Turning back after spending a decade as an SAP Consultant, I’m grateful to my career for having given me the opportunity to widen my horizons and enrich my life, both personal as well as professional. I was fortunate to work alongside a roster of talented people, across multiple business domains , in multiple geographies, with great multicultural teams, designing and delivering complex enterprise solutions. It was a journey filled with many highs and lows. I’m sharing a few takeaways from this journey.
1. Customer is King
This needs no elaboration. Meeting customer requirements are sine qua non for the success of any role that you take on in the service industry. I have once had a manager, to whose mentoring I owe a lot, always reminding me, “Be loyal to your employer, but work for your customer”.
2. Partnership first, commerce second
Focus on building relationships and partnerships for the long term. If possible, avoid working for teams or projects that refuse to see the long term picture. You will be forced to play alongside their myopic trade-offs for immediate gains, creating inefficiencies, and poor outcomes in the long run. One example that I have regularly come across in IT consulting world is where the service providers perpetually rips-off the customer by providing complex solutions with often higher estimates, thereby making the solution even more complex to maintain, slowly worsening the customer relationship. Always try to balance the immediate gains against the larger strategic goals.
3. To be a go-getter
The first ever manager I had back in 2011 always used to tell me, “Never say ‘No’, instead always give it a try'”. I have followed this mantra ever since. And it has brought amazing opportunities to my professional life. I worked on some really challenging projects early on in my career, moved to a country which gave me an amazing experience, and made several transitions in my career. With each daunting task I took head-on, though I saw myself failing a few times, I grew every time.
4. Continuous learning
This is something that has become trite and its importance has thus been lost. Many seem to do it as a sort of punishment – the chore of completing that ‘mandatory course’, ‘mandatory certification’ – that your organisation wants you to. I have tried my best to avoid that mentality and always kept myself interested in the continuously evolving technology landscape that matters to my career. What seems so comfortable and permanent right now, may become obsolete tomorrow. Be aware of where you are right now, and more importantly where you are headed.
5. Find your mentor
In every organisation and every team I worked with, I was fortunate to get some of the best professionals as my mentor. Many have helped me overcome the challenges during different phases of my career and many have guided me towards making crucial decisions in my career. There is nothing like learning something when it’s straight from the horse’s mouth.
A lot of my professional growth has taken place during difficult circumstances working with difficult projects, and challenging customers. Though those were absolutely difficult to endure, I now realise that they constantly pushed me towards growth. As Steve Jobs famously said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards”.
Mahesh MS 