3. February 2009 by amal.

26th Jan,  2009 is the day, when I learnt success being by-product of zeal, passion, preseverance and most important team-work.  26th Jan, I went to IIMB to watch documentary on “Making of Lagaan” followed by experience sharing and Q&A session by Aamir Khan himself. For my non-Indian blog followers, ‘Lagaan’  is one of the major blockbuster Indian movie released in 2001.  It was phenomenal success and got multiple Indian awards. Movie also got nominated for ‘Best Foreign film category’ at Oscar.

Coming back to the topic, watching documentary was awesome experience. It started with the story conceptualization by Ashutosh Gowarikar (movie director) alias ‘Aish’ and outright rejection by Aamir Khan (Famous Indian movie star & chief protagonist in the movie) . He likes the plot but wasnt sure concept as movie theme per-se. ‘Aish’ felt dejected but determined to overcomethe obstacle. This is what belief & visibility is all-about. Passionate ‘Aish’ spend few months seating at home, pen-down the entire script. That was humongous task, but belief is all about ‘moving forward’.  ’Aish’ went back to Aamir few months down the line and seeked few hours of his time to narrate the script. This time once Aamir listen the script, he knew the game is on. Not only Aamir liked the script, he planned another session with larger team including Jhamu Saughand. Lesson #1: “Believe what you want to achieve. Failure is always first step towards success”.  Then  together they start forming the core team-members right from financing, (pre)-production activities,  music, rest of the crew & star cast. Few of the key team-members were ‘Reena Dutta’ (Aamir ex-wife), Jhamu Sughand, A.R. Rahman, Anil Mehta, Bhanu Athaiya (costume designer - 1st Indian to recieve oscar for ‘Gandhi’ movie), Apoorya Lakhiya & Kiran Rao (assistant director), Javed Akhtar (Lyricst) and of course remaining star-cast.

It was clearly evident phenomenal effort went in building the right team. As right team & mind-set is pretty much required for such large events.  Lesson# 2: “For any mission, there is always right team required. Once the right team with right skills & commitments is in place, half of the mission is accomplished”.

There-after it comes the operational issues/modalaties, which were as:

• Location hunt (Chambal valley MP vs. Kutch, Bhuj). Kutch, Bhuj was the eventual selected location
• Star cast selection (critical part was selection of british cast who were cricketers)
• Pulling up 10,000 villagers as audience for the match shoot
• overly budget. There were certain decision points to decide to go-ahead with the shooting or not
• Most of the Indian star-cast didnt have any knack of playing cricket.  Cricket was the soul of the movie and had to be reflected in shots in most natural manner
• Accomodation issue, no appropriate hotel. One building was rented and setup as base for the entire cast & crew
• Extreme temperature: scorching sun & 45 degree + temperature
• setback such as A.K. Hangal fracture & ‘Aish’ slip-disk, still the ‘Show must go-on’ approach. Notable was A.K.Hangal commitment to shot inspite of fracture
• synchronization among 10K villagers for the appreciation shot, once Indian team won the match. On that day, Aamir sung song “Aati kya khandala”…and villagers went extremely happy, clapped, smiled, went bizarre & that was the moment captured as the winning apprectation shot
• Continous assistance by Mr. Dhanabhai (local villager) to co-ordinate among villagers for the movie support
• Tremedous planning & paperwork to manage the large crew (11 indian + 11 English players, along with the other key characters - Gauri, English Mam, Raja G and so on)
• budget issues: 12 to 16 to 18 to 20-22 crores
• Preseverance of entire team from April 1988 until June 2000, notably by ‘Aish’, aamir & core team-members

End is inevitable and eventually this movie got completed as well. Not only completed, but completed to make history. More-over it gave us lesson, nothing is impossible as long as one has vision, passion to fulfill the vision, preserverance to overcome obstacle, zeal to work together as great team. Success eventually is the by-product of the mentioned points. Before i end up, let me share few interesting quotes & artifacts shared in the documentary

•  Aamir to ‘Aish’ during conceptualization phase: “Dont compromise, dont tell later I could have this, done that. Do what is the best, no compromise at all“
• Apoorv Lakhiya “I can write in my profile that I manage crowd of 10,000 people” This will be highly regarded statement in US movie industry. Do note, Apoorv join the crew after his initial stint in the hollywood
• Two english crew members - Jimmy & Catherine got married on the set of lagaan under hindu rituals. Aamir & Reena did the kanyadaan (formally handing over bride to the groom)
• Aamir, Reena & Kiran Rao all three were part of core lagaan team. It is said, during Lagaan only aamir & Kiran got attracted towards each other, leading to aamir marriage to Kiran Rao. Intersting world!!!
• Paul the english team captain never played cricket

Overall a fantastic experience. Aamir also shared on the finer points how he live character, his stance etc. Please look into the video-shoot for his character portray of Bhuvan of ‘Lagaan’ vs. Aakash of ‘Dil Chahta hai’

I am posting one picture with Aamir khan (during 3 Idiots movie shotting).

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8. June 2008 by amal.

During one of the project discussions meetings, we were briefed that almost 80% of the IT project are failure. Key reasons were ‘ambiguous scope’, ‘non-participation/co-operation from business users’, ‘technological changes’, ‘competitive challenges’ etc. We eventually zeroed on ‘Time-commitment of project scope’ as one of the key reason. Seems to be technically correct, still far away from reality. To explain, let me dive into details of the “project scope”.

Project scope has three key qualifiers: Statement of the work (SOW), Delivery Time, commercials. If I have to divide stakeholders responsibilities - project owner (typically IT users) emphasis is on the unambiguous SOW definition with buy-in from business users. Procurement team’s focus is on ‘Make vs. buy’ decision. Vendor’s interest is to present best proposal with scope compliance and highly competitive commercials. What possibly gets missed here is the time compliance, which is of utmost importance for the business users. Among the entire process, there isn’t any guarantee meeting time commitment even if project executed successfully on competitive pricing. Commercial models are also evolved over time and try to address this aspect through service level agreement and fulfillment. Statistically, it has been observed that on average there is 50% time deviation w.r.t. committed time. This equates to huge business risk of not meeting stated/unstated project objectives. At times, organizations tend to loose out to competition especially if there is delay in the projects or the objectives are not met. This leads to undesired situation, where project objectives are met technically as per SOW & commercially. In terms of business objectivity, still organizations goals are not met.

We realized missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle is ‘project sizing’, which forms the basis of estimation. As most of the vendors, tend to estimate based on the customization/development requirement classification into simple, medium, complex requirement. This is the basis of most estimates, eventually leading to the project plan & commercials. There is no-way IT team has absolute measure of ‘project sizing’ and can confirm the same to the participating vendors.

Best way to avoid undesired situation, if IT team can benchmark ‘Project size’ to some standards. Issue is how & to what? IT industry has been working hard to come out with some standard either based on the line of code (COCOMO) or function point sizing (to express business functionality as measure of project size) and few others. Among these, function point seems to be more popular among the business users as it directly measures project size as function of tangible business requirements and absolutely independent of the underlying technology. COCOMO on the other hand, works very well on mature technology. However, since it is more dependent on LOC, it seems to be more technical. Hence not so popular among business users.

On the other hand, function point seems to be more correct and works very well both for the customer and vendor. In today’s world of outsourcing, vendor can use it very well to define/estimate function count across the applications. These estimates can be used by finance team to do cost-benefit analysis on ‘Make vs. buy’ decision. This gives benefit to the vendors to critically & positively evaluate project size and then estimate based on the project size. Additionally it assists procurement team to assess all vendors proposal on the same level playing field.

More-over with more accurate sizing, this can be basis of project estimation. This definitely minimizes the scope of time deviation and results in “best-case scenario” for business/IT users to complete project successfully with stated/unstated objective. In a nutshell, it is a ‘win-win’ situation for all the stakeholders. What is surprising is the limited number of IPUG certified (functional point) professionals available in the market. Maybe IPUG deliberately wants to limit number of professionals, unlike other certification bodies, where count is huge and increasing?

Let’s try to leverage on functional point sizing and use it for benefit/advantage situation for vendor, customer and customer’s customer as well.

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