@Joe Shearer thank you for sharing your valuable experience.
As you mentioned in one of your posts that you hired Pakistani IT professionals, would you pls share your experience what do you think Pakistanis lack when they work in a group? And i specifically mean corporate culture-wise and their Organizational behavior. Thanks in advance.
Good heavens, that takes me back fifteen years.
This was a project that we had plucked out of the fire, thanks entirely to one of the kindest men I have met in my professional life, a Pakistani from Sialkot, who allowed me, the new CEO, three months' time to finish a project one year overdue. When we brought it ahead of the extended schedule, he wanted to know what to do next.
Now, some of his own team had been working in the same office space - this was in Kuwait - as my on-site kids, and they had reported that there was constant friction with those people, a lot of attitude, curt words and uncooperative behaviour. My four people on site were all south Indian, Tamils, one Telugu, and didn't know how to cope with this. So on getting a chance, I suggested to MR, who had by now become a friend as much as a client, that we should involve his team, or three out of them, to work alongside our team in bug-fixing and the next extension. He thought over it, and agreed in a day's time.
The culture in THAT team was very casual. MR was Dy GM; in the British corporate culture of Kuwait, that was a BIG deal, and when he entered a room, the earth shook, and the Gods showered flower petals on him. But he was very easy to get along with, and my boys reported with some wonderment not unmixed with envy how his software employees would tease him and fool around and generally act like juvenile delinquent nephews around their favourite uncle. Incidentally, he was genuinely a kind man, and this was not weakness, just loving care for the kids.
I thought bringing them into close working conditions with my people would help break down barriers and cut out this friction crap, that was frankly an irritant, a very minor irritant, but irritating, all the same. So he agreed, but his staff were panic-stricken; work with these bloody Indians? No way, Jose.
While we were trying to figure out how to overcome this obstacle, suddenly he found that he had an offer from his organisation that he couldn't refuse: to be a GM of their mobile telephony company in Dubai. It really was too attractive a chance to give up, so he left without actually solving the problem.
His successor, to my astonishment, was named Muawiya. I never got that the name was still highly respected in Arabia, but when I met him, I realised that he was a thorough professional, albeit one with an entirely different personality from MR. In place of MR's kind uncle who slipped a tenner into his nephew's pockets after a day out on the town, here was a sharp dresser, with a sharp mind, just as sharp as MR, and relaxed but task-oriented. He would never have agreed to the three-month reprieve period. I went to him and updated him on the future plan, and he already knew all about it; MR had briefed him. His manner was brisk; he called in the supervisor of his software team, and very briefly explained that A, B and C would work from the 1st onwards in the same office location as our team.
So there were three little mice in the area given over to our team, very apprehensive that they were going to get mauled severely, as payback for their pranks. To their astonishment (I think), they found that Tamilians were really not interested in anything outside work, and certainly didn't have TIME for feuds or panga on the sidelines. They quickly relaxed and started contributing.
What were they like?
Spoilt, but that was MR. He had treated them like family, and they took a little time with their re-entry. Technically good enough; not Derby winners, but sound runners for Cheltenham. Initially totally unable to figure out what to do with the complete focus on the job, and refusal to look up or around of the Tamilians. Inclined to take deadlines as hopes rather than deadlines; if you cross that line, you die. Unsure how to deal with authority; our lead programmer, actually a programmer-analyst, was the team lead, and they were not sure how to deal with him and his authority. Overall, nice kids, but not clear about how to deal with work pressure and with time schedules and time-sheets (we had that and they didn't; they were part of an in-house maintenance team, and had a deal of latitude).
The good thing was that they picked up pretty fast; our people warmed to that, and soon there were brief conversations and smiles exchanged, and the earlier armed civility had entirely melted away into a good working relationship. In retrospect, I would club them with northerners. They simply didn't have the attitude to work that south Indians had, and they were not the do-or-die Bangalis either. But in three months, their KLOC was as good as our people, and they had settled in very, very nicely: to the point and professional during working hours, inclined to school my guys on the inherent superiority of Pakistani cricket outside work (cricket had never figured earlier; only things relaxed did it come out).
I gather, after making allowances for MR's unique style, that work culture in Pakistan was more relaxed, and there was a great deal of ribbing and joshing that goes on; my boys were open-mouthed at the frivolity they witnessed,
in working hours! I feel if I had to manage them, I should have done so with great ease. They were fairly easy to read - not like my complex and angst-ridden southies.
Good boys, but needed more steeping in work culture and the sanctity of deadlines. Good at their work, sincere and committed, but those had to be brought out by smiling absently at their japes, and going back to the screen. They were working in Java, and their output was quite satisfactorily close to our team, the difference being explained (in my mind) by their unfamiliarity with working to deadlines.
True, but ERP system have been highly customized depending on customers need.
In past 10 years I have worked for different service providers and vendors for various industries. They have customized systems like Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Siebel etc, in some cases more than 50% - its a common practice in USA and Canada. However, in order to do customization or new development in such complex systems, one needs to understand its framework inside out, which of curse is no small task.
More to the point, if one understand and master such systems, then not only he can work for any corporate but also for said ERP vendors.
Oh, sure. I was one of the first to deal with MRPII - that was the immediate predecessor of ERP - and am aware of this. And of the advantages that you mentioned.
Over time, I've seen a number of alternatives succumb to SAP's inexorable pressure. I simply can't remember them all here, just now, off-hand, but I've dealt with a lot of them in my time and completely agree with your points.
BUT it isn't development, it's adaptation, it's customisation; my last two jobs were partly concerned with SAP, in fact.
What you say is perfectly correct, but the differences exist. In ERP, as a consultant, rather than a programmer, a designer, or a consultant, as bespoke needs, one gets deeper and deeper into the system. In bespoke, one gets wider and wider and wider.
I agree with you that it is a viable option, but I taught myself software to be a developer and I would like to stay there (in thought, at any rate). Which doesn't mean that consultancy and working with ABAP to customise someone's FICO module is bad. It's different.
