Former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam at Wharton India Economic forum , Philadelphia, March 22,2008

Let me tell you about my experience. In 1973 I became the project director of India's Satellite Launch Vehicle program, commonly called the SLV-3. Our goal was to put India's "Rohini" satellite into orbit by 1980. I was given funds and human resources -- but was told clearly that by 1980 we had to launch the satellite into space. Thousands of people worked together in scientific and technical teams towards that goal.

By 1979 -- I think the month was August -- we thought we were ready. As the project director, I went to the control center for the launch. At four minutes before the satellite launch, the computer began to go through the checklist of items that needed to be checked. One minute later, the computer program put the launch on hold; the display showed that some control components were not in order. My experts -- I had four or five of them with me -- told me not to worry; they had done their calculations and there was enough reserve fuel. So I bypassed the computer, switched to manual mode, and launched the rocket. In the first stage, everything worked fine. In the second stage, a problem developed. Instead of the satellite going into orbit, the whole rocket system plunged into the Bay of Bengal. It was a big failure.
That day, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, Prof. Satish Dhawan, had called a press conference. The launch was at 7:00 am, and the press conference -- where journalists from around the world were present -- was at 7:45 am at ISRO's satellite launch range in Sriharikota [in Andhra Pradesh in southern India]. Prof. Dhawan, the leader of the organization, conducted the press conference himself. He took responsibility for the failure -- he said that the team had worked very hard, but that it needed more technological support. He assured the media that in another year, the team would definitely succeed. Now, I was the project director, and it was my failure, but instead, he took responsibility for the failure as chairman of the organization.

The next year, in July 1980, we tried again to launch the satellite -- and this time we succeeded. The whole nation was jubilant. Again, there was a press conference. Prof. Dhawan called me aside and told me, "You conduct the press conference today."

I learned a very important lesson that day. When failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came, he gave it to his team. The best management lesson I have learned did not come to me from reading a book; it came from that experience.

He is a rising star in his organization and recently received a star performer award for being dependable, flexible and for his co-ordination skills. Today, he is a Manager with 9 years of experience in the software industry. He is also my good friend and school buddy who graciously set aside his Sunday morning to talk to me about his new role, his job and about managing teams.

[I start off by asking about his new role as a manager and try to understand the kind of projects he handles.]

"The new role I'm handling is 40% management and 60% technical leadership. It involves lots of reading. As a company, we are expanding and scaling up our services. We are going to launch a series of services and the first step will be to identify a model where all kinds of services can fit in. Ours is a content oriented service... basically our company will provide a model of white labeling where the service brand would be theirs, but the actual service engine would be ours. So we need to be coming out with our tried and tested model that would work well in case of mass deployment. That is currently our first project. There would be lots of parallel activities happening where we would try to fit in the third party's parameters into this..."

[This is very different from the projects I manage in the software services industry. To get a better sense, I ask him about his previous role and how his new role is different.]

"Well.... I've been all over the place in my previous role.....been working on the different modules involved.... now i need to stitch 'em all together. That's the technical challenge. Also, its my neck on the line now and i need to get things done. I keep hearing only one word now - accountability."

[Accountability!!! A favorite topic of mine and for the next few minutes I brag about my article on being accountable and how it is so important...blah blah blah. Luckily I stop before he dozes off. I ask him about his team and their skills.]

"We've started off with 5 guys....will expand. 5 network engineers. Testing is a different dept. Since we are closer to the field i.e. actual deployment, we need to know more, research more on CDNs, scaling networks etc. So I've been reading recently about mySQL replication, scaling and stuffs... thats quite new to me. I would need at least a 2-3 yr experienced guy to take that thread forward... like i said we're doing all the blue-prints, templates, tech research... kind of totally new stuff technically. It will involve defining the process from scratch. We are basically a networking, DSP codecs, team and would be looking to get everything to scale... that is the first bug hurdle."

[...and I thought my job was complicated. I wonder if I would be able to manage a project/team in such a tough, aggressive, highly technical environment. I ask him how he monitors team activities, capture metrics, etc.]

"oh....we do meet twice weekly....got our plans and milestones for 3 months set....and review ourselves often against each milestone. Since there is lots of research work involved, it's kinda different than your conventional process oriented stuff where technically things are 80-90% clear. There is no quality assurance group in our company that typically does only metrics consolidation as such....it's up to the respective managers to consolidate and present it to the management..."

[That sounds familiar. I recall how my organization started along similar lines before we were CMMi certified. Each manager was entrusted to capture data from his/her project however possible. Then we reviewed it... standardized the metrics based on what we were able to capture and defined our process and tools around it... I'd say that any small company should start off on similar lines before trying to jump into the GE, Infosys or Microsoft way.]

With that I shall end the 1st part of this post. In the next and final part, I will share our conversation about motivating teams and its challenges. Thank you for visiting.

You were reading a post from the new "Let's Talk!" series where I talk to some very interesting people and pick their brain on a specific topic. Then I share it with you. I hope you found this conversation interesting and thought provoking. Thank you for tuning in. Let's talk again soon.