Project and Deadlines; Deadlines and Projects

Hi
I was caught in the midst of a heated discussion today at the breakfast table. The topic was how to make Tata Indicom the premier mobile operator in the country. The only way the Tatas can achieve this is through churn (acquiring the customers of a competing network operator). Now, this is not easy. Because if a customer churns why should he come to TATA and not go to Vodafone? Besides, why should a customer churn? Bharti, the country's premier mobile operator, owns a powerful brand, Airtel. It is incredibly fast to the market. They came up with their m-commerce ads (currently running on Indian television featuring Madhavan and Vidhya Balan) a couple of days after the RBI gave the green signal to mobile commerce. The recent acquisition of Spice by Idea demoted us from being the 5th largest player to the 6th largest. So, the business case is dire. And the people on my breakfast table were the cream of the company. One of them is part of the core strategy team in the Corporate head office, another is a core member of the marketing team of a "to be launched" new product division and so on. Bottomline, these guys could make a difference in the organization. Yet, for the last one month I had seen this topic being debated and debated. The people on the breakfast table changed but the arguments remained. And everyone had differing views on how the growth could be achieved. But they kept talking and nothing was being done. It reminded me of that IBM ad "Stop Talking, Start Doing." This makes me ask a controversial question? Are we management folks more inclined to talk rather than execute? Certainly, IBM thinks so!

The Business case above represents a sample of the business cases we had to handle for our first term projects. Personally, I love these projects. I believe that is what makes b-school life interesting and differentiates it from an under-graduate experience. B-schools believe that these projects simulate a business environment for students. Agreed, except with one big difference. In projects you have nothing to lose. At a maximum, it will effect your grades. But in business - politics, livelihood, greed, fear - all play a part. There are a whole gamut of emotional attributes at play. A b-school business case or project cannot simulate these emotions.

The one emotion that they can simulate is fear of Deadlines. And I faced plenty of it during my first semester. My first project submission was Statistics. For stats, we were given the option of choosing our projects. We had to take one key decision for the project - did we want to do primary research or did we want to download secondary data. We settled for the latter. Mostly because of the amount of work involved for primary research and the unreliability of the data. There were some teams which opted for primary research but eventually had to manipulate their data to achieve the conclusion they wanted. But we found it incredibly hard to find relevant secondary data. Most of the secondary data suffered from insufficient data points required for a regression analysis (on which our project was based). Finally, we settled on a project about the 'Crime patterns in the United States'. We got the data from the Department of Justice. Our team's magician was Fred. He drove the project and did the core work. If not for him we would have struggled to finish the project. And even today I don't understand the tables that went into the project. But Fred knew what he was talking about and that is what matters.

In a generic sense, team-work is great for projects and helps divide work. But I have seen projects completed with the dazzle of that one "magician" in the team. Subsequently, these magicians are either in great demand or scorned upon. If he is a magician and can still work in a team (not as easy as it sounds), he is much in demand. If he is a magician but thinks everyone else is shit and cannot work as a part of the team he is scorned upon.

The project I enjoyed most was Marketing. We had to create a marketing plan for "Formula 1 -Singapore". The project was exciting and it was the only one where I put my heart into it. Different teams put in different levels of effort for the project. There was one team which commissioned a market survey to understand the F1 customer. They actually paid outsiders to conduct this survey. While there were other teams, which started work with barely a week remaining. We were somewhere in-between having started work with a month to go. And I truely believe that we had the best caption among the teams - "Racing into the night". It reflected our positioning for Singapore having the world's first formula 1 night race.

Our accounting project was due to be submitted on the same day as the Marketing project. We had a fun time that night. Our Marketing and Accounting teams were working till 5 in the morning. I remember shuffling time between Marketing and Accounting during the previous evening and well into the night. At times I wondered what was I working on - Marketing or Accounting. While my Marketing project had taken a decent shape, our Accounting project was a mess. We were supposed to compare the Financial Statement of HP and Dell and evaluate which company was better poised for delivering 'shareholder value' (another buzz word!). The basic criteria for the project was to compare like firms from a list of firms populated by the professor. And we had one team which wanted to prove that HP and Dell were not like firms. So, our project had to first prove that they were like firms. Only, if we did this, would the remainder of the project be evaluated. The problem with our Accounting project was that it was 'nobody's baby'. So, it stayed incomplete till the last minute. We had to submit the project by 12 noon. We had our marketing class from 9 to 12. I remember working on the Accounting project right through the Marketing Class. I exchanged mails with my team members through the class. We even discovered a major blunder half-way through marketing class. With 10 minutes left, we submitted our Accounting project which I will best describe as 'half-baked'.

We had two projects to submit for Financial Management. One at the mid-term stage and one at the final stage. The first project was about finding NPV (net present value) of a particular project. I knew nothing about this project. I had an excellent team which didn't need my contributions. The second project was about calucating the WACC (weighter average cost of capital) for two firms. This was a pretty simple project which we finished in a day. By this time, I had suffered my mid-term exam catastrophe (to read about this, click Mid-term catastrophe) and thus actively contributed to my projects.

The final project was Operations Management. We did a project on the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) of Singapore. This was quite a simple project which was done in a couple of days. Some basic shit about the ICA and how they could improve their operations. That is the great thing about strategy. You can write any 'shit' about it. Trouble is, very little of the 'shit' works!

Economics and the intensive modules did not have projects. The other sections had economics projects. So, I guess we got away with one. Though I would have loved an economics project. It is a wonderful way to round-off all the theory you have learnt.

During the course of these projects, I met some wonderful people. And typically, project members become the best of friends. And after some time the cycle reverses. The best of friends become project members. Projects are where diversity in backgrounds really helps. During our Marketing project, Anh came up with the idea of dividing our marketing plan across phases. And these phases would overlap each other to save time. She showed this diagrammetically which made our plan easy to understand. This was possible because she was from a Marketing background. This was all new to me. All in all, the projects were a lot of fun and a lot of learning.

And once the project were done, thats when the real fun started. The final exams were due in a week's time. And there was no break in-between.

Cheers,
Suraj