Quarterly Sales Review

As Krishna reviewed the sales figures for the second quarter, Kripa, the head of sales and marketing scanned the faces in his team. They had their eyes studiously averted from both Krishna and Kripa. It had not been a good year. Kaliya was busy scribbling on his notepad. Nala appeared to be scanning the traffic on the highway visible from the large bay windows. Light mist from the morning still hung in curiously stratified layers over the city. And Vajra, recently married and back from his honeymoon, appeared to be counting the number of electrical fixtures in the room.

"Mmm...".

Kripa's attention jerked back to Krishna. For some reason, Krishna always appeared pissed off at every quarterly sales review meeting. Even if they were holding in a declining market, it was never good enough. And for the past two quarters, they were not even holding the fort. The writing was on the wall. No matter how much he tried to divert Krishna's attention to the substantial pipeline and forecasts, Krishna just ignored it and jumped to the P&L.

"So... where do I start", said Krishna, looking up for the first time. The mood in the room was sombre. "Kripa, hold your presentation for now. The pipeline looked great even at the end of the last quarter. So let's get a quick brief of what went wrong from our chaps here.  Who wants to go first? Vajra?"

Not that Krishna was seeking an opinion. Vajra startled, froze momentarily like a deer caught in the headlamps, then heaved himself off the chair and headed to the firing line.

The grilling lasted all of forty minutes. And all during that session, Kripa kept scanning the thermostat to his left and the vents above to check whether someone had switched off the air-conditioning. The streamers fluttering below the vents did not indicate any problems with the system. Still, Kripa felt as if the heat in the room had risen a few hundred degrees since they had started the session.

Of course it helps to know your clients.

But what exactly did that mean?

To Krishna, it meant that you had to get under the skin of every executive associated with the decision. And that meant knowing, among innumerable other things, the accessories they flaunted, clothes they wore, brands they favoured, the locality in which they lived, the cars they owned, the number of children they had, the schools they went to, the holidays they took, the state of their health, the health of their parents, the breed of dog they preferred to the type of drinks they consumed, the restaurants they frequented, the movies they saw, to whom they socialized with.

"You have to figure out what made them tick." Momentarily, Nala had this vision of an ancient clock with the elongated pendulum in his grandparents living room, back in his native village. But that was only momentarily.

You had to figure what time they came into the office each morning, and what time they left and where they went for lunch! And the decision flow from the point of contact to the decision maker, who the influencers were, who did they consult, who did the evaluations. And especially if the "influence lines" crossed "task-authority" lines.

It also meant assessing their market, sizing their competition, and systematically probing the organization to uncover points of weakness.

There was a pattern to it of course. Given Krishna's experience, this was pretty old school. What had changed over the years was the nature of the tools. And researchers had an easier task given the number of  information sources from company websites to social media networks. "The trick, Mr Kripa, is to get information that would facilitate intimate contact with those who can influence the sale."

Of course, Kripa knew well that the days when a company's senior executives were accessible on land lines was history, as was getting five minutes of their time in their offices to make a sales pitch. The contact had to be established elsewhere, and even then the opportunity for a discussion usually came after a completely unrelated favour was dispensed.

"These favours will cost you nothing. The trick, Mr Kripa, is being at the right place at the right time."

The Cast

The cast so far:

Dhritarashtra, VP, Strategy
Eklavya, Head, Mobility
Gandhari, Head, HR
Nakul, Analyst
Karna, Manager, Mobility
Yudhisthir, Business Head
Bhishma, CEO
Krishna, External Consultant and Facilitator

Dhritarashtra, the VP of Strategy, is unassuming, diminutive and perpetually on the move. He is quite obviously the survivor of many management purges and as a senior VP, appears to have perfected the art of survival within the enterprise. When he is available he is usually on the phone, pacing the floor near the main exit almost as if there was the possibility of a fire at any instant, in which case he could move out quickly. And usually he is unavailable, and never responds to emails. Krishna recognized that as a key factor in executive longevity - "plausible deniability".

Eklavya is the chief of mobility and just six months with the organization. He likes the non-bureaucratic character and high energy of the workplace and firmly believes that anyone with an idea can find expression in this environment. He came in from a CMMi Level 5 organization and is glad that people spend so much time on getting the business done, rather than focus on completing piles of documentation. "Not that it doesn't have its own merits", he was quick to clarify! He was in complete awe of Krishna's breadth and depth of experience, but Krishna, who understood the sinusoidal "emotional cycle of change" well, knew he had to take that worship with a pinch of salt.

Gandhari, the head of human resources, is cute and easy to get along with, as is any young head of human resources in a young organization. And like Eklavya, she is new to the organization and keen to establish her mark. From all reports, the HR department has been a beehive of activity ever since she took over. They streamlined the towering organizational hierarchy, adding many more layers in the process, by giving each original layer and number suffix. So while Manager-03 is a Manager, and Manager-02  is also a manager, hence peers, M-03 drew a higher salary. And to facilitate this new structure, they had rolled out this new performance management stack ranking system that was drawing rave reviews from the executive, but more on this later. And like all HR personnel, they were clueless about what exactly their flock did other than the fact that they were mostly expensive software engineers - extremely opinionated, difficult to please and always comparing their salaries with each other and with other software development organizations and cribbing about it to anyone who cared to listen.

Nakul, the Manager Product slash Analyst, was the strong silent type. Initially, Krishna thought that maybe it was because he came from the Hindi heartland, that maybe he was a bit inhibited speaking English. But he spoke English rather well, did his job quietly, hit all of his deadlines and kept the program leadership appraised of issues. One of those rare birds just interested in getting it done rather than showcasing every step of the process.

Karna, the Manager Mobility while from the same breed as Nakul, was a different kettle of fish altogether. He was the only Certified Scrum Master in the core group (or so he claimed). But he never volunteered his time, never accomplished a single task and never met any deadlines. It was almost as if he considered the change program's daily morning sessions a boring movie that he was forced to watch before returning to his "real work". Krishna spoke to his boss Eklavya about this and of course he had noticed. Eklavya said he will have a word when he found time that afternoon, which he did. The next morning he came back with the recommendation that they should remove Karna from the core group as he had an "attitude" problem!

Yudhisthir, the Business Head of the BU in which we were running the pilot, appeared enthusiastic about the program and its potential to change the fortunes of his unit. The unit was a flagship until a few years ago when more nimble competitors and some global players had dropped in on the scene and taken the shine away from his business. "We have to hit the numbers", he repeated for the n-th time that morning Krishna and he met for the first time. "It is all about the numbers", repeating himself as if to revalidate the fact that it was indeed a numbers game. Krishna had initially mistaken the numbers to mean "revenue & costs", but it was about "eyeballs" and "new registrations", etc,; web stats - the type of figures you obtain from common website analytics tools like AWStats, SiteMeter or Reinvigorate.

Bhishma, the CEO, was a man who obviously believed that the organization was competent enough to run itself. Not that he wasn't involved in the nitty-gritties. Krishna's guess was that Bhishma believed there was adequate competent oversight in the organization for it to take care of the routine. However, Krishna believed that this hands-off approach could be a problem in a major initiative like the one the organization was about to embark upon. Which was not something new. Almost every organization implementing Agile for the first time, underestimated both its scope and impact. The possibilities were, either the person appraising him was not adequately informed about the all-encompassing nature of the upcoming transformation, or Bhishma himself was underestimating the impact simply based on the low external facilitator budget for the Pilot phase.

Krishna, the external consultant and facilitator, was an old dog in business transformations. Having worked with well over a two hundred companies in his lifetime, including some of the biggest of Fortune 500's, transformation was old wine. Yet, agile transformations was still a comparatively new bottle. He would need to adapt and bring lessons from his considerable experiences in handling people and facilitating organizational change to bring about this latest success. He was not unduly worried, except that he often wondered when a new client would begin to see the challenges of such transformations and provide full and unbridled executive support for such an initiative.

There are more characters in the cast, of course, and I will evolve them in due course, as they appear on the scene!

Preface

Obviously, this is just a preamble - an evolving one at that. The objective is to document an "agile transformation" as it happens, with the full cast of characters, their characteristics, quirks and actions or inactions that make or break such initiatives. I have to keep it anonymous, at least for now. So here goes!

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.