I had declared 30th May 2005 as my longest day. Air India proved me wrong. My longest day was 18 Feb 2006. I didn’t plan to fly Air India to Chennai in the first place. British Airways had more convenient timings and a similar fare. But I clicked on the wrong button, and didn’t realise until a few days before the flight that I was on the Air India, and that the flight left at 8:45am. ...
A software services firm once asked us, “How come we are not able to staff projects quickly, even though we have a lot of people on the bench?” There were a bunch of reasons, but among those, we found something interesting. They were implementing two policies that were logical on their own, but disastrous together. (The bench is where programmers sit when they are not on a project.) Here’s how they work. When a project starts, the project manager requests resources (people) for the project. HR passes on matching CVs to the project manager, who approves or rejects them, in consultation with the client. ...