 Amitabh Pandey, President & Head – ebusiness, Thomas Cook
In my previous job, as Group General Manager (IT Services) of Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation Limited (IRCTC), I conceptualized and implemented Indian Railways’ Web-based ticketing facility. Among the key lessons this mammoth project taught me was the importance of handpicking and creating a compact group of committed people as the core team to ensure the project’s success. In essence, people management is the key to any IT project’s success.
At IRCTC, I started off with a small group of 4-5 people who were very junior in the government hierarchy for the Internet-based Ticketing project. These people were not going to become GMs in the railways at any point. However, what marked them out was their deep interest in this project’s potential, and in the opportunities it promised.
Of course, they were not doing it for love alone. In this case, what I couldn’t offer in terms of great money was compensated, I believe, in terms of providing them all the training they wanted. There was no budgetary constraint on training. I promised my core team a great time for the three years they had to commit when they signed on for the project.
There was no rule book to follow because nothing of this scale had been attempted then. Trial and error, arguments and counter arguments, and experiments made up for the lack of precedents. While a consensus is important, you also need to have the right direction. We were a small team, and decision making was quick - there were no bureaucratic layers within the core group. The senior members of the group would step in to break deadlocks when they occured. Because of the way this compact group was constituted, there were no distractions or politicking that government projects are often saddled with.
We had top management commitment, which in this case, is the government; else, the project wouldn’t have been sanctioned. However, it wasn’t easy going either. Change management was a serious issue. In government, problems arise even when you have top management commitment. There is no way you can avoid dealing with the middle layer bureaucracy who are very protective about their ‘empires’ and oppose any thing that disturbs the status quo. However, to the credit of Indian Railways, they could see that the project was working and always supported us.
A recent example I can cite is the launch of e-ticketing last year; I was worried that Ticket Checkers wouldn’t be able to recognize e-tickets and would throw out legitimate passengers. Communicating the new development to a six million workforce isn’t easy; but the Railways had benefited tremendously from the IRCTC website since its launch three years back and took this challenge seriously. To my knowledge, there were only two cases where passengers were inconvenienced due to e-tickets.
The lesson here is that if the top management, whether it is the government or private enterprise, is convinced about Return on Investment (RoI), support will not be a problem.
When IT projects run into trouble, it is because business doesn’t spend sufficient time in framing the specs. The problems that I faced in all my projects were largely due to the fact that complications of business were not made clear to IT. Typically, business provides minimal information to IT and leaves them to get on with the task. That’s a sure recipe for disaster because IT doesn’t understand business; you have to explain to them your business processes and spend sufficient time with them. IT engineers have been trained to think in a structured manner; hence, you need to structure your explanations accordingly. You have to be very clear about what is to be done; else, IT will impose their structure on your business and the end result will be completely different from what you had in mind.
And it’s not IT’s problem; it is your problem, and only you can resolve it.
-- As told to Anoop K Menon
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