Ram Navami

Tomorrow, March 27, is Ram Navami in India.  This morning my team leader in Gurgaon explained that Ram Navami is the Hindu equivalent of Christmas.  She also explained that she didn’t have enough time to fully explain the importance of the holiday, so I gather it’s pretty important.  She’ll be spending the day with her [...]

Too Much Freedom Isn’t a Good Thing

And I thought prohibiting email and IM for personal use was bad.  Read how technology students in Mumbai have a curfew of sorts in Internet Curbs for India’s Top Students.  Turns out students at the Indian Institute of Technology haven’t been making their 8am classes, so the authorities have shut down their late night Internet [...]

Team Building? Pahlease!

Today our managing director asked us to fill out personality profiles in preparation for a team building exercise we’re scheduled for next month.  We’re spending two days with a corporate training firm to enhance a bunch of stuff that sound pretty fluffy to me. 
The personality profiles are pretty funny.  The instructions are to select the [...]

Fight the Jargon

I spent a an hour this morning removing the term “updation” from a report my team in Gurgaon prepared.  I had asked them to update 2005 figures with the most recent data they could find.  Their final report was entitled, “2006 Updation,” and was littered with this incognito version of the word update.  So I [...]

India Still No.1 for Outsourcing

A study by management consultancy AT Kearney shows that India is still the top offshore location for outsourcing because of an “‘unbeatable mix’ of low costs, deep technical and language skills, mature vendors and supportive government policies.   It adds that wage inflation has been matched by corresponding increases in the supply and quality of skills.”  [...]

Cottage, Please

I can’t begin to describe how much I enjoy shopping.  It’s therapeutic for me, akin to meditation or deep relaxation.  So after ten days of extremely long hours working in our offshore office in Gurgaon, I was hell bent on getting in some serious shopping before heading back to NYC.   My time was limited so [...]

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

Work flow can be tricky for offshore operations.   For us, work begins in NYC, makes its way to Gurgaon, comes back to NYC, heads over to the client, and then sometimes comes back for amendments and revisions.  We’re always looking for ways to make this flow more efficient and we hired a business development consultant [...]

American Culture 101

Our offshore analytics team has training sessions every quarter to stay on top of the most current analytical tools and frameworks and to sharpen their written English and data presentation skills.  Every so often the training officers ask the analysts if there’s something in particular to they’d like to focus on in an upcoming training [...]

Remember The Story

Two weeks ago a global consumer healthcare client handed me a report prepared by a boutique consulting firm my client hired last year to assess a potential acquisition opportunity.  My client asked me to update the report with the most recent market figures and then pick up the analysis from where the previous firm left off.  
Clients typically don’t [...]

Decent Investments in Gurgaon

We spent the last of our 10 days in India touring the residential areas of Gurgaon.  The office manager of our offshore office drove us through Gurgaon and pointed out the many construction sites for residential properties.  As we drove through the suburbs of Delhi several of my colleagues talked about an interest in buying real estate in India.  We mostly joked [...]