I, Cordelia, a Scandinavian girl, have on my team no less than 12 Indian guys!

They are based outside Bangalore, India and are working on my project! There are also three Indian guys who work on my project and are based here in London. (Those are the most senior team members.)

Why have we got this odd set-up? You guessed it – Indian labour is cheaper than British - much cheaper! (but equally qualified…)
The Impressive ‘Campus where my team members work….

Growing up in Sweden until my early twenties, I had practically never met anybody from India. (Granted, there were some Indians in Singapore where my father used to live. But I never knew them, just ate at their restaurants.)

Here in England there are plenty of people of Indian origin. But most of them were born in the UK and there really isn’t much that differentiates them from any other British person.

When I first walked into my present employer’s office in the City of London, I was really surprised at how many brown-skinned people worked there. Really, one in four or so is actually Indian! It certainly stood out from what you’d expect in a London office. I remember thinking “Gosh, they must be doing some kind of reversed discrimination here…. “ Pretty stupid thing to be thinking, but I was really surprised.

Then I was told about the set-up whereby my company has a large part of it’s infrastructure located in India. I hadn’t picked up on that in the interview actually.. In addition, my company is using one of the largest Indian consultancies for further outsourcing. People from the offices in Delhi and Bangalore regularly come over from India and work for a few months in the UK.

With a completely straight face my manager told me that I must get signed up for the “India Cultural Awareness” three-day training course. My boss isn’t exactly politically correct most of the time. So I thought he was just being silly at first. But this is genuine corporate course, run by HR. It teaches about Indian languages, traditions, the caste system and many other things that most Europeans have a very sketchy knowledge of, at best.

Jacob , my boss, was adamant that I must attend, but then dumped enough work on me to make sure that it was completely impossible to fit it in. As a result the actual Indian lady who runs it came to see me and was very concerned that there was no time for me to do the course. Jacob then assured her that “Cordelia will be going to India on business soon anyway and then she can learn all that stuff when she is there” The trip has yet to materialise though!
….meanwhile outside Bangalore….
At first I was really struggling to understand the Indian accent of my team members. For that reason I was really reluctant to call people in India… With some people, I couldn’t understand more than about half of what they said! When I mentioned it to somebody, they said; Actually, they can’t understand us wither. The Indians just have a different intonation that any European would have… The way they speak sounded a bit ‘robot-like’ to me at first. It took a while to get used to, but now it is much easier. Still, some people sound incredibly grumpy! Their vocabulary is as good as mine, or better – the only difficulty is the intonation.

The number of Indian team members based in the UK was larger when I started than it is now. But some of the Indian guys didn’t like it here and actually requested to be sent back to India! I suppose that’s understandable – the British weather is awful beyond words and housing here is pretty bad unless you make a very good living.

Jacob my boss claimed that they have a really excellent lifestyle there, much better than we have here. (Good for them, if it is true!) However in the UK they get very little for their money. I wouldn’t know – it sounded like he was exaggerating. Surely ordinary programmers don’t have gardeners and maids!

However these guys have no shortage of top-notch electronic gadgets, designer shirts, expensive watches and the rest of it, actually. They may be the ‘cheap’ labour, but there is nothing cheap about their appearance! (I don’t actually know how that works out actually. If we only pay £150 as a daily rate for a consultant based in India, then the guy in question would be lucky to get half of that in his paycheck… (I ‘got’ a third of my rate when I did consultancy.) So how is he able to afford luxury European consumer goods such as Swiss watches and Italian shirts with an income of less than £75 /day? I must be missing something… Glad for their sake that they’re able to afford this kind of stuff though.
Romance, Indian Style: I like it!
(And aren’t ’saris’ sexy?!)
From a project management perspective there are mixed benefits with the outsourcing setup. The cost of labour in India is something like 1/4 of what the exact same resource would cost in the UK. This is of course very welcome when budgeting. But time differences, cultural differences, infrastructure problems etc makes the setup logistically difficult at times. When you most need to speak to somebody they may not be in the office. You can not walk over to somebody’s desk and have a serious conversation with them. Everything is done over email or telephone.

There also seems to be a much higher incidence of illnesses and miscellanous other family emergencies happening with Indian team members than with others. The family emergencies also seem to take a lot longer to sort out. When you least need it, somebody jets off to India for reasons that are never very clear. Although I sympathize, as any normal person would, that doesn’t make the impact on my project any less. I found that Indian family emergencies is something I have to keep a backup plan in order to be able to handle. I have to admit that I find it irritating.

There are lots of funny mix-ups as well. The guys in India didn’t at first realise that “Cordelia” is my first name. Several people wrote me emails starting with ‘Hello Neumann…’ We probably mix up their names quite badly too though!

The English team members say they ideally want to shorten Indian names (like using ‘Jay’ for ‘Jayanthkumar’ etc). But they don’t actually do it, as they fear it may be rude. (Second-generation British Indians our own age accept that without any problems.)

As the Indian guys on the team are all around thirty, many of them are currently looking to get married!
I am fascinated by their structured and scientific way of finding a wife. Very cool! It seems a bit rude to probe, but I hope to find out more about how they are getting on when we go out for a team dinner shortly.
(Gosh, I wouldn’t mind it if somebody else introduced me to a ‘fully compatible’ guy the way that seems to be happening in India… )

It is also fascinating to think that the whole caste system thing is going within the Indian group, [correction, it is not: see comment by Gana] and that I am completely oblivious to it. My English team members have known the Indian guys longer and have revealed that ‘such-and-such’ is a really low caste, but ‘such-and-such’ is a high caste….It means nothing to us though, of course, but it’s fascinating.
Indian Fabric, Textiles, Carpets….Gorgeous!
I really wouldn’t mind it if I was able to go out to India for business. My own company’s offices are in Delhi and the consultancy that we use are outside Bangalore in an incredibly cool ‘campus’ where customers are apparently driven around in little golf-carts. Very funky! Indian culture is beautiful and fascinating. I love the fabric, textiles and carpets.

Well, as things are turning out – the Indian team are not as alien anymore as they first felt. I have got to know several of them well and we can have a good laugh together. I suppose the language of IT is fairly universal.

I am not sure what I think of the whole ‘outsourcing to cheaper countries’ concept. I wonder whether it bothers the Indians to know that they are essentially the ‘cheap labour?’ On the whole, I suppose it must be a good thing that these jobs are being created in India. But where is this trend leading?

For the time being I am trying just to enjoy working with this fascinating group of people and not worry about the bigger picture. I have learnt a lot from the whole experience already and I really like my Indian team.

The Station: Got to be here at 7:45 a.m!
I wake up at 7:00 a.m. Oh, no! I have over-slept by about half an hour! I guess that noise in my dream was the alarm bell after all!

Get dressed and ready for work. Wearing a two piece (womens’) suit makes dressing very easy. No worrying about what matches and whether I look fat.

No time for breakfast unfortunately. I normally have microwave porridge though. It’s really fast. I remember to take some vitamins though.

7:40 a.m. Richmond Station

I leave five minutes too late to make the fast 7:45 service to London Waterloo… I secretly don’t mind missing it because that train is worse than a cattle carriage. In order to get on the service you have to press yourself into the carriage using force, mumbling, ‘sorry, sorry, excuse me please… ‘ to those around you.

Then you are in for 23 minutes of disgustingly crowded conditions. You are pressed up against people you don’t know. It may be hard to find something to hold on to. I keep my eyes closed and listen to my iPod…

One improvement is that the trains are normally on time now. They didn’t use to be. I strongly suspect that is partly because the train company have taken some trains out of service, thereby having less congestion on the tracks and more congestion of people in the carriages instead.

I get on the 7:49 all-stations train and actually GET A SEAT! This journey takes 30 minutes instead of 18 minutes though. I listen to a Christian audio book on my iPod and flicker through a copy of Metro.

8:20 a.m. - iPod Drama and a Brave Man!

The train pulls in at Waterloo station and I get off with everybody else. As I swing my backpack over my shoulder, I manage to make the iPod disconnect from the headphones and fall through the gap between the train and the platform!
Just how I dropped my iPod!
I can see the iPod laying on the track, but I really wouldn’t dare jumping down to get it. And at any rate, it is impossible since I am wearing a fairly narrow skirt. Also, it is very dangerous to jump down on the track.

However a guy noticed what happened and without hesitation got down on the track and got the iPod! I thought he’d struggle to make it up again, but he managed to pull his own weight and get up just fine. A few weary commuters smiled. I thanked him profoundly. This was the nicest thing that happened to me all day.

Next time somebody does something that nice for me I will say ‘God bless’ as well, and give them my nicest smile. Just to see what they will say,

’Waterloo and City’ Tube Line

Next I need to get on the one-stop Waterloo and City line and travel to Bank Station. The queue to get on the train starts under ground, about 100metres away from the platform. It’s more crowded than this!There is one train every three minutes or so. You just queue until you get to the platform which usually takes 5 minutes or so. Then you squeeze onto the train. “Sardine jar” doesn’t sufficiently cover the experience.

At Bank I walk the long escalator walkway and get up at Threadneedle Street. From there I walk to work, stopping at Pret-a-Manger to buy breakfast.

Laptop Problems + Unconventional Solution

I am a project manager, so I get on with the things that I have to do, skiving off a ‘Project Manager’s Forum which I am supposed to attend. However if I do attend it, I will fall behind on my day-to-day tasks. Later a senior person commented on my absence.

At 11:00 my laptop starts acting up. It already crashed once during the morning, but now the mouse and keyboard stop working.

I disconnect the laptop from the docking station and start trying to troubleshoot it. I don’t have the time or patience to do it properly though. I call up the IT Helpdesk which is based in India. I tell them that I am unable to work and that they need to send over a local guy immediately.

15 minutes later; no support guy and no sign that anybody cares that I am unable to work…

I continue my troubleshooting and isolate the problem to the laptop’s docking station.
I start walking the huge office to find a member of the local desktop support team as I realize I need a new docking station. No joy. I see a few empty desks and am told that that’s where the support guys normally sit. However, they’d not been seen that day.

I start getting desperate. I am on a tight schedule and am starting to fall behind. The amount of paperwork I have to produce by next Wednesday is overwhelming.

One of the support guys has a docking station on his desk, and I decide to take it and check if it fixes my problem. I take the power cord and the docking station and go back later to replace it with my own. Nobody nearby seems to care that I essentially stole this guys’ docking station and power supply.

The new docking station, kind of works, but is wobbly. If you touch or move anything, it looses it’s connection to the power supply and switches to battery. The mouse and keyboard also stop working from time to time.
The Gherkin has a pub at the ground floor
I get on with work. Some of the things I have to do are very boring, confusing etc. Today I am mainly trying to sort out the ‘quality requirements’ on the project. Blah, blah, blah!

6:00 p.m.

An hour after I can officially leave, my boss suggests a drink to a collegue and myself. I accept out of politeness. We go to the bar in the ‘Gherkin’ which is filled with bankers. We sit down in the corner and talk. We actually have quite a nice time.

8:30 p.m.

I get home and feel soooooo tired! But I’ve got plenty to do at home. I was too tired to go shopping for groceries.

My boss asked me to think of what ‘objectives’ to set for /whatever period, I didn’t quite get that/…
As usual with him, he gave some very muddy instructions and I wasn’t clear what the format I was supposed to use. So I scribbled down some vague, cliche-ish ‘objectives’ and went to the meeting.

The objectives were things like ‘Manage delivery of project phases according to agreed timeframes, budget constraints and business requirements..’ I sneaked in something about getting the prestigious PMI qualification as well, or ITIL. As you may guess, these qualifications make my CV look better and that is the reason I want them.

Anyway, Jacob approved all my muddy ‘objectives’ and told me to enter them into the employee management system… (A very ambitious Oracle 11i based HR application.)

He then started saying that he was pleased with my work etc, etc. He seems to really like my style of working. I never take anything for granted with work, but this is really going quite well! We discussed the project for a while.

I dislike working as an IT project manager as much as always, and I still dream of an old-fashioned life in the countryside. But since I have no choice but to do this right now, I might as well try to enjoy it.

I got two of the things from my ‘Commitments for This Week’ done today. The easiest ones…

I have promised myself to write something every day, but today I came home feeling so exhausted and with a terrible headache and ache after my surgery.

I spent all day in Microsoft Project and Excel, planning out the next phase of the project. No lunch today, just a sandwich at my desk. My boss confided in me that the whole project is in jeopardy. Unless we can state a very good case, very quickly, there is a chance that the company pulls out and changes the technology to something else. (Corporate madness - the technology is adequate and the software is doing what it needs to do. I really don’t see what the problem is…) Some of the big bosses came by to talk to my boss Jacob, and it is pretty clear that he is telling the truth.

I am not terribly worried about things like redundancy since it’s very easy to get another similar job in London. But I don’t want the disruption or confusion, and I don’t like to leave things before they are finished.

When I got home I watched a Swedish film and got terribly homesick for pine forests, blue lakes, red wooden cottages, pastel coloured wooden houses and blonde people.

I am going to write properly about Sweden later on this week.

Bye for now,
Cordelia

Just as I was beginning to wonder if my company was crazy for paying me a very decent salary for next to no work, I was given a considerable amount of work with a very narrow timeframe. The start-up documentation, budgeting et.c. for a multimillion £££ project. My boss is under the impression that the bulk of the work can be done by Thursday, i.e. in two days.

It looks like I’ll be managing the next phase of this enormous project after all. It’s to do with developing and deploying a piece of software in 13 European countries.. The development team is partly in India, partly in Canada and, of course, in the UK. The whole experience certainly looks fantastic on the CV, and I’d no doubt learn a lot. But as mentioned previously, I’d be much happier as a traditional housewife and mother. The irony of it!
PRINCE2 process flowchart. This is the bible of IT project-
management in Europe. Luckily I am a certified ‘practioner’.
My manager who is nice and funny in a way, can also be quite crazy. When he wants to, he bullies people like you wouldn’t believe it.

The guy who is managing the project in question, for one. My boss, (Jacob), seems unable to behave in a reasonable way towards him, always being rude, bordering on obnoxious. The Indian team members are quite scared of Jacob.

I’ve only been working there for about 2.5 months, so I have had no reason to fall out with him yet. I always behave like the committed employee, always asking Jacob for advice and taking it unless it’s too crazy. Jacob hence is mainly nice to me, constantly joking and being quite funny and decent. But I notice how he behaves towards other collegues so I can’t relax with him. The wind could turn any time. Maybe he is letting me off easiser for being the only woman who works for him. Or maybe it’s nothing to do with that.

I am still in pain from the surgery though; not feeling even close to 100%. I will spare you the details of my symptoms. Suffice to say that nobody cares how you feel at work and you cannot talk about it… If you are there, you have to do the work to your best ability. I am just biting my lip, popping painkillers and getting on with it. I’d love to lie in bed and rest another week, but it is not an option.

A nice surprise (apart from the flowers) awaited me after I was back from being off for the surgery; I have been given a really nice desk in a secluded space by the window. It’s a top spot in this massive office! I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Daylight cheers me up during the working day so I am very pleased about that.
St Helen’s Church, a very dynamic
bible-believing church in the ‘City’
The business analyst in my team gave me his palm tree, so I have that to look at too. All the guys are very fascinated by the destruction of a high-rise post-war building next our office building. They are often standing by the window near me, observing the builders as they tear this large building down. It’s a very noisy and violent process though and personally I wish they had chosen to just renovate the building. So what if it was a bit ugly! With the destruction work going on there is a constant background noise of cement-drilling…

I wanted to attend the dinner and talk about Christianity at a City church this evening at 7:30, but because of the surgery etc I am too exhausted by the end of the day and need to go home. Hopefully I can attend next week. I really like the people on the course, the topics are interesting and the church certainly lives up to it’s reputation as the most dynamic Church of England church in London.

Technorati Tags: project manager, it professional, developer, developer, conservative”,
hospital

Today I have to be back at work. Yesterday I was still ill with fever (fell asleep as a wreck at 9pm!). But I really don’t dare being off any longer.

I am certainly much better since the surgery, but the girls on ‘Geek with Fibroids’ are right; It takes a long time to recover from this. Every night I get a fever despite taking some strong painkillers. I suppose I’ll just have to put up with feeling a bit weak.

During my time off I kind of got this blog up and running which was one of my objectives. My sister was here visiting too, which was very nice, if unplanned.

Now, on to some whingeing!

God, I need to get out of London. The commute on overcrowded trains, the lack of real nature, the consumer madness, the cheesiness of professional life; It’s all slowly driving me crazy. Today I’ll experience it again.

I stopped worrying about performance at work and what collegues think of me quite a while back. It’s very hard to affect these things; too much effort on it can actually backfire. The ideal is a bland medium, really. I am finding that hard to live up to; I ne

If you are too good you attract backstabbers. Too ‘girly’ is just plain dangerous. Too tough will lead to revolt in the team.. I just go there without any expectations, give it my best effort for about nine hours and then get home and try to forget about it! Too bad I am completely exhausted and spent by then! Also. if one of the senior people wants to be rid of me for any reason, I am well aware that this could happen at any time.

Being a tall, blonde, busty woman I am aware by now that guys at work have their eyes on me from time to time. I am ‘highly visible’ as an ex manager put it. This feels dangerous; I am worried that any mistake I make will turn into a big laugh. I am not good at being “one of the lads” and feel like an outsider.

I try not to worry about the bigger picture (which is unclear to me), or my complete lack of motivation. I am truly grateful for the success I have had on the career side, despite not actually being particularly talented at either IT or management… Thank you God, I have to admit it was what I was praying about. Too bad I didn’t realise what I should have prayed for!

Growing up, I thought that having a career was the best and most fulfilling thing that could happen to me. Now I know that it is fairly hollow and certainly not fulfilling. Once you’ve experienced a shopping spree at Selfridges paid for with money you earned yourself, you realise that there is so much more to being a woman.

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Update: Despite my negative ramblings above, the day actually went well. The people who have desks around me bought flowers for me! That really made me happy!

I discovered that I had hardly been missed in terms of my workload. This is very odd, making me have to ask “why exactly was I hired? I haven’t been doing any proper project management yet!” I had some pain and fever starting late in the afternoon. Hence I left at 5.15!
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