SupraDigit Solutions

When I was studying in class 10 th , I asked my English teacher a very basic question about why two words in English sound the same but mean different. That time, we never had a separate subject on “phonetics” and I was quite unaware of this part of the English subject then. She smiled and very smartly told me that – “English is a ‘funny’ language” and went away! I was amused by her answer the whole time. Only later I learnt that in English there are so many words with a spelling, that are used “as per the context” to mean different than their similar sounding words with a different spelling. In quality assurance and in general in project management, many testers and project managers make the same mistake with a misunderstanding and confusing these 2 words – “Metrics” and “Matrix”. They use them interchangeably! Metrics in the quality management context means “to measure” (check its meaning here - https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metric) and … Matrix has different meanings based o...

"Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." ― Nelson Mandela When I started my career in the software engineering field 2 decades back, the only way to achieve success in my mind was – to do “hard-work”. From initial experience, I started believing, that it was not “hard-work”, but “smart-work”. I have been blessed, as I got opportunities to work with some of the best project managers and leadership teams. I was told, that “smart-work” combined with being flexible and taking new initiatives can take you to greater heights. I have been successful in following these mantras in corporate career, but then I faced a new dilemma. It took me many years to realize, that in-spite of my good programming experience, my daily-work (mostly managerial) was taking me away from understanding the core issues of my team members. My understanding of team-member real problems was no where near to what they were truly facing! I saw my leader...

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” - by John Quincy Adams True Leadership… The Best Leader… The Star Leader… A Leader is Not a Manager… Leading from Behind… and the list just goes on for ‘being the best leader’ phrases. “True leadership” is hard to find. What makes it ‘hard’? Few years back, I used to work in a big program having 300+ human resources. I was one of the youngest project managers. I was looked upon by my team as a role-model on assertive leadership and a can-do attitude. This made me proud, but I later realized failure to understand the pulse of my team. I also went through a 360-degree leadership assessment during this period. I got my anonymous review comments (from my team) as part of this assessment. The feedback comments reflected how I was popular in driving my own agenda, rather than resolving my team issues. In a few years down the line, I managed a much smaller team of 5, where I also worked as...

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off. - Franklin D. Roosevelt In today’s world order, the word “competition” has taken far reaching meanings and consequences. When we are born, our parents compare our growth and behavior with other kids. As we grow-up and join a school, our teachers compare, teach and behave in perspectives of competition. Human perspective itself is formed out of wanting others to be like their own selves and then behaving accordingly. This may not be true of all but for majority, it is a definite case. Competition doesn’t end here. When we get a job, appraisals are done based on “competition” again (with the famous or infamous bell-curve technique). When we become parents, we again want our kids to compete. Most of us, also look at life as a competition with our neighbours or relatives accrued wealth, or it could be with that of a...

Let me tell you… This has been my favourite subject of all! Not that I may want to do research in psychology but understanding people and how they behave so differently in different situations - just puts me in awe! So… What is EQ? A very nicely written post from psychcentral ( Psych Central Link ) aptly explains EQ as well as its 5 categories (or components), which are – Self-awareness Self-regulation Motivation Empathy Social Skills With even more detail, positivepsychologyprogram ( Positive Psychology Program Link ) provides even more details with the 4 dimensions of EQ, which for ‘emotions’ are – Perceiving Using Understanding Managing For further exploration on EQ, starting with Wikipedia ( Wikipedia Link ) is a great idea, since it also talks about the 3 models of Emotional Intelligence (or also referred to as EQ). The above 5 categories are coming from the “Mixed Model”. I am quite influenced by the ‘Mixed Model’ than other models. It is much more comprehensive and connect...

Creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t, however, let employees choose which one. - From this article ( HBR article ) The word urgency has become synonymous with the daily work of so many corporates today. I am referring this, not to degrade the importance of urgency, but to understand how the ‘false sense’ and ‘frequency’ of urgency impacts everybody and the organization. The worst impact is on the product and / or services. In almost 2 decades of my career life, I have seen innumerable instances, whereby corporates just love managing things on fire… not for a few days in a year, but almost every now and then. This creates a belief in the minds of majority of employees, that something worth doing has to be defined as urgent! Such beliefs create “belief systems”, which in turn creates the appropriate organization culture. As rightly said by Mr. Martin Zwilling ( Martin Zwilling's Blog )… “Many confuse the Sense of Urgency with a S...