Introduction

This article is based on what I have observed in the last two years, when I started working in the IT industry, over what happens when an IT company grows in terms of work, money, resources, and infrastructure; but encounters few shortcomings that remain unattended most of the times.

Kindly note, these are general observations; do not assume I am pointing deficiencies in my current organization. Such views, in my opinion, should be discussed with concerned people such as HR (Human Resources) and higher management of your company, rather than taking them up in a public forum. Abusing your organization behind their back does not make you a hero; if you want to do that, do it in their front.

Like Incremental Waterfall model followed in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) model, I will keep adding things to this article as and when I feel there is something I need to share. In my article on PL/SQL Best Practices, around 33% of the content was added after the first draft went on the internet, due to ideas coming at varied times. While I do give time and jot down whatever points that I possibly can, there is no end to information in this world, it will always increase.

The target audience for this article includes

• CEO’s and head honchos of startups that are getting noticed big way as of late.

• Small sized companies that are going for expansion.

• People occupying prominent positions at large organizations, so that they get to know where their organization could be going wrong.

• Employees of any organization, if they can provide their experiences, so that I can share them in the next iteration of this article.

• Those who wish to start their own organization. Though not a complete reference material still this article could be of use to them.

• My friends working in the field of medicine, having plan of starting their own Hospital in future. They couldn’t understand any of my previous articles, hopefully would understand few things here.

The article is divided into five categories. Each of them contains points that I felt would do justice to that category.

1. Office infrastructure.
2. Scale of applications.
3. Employee care.
4. Market perception.
5. General policies.

Let’s start now.

1. Office infrastructure

• Congestion – There should not be any congestion with regard to seating area, network cables, parking slots, etc. as your headcount increases. If you have plan to accommodate 50 people in your office, and the existing capacity is for 30 individuals, then your employees would have a hard time adjusting in cramped spaces.

• Security – Make sure you have cameras installed inside your office premises, in order to prevent theft. Have firewall installed on your network. Provide anti-virus protection to all employees. Security guards should be monitoring round the clock.

• Work from home – You should equip critical employees with the facility of working from home, not for personal, rather professional reasons. What if riots occur in your city and all shops remain closed for few days? What if your city gets affected by flood? What if some national games are taking place in your city and the government orders people not to go to office so as to reduce traffic? What if there is threat of a disease like Swine Flu looming large in your city and employees are advised to avoid crowded places? Be prepared for events that are not in your control.

• Basic facilities – Ensure there is a printer installed in your office, with adequate supply of paper and cartridge, if your processes involve printing of critical documents. Provide phones to your employees, not necessary mobile, if they need to make calls for official purpose. STD and ISD facility should be provided if your business expands beyond your home state. Tea and Coffee machines, plus water dispensers, help employees as well as increase productivity for they don’t have to go out of office every time to consume them.

• Emergency exit – Be prepared over what to do in case your building catches fire. Bring experts to train employees for the same as well. Make sure your office is designed to take care of such situations. Ask your builder for proof that the building is Earthquake resistant.

• Extra expenses – In case you earn a lot of profit early on, and while expanding office are tempted to spend money over itsy-bitsy things, take into consideration that the recession could strike again. To have a sense of mental peace you require few extra pounds in bank.

• Local HR – If you open up a branch in a location far from the present one, keep an HR professional over there as well, so that s/he would remain informed over what difficulties employees of that particular area are facing.

• Office location – Most companies prefer setting up offices at areas on the outskirts of the city, as they are cheaper compared to the ones having closer proximity. In such scenario most employees face the following issues – lack of public transport, less eating joints nearby, too much traffic on roads, and area not being as safe as the ones inside the heart of city.

• Conveyance – Companies should provide facilities such as buses and cabs to its employees especially when they have to cover long distances.

• Connectivity – Companies should be concerned over providing electricity and network supply round the clock.

• Latest version – Some organizations, in a bid to do cost cutting, avoid upgrading their software’s to newer versions. At times this leads to drastic effect on performance of software’s like Oracle database, where not using the latest versions can lead to slower performance the of your program.

• Building approved – Be aware about approvals for your building from the local Municipal body. Otherwise you may never know when it’d come and demolish critical parts of your building.

2. Scale of applications

• Increased user base – Usually, when applications are first designed, the number of customers are less, and so is the data. As time progresses, situations start getting out of hand in some cases. Like if your database table isn’t partitioned, stores billions of records, and this is the case with more than a hundred such tables, you would find a hard time stopping the current transaction, creating partition, loading data, getting the program up and running again.

• Web 2.0 integration – As the internet continues redefining itself, ensure your application makes use of the new functionalities as and when they appear. Examples are ‘Like’ button to be shared on facebook, ‘Tweet’ button to tell your friends, ‘Share’ button for all new services, etc.

• Cloud – Get your application on the cloud, because if you won’t then your competitor may do that. Save resources, save time, utilize that time elsewhere.

• Application Security – With new security threats always on the prowl, you need to keep your program up to date in this regard. Handle critical aspects such as Cross Site Scripting. If you plan to implement a new technology such as HTML 5, check for its security whitepapers on the internet before embarking further.

• Database Privileges – Everyone doesn’t care about them when your program is small, as it grows it becomes important that your application user shouldn’t have rights to perform some operations that are intended to be DBA-specific.

• Technical documentation – Keep them prepared, for what a developer remembers today, may not remember after two years. Plus it is easier to manage when things are small, compared to when they get big.

3. Employee care

• Extra hours – If you have employees working late night or on off days such as weekends, make sure that the Cafeteria is equipped to handle their needs. Also, they should get transport facility and don’t feel unsafe when commuting late. Giving them some extra amount, for putting in those extra hours, would help motivating them to do your extra work.

• Backups – Don’t overload a single employee; make sure s/he has at least one backup, so that in case s/he gets sick work doesn’t come to a full stop. Worst happens when one dies tragically.

• Distributing profits – Be very generous in sharing your wealth among employees in form of increments and perks. Especially in India most people don’t mind putting in more as long as they are raking in the moolah.

• Weak HR department – If the HR department is miffed with troubles of its own, because of which doesn’t have the time to lend an ear to other’s concerns, then this can turn out to be a huge blow for your employees. Resulting in many leaving your organization.

• Bad manager – Never ignore an employee’s plea regarding a bad manager. I read somewhere that more than 80% employee’s leave well-respected companies because of working with a manager with whom their frequency doesn’t match. Companies keep working towards stuff such as incentives and benefits, this is something very few do something about.

• Overload – Don’t put too much burden on your best resources, making them work for different projects involving diverse clients, at the same time. This affects their health significantly. Is responsible for increasing heart attacks.

• Recession – Don’t make existing employee’s slog, by black mailing them. This isn’t right on humanitarian grounds.

• Flexible timings – Give people the option of working as they feel is convenient. Some perform better when they work in night. Make employees work in shifts so that at least one member of the team would always be present in office.

• Work life balance – Encourage this trend. Much needed in India where I have seen IT people hardly having time for their families. If you are paying someone money, doesn’t indicate you have purchased them.

• Team events – Keep hosting them from time to time. This’d bring people together, increase the amount of fun quotient, and make atmosphere more positive.

• Females extra time – When women leave late from the office, provide them a cab and send a security guard along, to ensure safety.

• Cafeteria – Have different options, especially for vegetarians and people from diverse locations. In short, provide Wheat Chapatis for North Indians, Boiled Rice for South Indians.

• Women friendly policies – Don’t make the married ones overworked, else they’d leave your organization soon, for they have to manage several other things at home. Give them flexibility before and after pregnancy.

4. Market perception

• Country Counterparts – When you set up base in another country, ensure that your counterpart is represented separately, especially on social networking sites like facebook and micro blogging sites such as twitter. Use local people for reaching out to respective people.

• Outdated website – Many times web sites carry in footer ‘Copyright 2008’ when the year is 2010. That is, companies get their web site created and don’t bother keeping it up to do. At times the information provided is old and not of much use to the visitor. The latest happenings aren’t covered. Ensure web site doesn’t have any glaring errors such as 404, avoid ‘under construction’ message for prolonged period.

• Branding – Advertisement and branding is necessary. Keeping in news, so that people get to know who you are. Most of the people aren’t risk takers; they would like to play it safe if they want to get associated with you.

• Facebook, twitter – If you have them, maintain them properly. Reply to people’s messages when they drop by. Make use of their features to the fullest. Get applications created for promoting your brand.

5. General policies

• Faithful employees – When company sets up base, it needs people, and when it can’t get the ones it was looking for, it has to settle for whatever it gets. In some cases quite average ones make it to the organization, and as they aren’t too capable of working elsewhere, stay there only. When their period of stay lasts several years, nor are they of the same level as their contemporaries, nor are they able to justify how they reached at that level. The company also doesn’t remove them as honour of working for them for so long.

• Code Copies – Make sure if you lose data, you can recover it easily.

• Check in – Keep your code checked in, check it out when you have to make changes.

• Internet – Disabling it for employee’s won’t necessarily increase productivity, the ones who don’t have to misuse it would never do it, and the ones who don’t do useful addition to your company won’t utilize their energies elsewhere, do whatever you can.

• Expenditures – In order to reduce costs, its better to cut down on things such as business class, luxury cabs, etc. instead of making employees pay for petty things. This’d help in improving your brand image as well, as it has done to Azim Premji of Wipro who travels by Economy class.

• Career path – Be very clear over how an employee can progress in your organization. While most of them have the road set for Management line, few of them are clear about the Technical ones.

• Job hopping – You hire two guys at same pay scale. After one year, one of them leaves your organization, on a higher salary. After 6 months he returns back, again on higher pay scale. So effectively the one who is more loyal to the company is being rather maltreated than the one who wasn’t that loyal?

• Sharable resources – Create a common knowledge pool, which all employees can access as well as contribute.

• Restrictions – Disabling sound drivers isn’t a good option, if you have an employee who works better under the influence of music. You need to get most out of your resources in order to boost results.

• Local people – In most cases it is the migrant crowd that works more, so as to establish themselves compared to those who have to. Take into consideration how feasible is it for the new people to move to the place where your office lies.

• Diversity – You need to handle people with diverse backgrounds and preferences. Like having separate sandwich toasters for vegetarian stuff, allowing Muslim employees to go to mosque Friday morning, not forcing employees to consume something they don’t, etc.

• Monitoring usage – It’s not always a good idea to monitor each and everything that your employee does, such as email body and internet data. NSFW is one thing, but checking contents of data transmitted over the internet also gives impression that the company invades in private stuff, and can misuse some of your information. Some companies send disclaimer footer at the bottom of every email, but once your company becomes reputed it pales in comparison when you observe several top professional organizations that don’t include such content at the end of every email sent from their domain.

• Equality – Treat all your employees equally. Don’t pay more preference to someone just because s/he is from the West. If someone complains about racial discrimination, take up the case seriously.

• Knowledge sharing – Make sure that your employee’s keep sharing whatever they know. This’d ensure that none of them becomes too critical for the company. Too much dependency on a single employee can be harmful, especially when s/he can’t be reached in emergency situations, and if s/he dies then it becomes worse for there are no ways by which you can extract the information s/he knew.

• Unethical clients – If you happen to do business with someone who lacks ethics, but is bringing money to your organization, then think before working on such a deal. After some time they’d expect you to follow their practices as well, and you would have to undergo torrid time working under their rules.

• Equally happy – You have to ensure that all your employees stay happy. Having two good teams is of no use, if you have total ten teams. Your policies should apply to everyone, not selected few.

That’s all. Keep checking this page for more additions. Do contribute if you can, I’d appreciate that.