April Fool !!

I have some fantastic memories of Fool's Day at office.  It is amazing how April Fool's Day can make the environment at office so much fun and bring about wonderful bonding within teams!  Ever since  I have been part of the April Fool Pranked and Pranksters club, if I may call it so, it is my strong personal opinion that harmless, simple pranks in office can actually enliven and brighten up the workplace.

Pranks on me at office have included a situation where my computer, keyboard and monitor and mouse on my desk were taped up with cellophane tape, and I was not able to work as soon as I reached my desk in the morning!    On my birthday, random colleagues with  whom I never interacted before, turned up once each hour and handed me a rose!  Given my birthday falls on International Women's Day, they wished me Happy Women's Day instead of Happy Birthday!!  My manager also actively participated and helped my collegues in the pranks, and sometimes pranked us all against each other; at once too!

The pranks I plotted, included setting up a treasure hunt, planting anonymous flowers & New Year's calendars & chocolates on friends desks for them to discover them on New Year's Day, while they wondered who sent them and why; until they finally discovered !!

I have truly fond memories of my friend setting up an elaborate prank wherein the prankster called the "prankee" on phone, and took an interview asking questions like favorite movie actor, favorite movie song, and all such things, following the pattern of questions like one of an ongoing Radio Show; and then asking them to listen to their interview when it is aired at a particular time; and insisting that the prankee inform all friends and relatives to listen in to the channel at that time!  In our case, it was real fun, since the time of the "airing" of the interview was supposed to coincide with the time when we travelled back home in the office bus; and the radio would usually be tuned to this channel on in the bus! When at the said time, the interview did not air, everyone on the bus jumped "April Fool"  !  Oh, the poor "prankee" was initially embarrassed a little, but the prankster had set up a little treat in the form of a small snack of pastry to celebrate the fun part of it thus eliminating the embarrassment! 

It's important that pranks are not overdone for then they are more embarrassing and less fun.  Once the balance is right, truly they have the potential to become the fondest memories in life!!

So, to whoever invented the idea of Pranks on April Fool's Day,  Here's Three Cheers! 

Work Ruling Thoughts!

IT is interesting that the work we do, seems to influence the way we think and respond to any situation at hand. Our mind seems to apply the same patterns of thinking for every situation, as that which we apply most in our day to day lives. For example consider an IT organization full of people who create different pieces of software solutions. Consider an example case, where the problem is to devise a way to address new work items; and each of these teams solve the problem in different ways.

The team that builds middleware components structure their portal to accept a new request, the moment the request comes in, it's sent into a queue. The request is prioritized based on the requestor's priority code. Then it is sent to different downstream queues each belonging to individual subgroups that need to address smaller pieces of work; to meet the final requirement in the end. Well, this is only correct that a middleware team would devise their strategy like this, isn't this what the MQ and JMS way of working is all about? The software we write, rules the way we think!

The capacity and performance team on the other hand, spent a lot of time optizimizing their internal processes, automating a lot of stuff, writing fantastic engines to trend forward, estimate how much new work is likely to come in and proactively plan to meet requirements even before they presented themselves! Increasing throughput, reducing response times, taking the knee of the curve to the right, bla bla bla ... the work we do, rules the way we implement our processes?!

The database team devised a way by which requestors would raise their request on a service management portal, and seek tons of approvals, each approver doubly skeptical than the previous one about whether the approval should be given or not , each approver asking lots of questions to the poor requestor, they left it to the requestor to co-ordinate the approvals, before the request got scheduled for implementation. When it finally was scheduled it went through successfully at the promised time and date. Wow, isn't that how databases work these days? Business Logic lies with the application tier (isn't it the application tier that raises the request to the database :-)) , it's left to the application & middleware tier to consider various pros and cons & co-ordinate among themselves before issuing a command for execution to the database! Again, the code we write, rules the way we think?

Quite Interesting Eh?!!!

Fast forward 2050!

This one's another gem; from one of my collegues again;
Three Cheers to him for thinking up this gem!

Imagine you're in 2050.
The organization asks you to claim your telephone bills.
But, don't do that, because the organization's claim system has now become very technology savvy; the reason they ask you to claim your telephone bills is in order to deduct your salary after considering the amount of time you spent talking on the phone during office hours!! ;-)

Fabulous system this one - Someone should think of doing this - Hey now, I didn't propose this!
:-)

A question for managers!

Would you want your children to have a manager like you?
If the answer is yes, you are a great manager, if no, then you know what you've got to do!

Efficient Time Management

This one's a gem - 2 of my collegues arrived at the conclusion below; so Cheers to them! :-)
As per Agile, there are these daily stand up meetings. More often than not, these calls extend beyond their stipulated 15 min duration and extend into 30 mins owing to the team size.

My collegue quips with a fabulous idea - "Each of us should have individual call with our manager; so that there will be 2 advantages - we won't waste our time; we will use our time efficiently;and the manager's time will be used fruitfully in having so many calls each day, one with each team member! "

Further Cost Saving Strategies!

Place the coffee pantry on each floor of the office; but architect the building in such a way that the coffee pantry is in such a location that it is as far as possible for the vast majority of employees. This will ensure that employees expend more energy in going and getting coffee for themselves than they gain after drinking the coffee. Due to this they will stop having coffee thereby reducing the cost on coffee and milk for the organization.

Other variations of this strategy include architecting the building such that the canteen is also farther away - possibly in a building far away from most other buildings; so that employees do not visit the canteen often; thereby increasing their "presence" at the work desk and so on.

Deadlines!

Even though there are deadlines, never work on weekends.
In fact, when the deadlines are coming near, disappear on leave, until the deadline is over!
There are several benefits of following this approach
a) your backup resource is built automatically
b) Once your backup resources are ready, any leave in the future will get approved very easily too; since your manager knows who can do your work in your absence!
c) Since you are likely to disappear on leave suddenly, nobody will make you a backup resource for others!

Law of email speed!

An email will take longer to be sent exactly at those times when you want it to arrive fast – for eg. when you are on the phone with a designer and he sends the design document on the call and you want to receive his design document while on the call and refer to it during the call; but it will arrive just when you’ve kept the phone down (so you cannot clarify your doubts on the call itself ! )

At all other times however, the document will be delivered very fast.

Corporate Cost Saving Policy

A)You can spend on 10 times more on each telephone device and 20 times more on expensive telephone headsets, provided you can squeeze more employees in a single floor by providing smaller cubicles, save space on each floor and thereby save 20% of the extra cost you would have spent on the expensive telephones and headsets!

The remaining 80% of the extra costs will be adjusted using the following means:
a) Not providing headsets to employees
b) Having a complicated procedure to obtain headsets
c) Making employees share telephone devices

Due to b) above, a side benefit will be that of increasing communication across organizational heirarchy.

Due to c) above, a side benefit will be that of increasing communication between neighbouring workers.

Due to all of a), b), c) above, a side benefit is that the number and length of telephone calls will reduce, thereby resulting in additional cost saving.

B) You can have a fresh graduate from college to come and work in place of a person who had 15 years of experience. This will reduce costs because you continue to bill the customer at the rate of the experienced person, but, your spending towards the fresh graduate is much lesser than the person with 15 years experience. This policy provides immense opportunity for growth both to the individual employee and to the organization.

More to come in this series called Corporate Paradox! Watch this space!