Managing social media is easy during busy office hours

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There has been a sudden rise in the number of social sites recently. The reason being, it’s acceptance by individuals as well as businesses and the fact that people are getting social. Most of the readers must have registered at multiple sites. But, the usage would be restricted to a limited number of sites. This is solely because of the fact that people do not get enough time to visit every site and update the same status everywhere. Taking time out from busy schedules and updating every site looks like a tedious task to them. Hence, most people update their Facebook page only and leave the rest. The status update is effective when it reaches to people worldwide. Continue reading Managing social media is easy during busy office hours →

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Social Mindfire

Mindfire + Social Media = Success for everyone!

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Social MindfireHow important is Social Media for a business? This is a question that business owners ask themselves before barging in to any of the social media platforms.

In today’s world Social Media is the heart and soul of any business. It does not mean that other things are not important but, businesses which have presence in social media platforms have an edge over others.  Therefore, every website you find on the web has some or the other social media icon on their pages as everyone wants to be at top of the race.

Continue reading Mindfire + Social Media = Success for everyone! →

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Achieving Excellence through Innovation

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A common myth is that innovation can’t happen on a day-in-day-out basis. However, innovation does not necessarily mean inventing groundbreaking stuff. It essentially means improvising ways and means of doing the same tasks, so as to do it better, in a ‘smarter’ way.

Achieving Excellence through Innovation
Excellence and innovation can be used not just in a professional context by the CXO level executives but also by everyone of us in our daily lives. If you have moved to a new locality and drive to work, the road to your office might seem convoluted. However, in a week or so, you experiment and you find out not just the shortest but the less crowded yet shortest path. This is innovation. You may have opted to learn about a new platform or technology and would be facing hiccups with the code, new syntax and so on. As you keep working on it, you devise new ways of storing data, syntax or just lookups which make your task easier. This is innovation. And when you and the entire organisation along with you, starts making smaller innovations in their work, that rolls up to a much larger drive. And that becomes the effort of an organisation towards achieving innovation at workplace. Innovation which leads to excellence in everything we do. Innovation which leads to excellence in client relationships, intra and inter-team dynamics.

If we refer to any write-up on business productivity, business improvements and innovation, it is clearly seen that contact points are the ones where most of our innovations happen. What exactly are contact points? They are the points of contact with the client. Think of a retail store which you last visited. You roll the cart towards the checkout counter – That is where you meet the customer service representative. That is a contact point for the retail store. You should not be surprised to see most of the innovations around that contact point – For example, the billboards just above the point of sale, the feedback kiosk with a box of candies, the growing variety of quick merchandise stocked near the counter or even the ever changing self-checkout kiosks.

Think of an airline. Starting from the point when you queue-up at the check-in counter, to when you board the flight to the time you get down from the flight, each is a contact point with limitless ways of attaining excellence. The airlines understand this. As a result, you see a smile being worn on each of the cabin crew. Your feedback about the airline is taken seriously and changes made. The airline industry actually takes pride in innovating around their touch points.

Financial institutions, banks, insurance companies all of them rely on these contact point opportunities to serve customers better, smarter and that is what gives way to innovation. As organisations mature, they perfect the art of innovation. And it starts with contact points.

For software organisations like ourselves, we have over 700+ software programmers working for clients. In a day, over 200+ discussions happen with clients. That rolled up over a month gives us over 40,000 opportunities to showcase our quest for excellence, our drive for innovation. It can start with improvisation of communication skills, taking notes and circulating minutes of the meeting religiously or it can just be responding to an email promptly or it can even be sending off an email as soon as a job is done and it can be anything else as well. It is said that the best ideas are generated from people directly in touch with the clients on a day to day basis.  Harnessing these ideas, nurturing them and leading them to execution would set the stage for newer levels of innovation.

Alternatively, innovation is best initiated at the periphery of organizations as it will be relevant to clients and not just by CXOs in an organisation. I believe that for businesses to excel, the client-facing staff need to open up and share their ideas and feedback with the team. These ideas, if effectively harnessed, ensures client satisfaction and delight. And isn’t that what we are in for?

The question we need to constantly ask ourselves is:  Have we done enough to share the idea which can help me innovate around my contact point?

Author – Subhendu Pattnaik

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Delighting Clients starts with a simple step

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Delighting Clients with Responsiveness
Delighting Clients with Responsiveness

It is a known fact that positive feedback, appreciation infuses adrenalin into your veins which charges you up.  With this surge, you tend to do things faster and things tend to become smoother, almost all the time. For all this to happen or more specifically, for that positive note of appreciation to trickle, you need to have happy clients.

That brings us next to the core issue of making clients happy, exceeding their expectations, delighting them. And this for sure would seem like a very daunting uphill task. Should i say herculean?

No. It might just be much simpler.

To understand client psychology, we would need to step into their shoes first and then try looking at the situation. Imagine yourself working on something important. Dozens of webpages are opened up, you are frantically doing google searches and compiling information and then suddenly your laptop breaks down! Everything gets dark.. Hours of work has been lost and you have no idea if you could recover it or not.  The next thing you do is to take it to the laptop service center. You expect someone to give you a warm welcome, put you at ease regarding the work, give you a rough idea on what needs to get fixed and then keeps you updated while he is fixing it. Right?

And if you enter the service center and you are lost in the crowd, no one pointing you to the right mechanic, no one listening to your exact problem situation – you would actually feel frustrated. On top of this, if you are told that this will take 2 hours to fix and you spend those painstaking 2 hours in the waiting room and no one updates you at the end of it about the status, you get so p.. off. And then if the mechanic updates you that it will take 8 hours more.. you feel like tearing the place up! I have been thru similar experiences and as a result my recommendations or warnings show up promptly in favor of or against service centers i have been to when people ask me. And if I was harassed too much, I go out online and pour out my angst. This is all but natural.

Our clients are exactly on the same boat. They have a situation. They need a solution for it. First they have done their part of research to reach out to us. Once they are with us, they should feel relaxed and at ease that we are handling their project. They should be able to know exactly what we are capable of doing from day 1.  And this is where responsiveness comes in. Being responsive to a client’s need ensures that he is updated about the progress of his project at all times and he is sure that he is at the right place. The final product does matter but the client would always remember the way he was treated and responded to.

This is what we call as a simple step – being responsive to what the client needs. And this sets the initial bonding and the start of a greater relationship with clients.

Do you agree that being responsive helps us gain client satisfaction and delight? What do you think?

Cheers

Author – Subhendu Pattnaik

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OSI Days 2012

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As a software developer, I sometimes attend sessions, seminars, training on specific technology related to my work, to increase my knowledge. This time it was a conference I attended in Bengaluru. OSI Days – 2012, the premier open source conference in Asia, targeted at nurturing and promoting the the open source ecosystem. This was scheduled to be held from 12th-14th October, 2012 at Nimhans convention center, Bengaluru. This opportunity was provided by Mindfire.

Back in September, I got a mail regarding my name being included in the list of attendees from Mindfire who will be attending the conference. I was very much excited and started looking for the day when I along with other six colleagues will be attending the OSI Days.

Day before 12th Oct:
Completed the work, sent the status and left office early to fly from Bhubaneswar to Bengaluru.

Day 1:
As this was the first day of the conference we reached the conference location little earlier. After a short registration process there at the venue we stepped into the Audi 1 where the keynote session was to be given. The conference started with a welcome note followed by the session on usage of Open Source and Commodity Computing in Government projects. Mr. P. Varma, Chief Architect and Technology Adviser to Unique Identification Authority of India(UIDAI – Aadhaar) gave a nice presentation on Commodity Computing and Opensource technologies those are used in one of the large government project in India. It was really interesting to know that the whole project is built upon open-source technologies, open standards and the relational database being used is MySQL. Technology like MongoDB, Hadoop Stack, Hive, Apache Tomcat etc. are used for this big project which handles around 200 trillion biometrics matches per day and 2 Peta Bytes of raw data are being stored. Got to know about different APIs it is providing to banks, financial institutions like eKYC API, Biometric Device API, Biometric SDK API etc. After this, we had a coffee break.

After the break, the presentations started to flow in,one by one. The whole day was for Cloud Computing. Speakers from Sify Technolgies, HP, Torry Harries were there to speak about the Cloud. Got overall idea on Public, Private and Hybrid cloud. Mr Lux Rao gave a very good presentation on this. Atul Kumar Jha, speaker from CSS Corp. talked about OpenStack. Openstack is an open source cloud computing platform for creating public and private clouds. Got to know that any organization can create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

First day at the conference was awesome. Food was OK. All the sessions were mostly on Cloud Computing, but sometimes I felt that some speakers were doing a kind of marketing of the cloud solutions they provide. Anyway I have now some idea about what exactly a Cloud is.

Day 2:
Day 2 started as usual at the right time. This was a important day as the day was for Web development related topics, on which I work at Mindfire Solutions. Out of the sessions “Off-line Web Applications Using HTML5 Local Storage” was an informative one. HTML5 local storage is a way for web pages to store data inform of key-value pairs locally, within the client web browser. This data persists even after you navigate away from the web site, close your browser tab, exit your browser. Unlike cookies, this data is never transmitted to the remote web server (unless you go out of your way to send it manually). The speaker Mr. Janardan Revuru, Project Manager, HP, Bengaluru demonstrated this with some simple examples. Session on “Test Driven Development And Automation” by Mahesh Salaria from Kayako.com was another good sessions. He gave an overall idea on TDD by providing some lights on the tools that are being used for the TDD and automation like PHPUnit, Selenium, Code Sniffer, xDebug, NetBeans, PHPStrom etc.. Jacob Singh, Director, Acquia India gave a talk on “Drupal Revolution and the Enterprise projects”. Role of Acquia in training people to take-up Drupal to next level and how Drupal is being used in enterprise projects were discussed by him. Also got to know about “Typescript”, “REST Applications With The Slim Micro-Framework”.

Day 3:
The Database Day: Speakers from Oracle talked about MySql new developments and new features. This was really informative. MySQL Cluster, MySQL Performance Schema techniques etc were discussed. Speaker from Cloudera solution gave a presentation on HBase. Hadoop Ecosystem was also discussed by Vaitheeshwar Ramachandran from TCS. I gained some knowledge on bigdata trends on which I was completely unknown.

This was the last day of the conference. I with my colleagues also talked to the representatives from companies like Oracle, PostGreSQL Enterprise DB, Microsoft India who were having stalls at the conference. Overall the conference was informative. Attending the OSI conference was very valuable for me as I got to know about many Open Source technologies that are being used or the future of Open Source.

Thank you Mindfire for giving me this opportunity to attend OSI 2012.

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My Journey to Certification(a success story)

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Every success carries a history behind it. No success is an accident. It always needs a regular disciplined effort and of course a good supporting environment. My Journey to certification goes as below.

Just like any other developer I was also very much afraid of exam pattern, questions and everything that is related to the certification exam. I have also skipped a couple of exam dates in this process. But yes at sometime and somewhere I was accumulating the confidence within myself to go for certification. Mindfire’s work culture has always helped me to tighten my grip on ColdFusion. In fact it allowed me to have knowledge in most of the areas of this technology. The wise decision by Sumit (my that time team lead) to get exam buster to test and get accustomed with the exam was very helpful. I was been continuously inspired by my team members to prepare the best for the exam. In the mean time Rabi (my current team lead) arranged one account in uCertify.com site to prepare more rigorously for the certification. This helped me increasing my confidence to go for certification. This is true that only practical experience in any technology does not help in total to get certified. You have also to go for study of help documents. As because when we work , it covers only some part of the entire technology. So to know and expertise  yourself, you have to go for study of entire documentation of the technology.

Because of the busy project schedules it was not easy to go for study in working hours. So after returning from office around 10 to 11 ‘o’ clock in the night, I was getting little refreshment and was sitting for studying till night 3 ‘o’ clock. In the previous night of my certification exam, almost everyone of my teammates wished me best of luck for the exam, especially Chandra, Smaranika, Preety and Rabi. They all inspired me to give my best in the exam. and get certified. But finally I may say that, though I tried for normal certification in ColdFusion 9 but it’s my god, who made me certified in Advanced ColdFusion. I scored 81% in the certification test. Which in a single go made me certified as an Adobe Certified Expert in ColdFusion and Adobe Certified Expert in Advanced ColdFusion, which is really a matter of pride for me, for my team and for my Company.

Thanks all for your help and support, without which it could have never been a success.

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Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop

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Knowledge as we know is not limited. We cannot say we have gained all the knowledge that we had to . Each day is a learning process, each person we meet we learn something from them, each work we do we learn something and the list is endless. And when it comes to our career , we would always want to have the best of our knowledge be it through learning , through training , etc.

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the 2 day workshop on Web and Database testing. Since the trainer was a senior industry veteran, with almost 20 years of experience, everyone was looking forward to attend and learn something new from the training. It was a 2 days training session with 25 QAs attending. There were many interesting topics covered in this session .

Continue reading Experience of Web & Database Testing Workshop →

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I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner

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Winning is a special thing. In every aspect of life winning gives a satisfaction, endless happiness and helps  prepare a path by showing a ladder of success to the next level. And of course , winning moments are the best moments in life. It has been more than a year since I am associated with Mindfire Solutions and I feel like a winner. Because being a part of a winning team makes you feel like a winner and Mindfire Solutions is a winner for 2012. It is not just me and my co-workers saying it, leading management consulting firms and industry leaders say it too.

Continue reading I am in Mindfire Solutions and I am a Winner →

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