Recently I wrote two blogs one about Multi cultural issues in Global implementation and another about Functional Specification.Though I am very happy about the exposure and the responsibility that I handle for my organisation and the Client in the project, but at times I question my self am I doing real contribution? Off course these questions are more to do with my manufacturing background.
In the good old manufacturing days it used to be a sense of achievement, while doing a monthly presentation to leadership team about achievements of the department. It use to be like "we have delivered these many pieces in turn it produced XXXX final products, Quality rate has improves in turn we have received less customer complaint". Working at Central role, sometimes I miss this sense of achievement. Sometimes I wonder, yes I am delivering, but is business benefiting from my deliverables? Are our deliverables helping them to do the process improvements or achieving any competitive advantage?
About a month back my colleague and me were working on a particular requirement from business. When we looked at a change request and subsequent documentation, it was a straightforward requirement. Business wanted a 2/3-line disclaimer to be available on a particular outgoing document, which will say, "don't contact this person for XXXXXX reasons". In fact we accepted this change as a no brainer i.e. we will change the program to pull the standard text and the standard text will be maintained as per business requirement in all applicable languages. However when we started discussing on the requirement further, it turned out that we don't use standard SAP functionality for this document instead we use an intermediary service provider. The intermediary service provider's representative took 15 days to come back and suggested that they couldn't add disclaimer. We discussed with Architect of our team, he had series of conversation with business and concluded that there is no business reason to make this change. The change request was marked as not required.
My colleague and me were still thinking on this requirement, we had a long conversation on this____ with point as why not do like this? Why cannot we change the process? Based on our brainstorming we generated 3 proposals and forwarded to Business focal point (thru Architect)____ and to our surprise he accepted our 1st proposal. What surprised us more was last few lines in the email...The lines were...with your solution, I am going to kick start a consolidation of this activity at a competitive location and this will have a +ve impact of XX FTEs. This solution will help us to move on our cost competitive vision. After reading the mail I felt the same sense of pride that I used to experience in my manufacturing days.
Yes, I still believe that my contribution will help the business to drive towards more competitive position.
