencies/Contractors, and the end customer is CWG Organising Committee (CWG OC). The deliverable's delivered by the Contractor is not fit to be consumed, and needs more work to be done. The behavioural trait of all those involved in providing the service, is the same as in our IT industry. Isn't this a common trait ?

Personal and Community Hygiene

More has been said about this in the media, thanks to the comment made by Mr. Bhanot. Its worth seeing http://www.ndtv.com/article/commonwealth%20games/games-village-world-class-lalit-bhanot-53784 Our tolerance levels for good hygiene are indeed low. We can tolerate unclean toilets, unclean approach roads to our house, unclean vicinity outside our homes. Many times, we have to paste circulars and send warning reminders in housing society requesting residents not to throw waste from balcony. In fact India has the notorious reputation of dirtiest toilets. What happened at the CWG is similar. The builder delivered the final product, but tolerance level for cleanliness was very low compared to global acceptable standards. Again, can we see a common trait in us Indians?

Last minute exam preparation

I have seen school students more often then not (including my kith & kin, baring exceptions), taking it very lightly during the year, and stretching themselves in the final penultimate days before the exams. Haven't we seen this behaviour more too often? Its a different matter altogether that Indian's in general have superior brains circuitry by genetics, which compensates for the unplanned last minute effort most of the times. Again isn't this a common trait of waking up last minute inherent to us Indians from childhood?

Delivery of a Constructed House by the builder or contractor

Most us (at least those reading this) have either bought homes/flats or constructed one and have livid experiences of the same. Remember if it was delivered on the promised date? Most often it was delayed much beyond the promised delivery date. Not just this, more significant is the perception of "finished or completed". The builder delivered my flat as complete and ready to occupy, but when I inspected it, it was not. There is a inherent tolerance to the perception of "finished". The tiles continued to be cleaned after I moved in, the leakage continued to fixed after moving in, the common areas continued to be plastered/polished/painted after we moved in. We don't complain then, we assume that this is normal as our inherent tolerance levels to the perception of "completion" is indeed very wide. This again is an inherent trait within us.

Game Theory Framework

"Games Indians Play" by V Raghunathan - http://www.flipkart.com/games-indians-play-v-raghunathan-book-0143063111 provides an excellent reading on behavioral traits of us Indians. it provides many more examples and uses the Prisoners Dilemma Game theory framework to explain it. I would strongly recommend reading it, and also this interview of the Author V Raghunathan @Wharton - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4222 It will need another blog to explain the Prisoners Dilemma framework, but there are enough of it on the net. The essence is that if we as citizens cooperate in public life, the payoff should be high enough, and the disincentive for getting caught for non-cooperation is higher too. This system will force us to change our behavioural trait. But alas this remains a theory still.

In closing - In spite of all the hiccups, wishing the CWG 2010 all the best and a great success.