Where should it start from? I think the correct answer is when the ‘Job description’ is written. Every new position may not have new role but every new job description should clarify a new role. Doing things right first time is the success mantra of every IT services organization. If the mantra is chanted while writing a job description for a new role, half the battle is won. However it is much easier said than done or rather it is easier but not practiced. Then we see the HR department conducting sessions across organizations for clarifications on role, arranging external faculties to explain it to the employee via series of training etc. Again I do not want to initiate a debate here on whether role clarification should be done by external or internal entity or whether it has been done or not but to discuss the different roles and their clarifications in this article. The focus will be on IT services sector only.
Every organization has specific short term, long term goals to achieve. The roles are aligned towards the goals with a set of responsibilities. Coming out with differentiators in current market, for an IT services organization, is very challenging as there is a lot of overlap in the service attributes which organizations want to offer. In this context, importance of writing correct job description and defining clear roles across levels is a key strategic aspect. There is a galore of IT services vendors competing in the market in this start up era along with the large, mid-level enterprises who are also struggling to cope up with the lightning speed of technology changes. The expectations from entry level roles are dramatically changing to meet up the cost competition, be it technical or behavioral. The challenge is to resist the pressure of recruiting just the numbers and focus on right fit. However the pain does not end here rather it starts at this point. Let’s discuss what a new hire or existing employee is expected to do in his set role and how that drifts from the road with the help of an upper and lower bound delivery roles example.
UI developers:
A job description talks about UI developers with different skills, recruitment teams pick up the key words and search the profiles. Interviews are conducted and the candidates get hired. Now it is extremely important for an organization to have a roadmap on latest UI technologies / frameworks in the market and how the person should be enabled to grasp those skills. There are multiple levels in practical job of UI person including design, static development and dynamic scripting. Very rarely can all the 3 aspects be found in a single individual. Also the design gets further divided into 2 elements, i.e UX and art. The UX takes care of better user experience and art element should factor in precision, scales etc . The second part is normally every designer have but many of them miss on the UX aspect. The UX person should be highly internet savvy and always look himself or herself in customer shoes in terms of usability, should understand the standards very well, should differentiate cultural sensitivities based on geography. The key here is the strategy should first be drafted accordingly to create a skills set inclusive of everything as a UI capability. Then different tools, frameworks, technologies should be studied and filtered out based on the target market. This is the basic pre-requisite before hiring. Once this is done, hiring manager can give a complete roadmap of 5 years to the candidate or to existing employee as well. Unfortunately most of the hiring is done on need basis in IT services as sales, delivery, recruitment teams are disconnected and work in silos. The resultant of this gets converted into attrition, lower employee satisfaction.
Technology Architect:
This is a key role in IT services organizations however still not clarified to the fullest in many of them. What should be the responsibilities of a technology Architect in IT Services Company? The standard answer is he should be involved in initial pre sales phase of the project , provide technology solution with right tools , frameworks , be part of the design phase , create initial framework and hand it over to development lead and move on to the next project. Well that should be 80% of his job responsibilities but 5 years down the line what should s/he build for an organization in remaining 20% is very important. In my opinion, an architect should always look for an opportunity to work on following
a) Compare frameworks and come up with comparison sheet which can be used during pre-sales stage.
b) Find out re-usable patterns from the technology stack used in the history, create working utilities from them.
c) Create a logical separation for UI, middle layer and back end technology frameworks and design standards / templates for each of them. This will save a critical design phase time during every project.
d) Define roadmaps for new skill sets getting hired seeing the technology trends. These inputs should be shared with delivery management and also with sales.
e) Should be a constant communicator with sales and delivery management to share the inputs and hence the technology strategy can be aligned accordingly.
f) Should always look out for young talent in organization who are ready to take on, experiment with new trends.
Project Manager: This is absolutely an important role as this role is the captain’s role where ever delivery is concerned and is more or less 90% responsible for the success or failures of the project. There are few types of project managers available in the market as follows.
1) Project Managers from domain or testing experience:
These people should add value in the delivery cycle by playing a key role in drafting requirements and verification / validation of the product being developed. They definitely add value to quality aspect but probably are not aware of how to handle scenarios while team gets stuck due to technical problems.
2) Technical Project Manager:
This is the ideal person for the project manager role in current IT services scenario. This person can add value in almost all the tricky challenges in delivery cycle. It starts from the estimate itself. Since the person knows technology, s/he can judge the timelines better than anybody else. The next challenge of identifying right resources is also successfully addressed with the involvement of this person. This person can also streamline the development due to understanding of know- hows of development because he has been through this before.
3) Certified project managers having MBA degree or carrying conventional project management knowledge:
Nice post