Hello All,

First of all I wish one and all a very happy new year 2012, may all have peace and prosperity through out and may this year bring the lights of eternal happiness along with fragrance of everlasting blossoms of joy into your lives.

Coming back its been quite a bit of time since I talk to you folks in my blog. 2011 has been a pretty busy year for me, especially in my professional life and with my interaction with Microsoft technologies as a whole. Let me narrate my experiences in a gist.

Product Development

In 2011, I was fortunate to get involved in a brand new product designed/released by my organization. Its a SharePoint Enterprise product targeting specific business owners who want to closely follow their finances and inventory as a whole. My contribution vested right from the starting of the product with business functional knowledge, and then I went through architecting SQL alongside closely working with UI devs to get it right and get it done. As a whole we (my organization) had a great breakthrough by shipping our product to our first client and we are excited with subsequent prospective sale enquiries which we are getting from potential customers. In 2012, we are looking ahead to make this product more sustainable, intuitive and flexible to our customers in terms of business value.

Apart from product development, I worked on with couple of teams on Services frontend. Its pleasure and fun to work with cross border teams on different technologies and with specific hard deadlines. Thanks for my mentors and team for their support and hard work, because of which we never went  into a heart burned state which usually happens with many services/consulting projects. In fact I never got pressurized in my daily routine work. My hands are on the fly to say goodbye to 2011 with beautiful conclusions to couple of fantabulous projects. It always make me feel better looking at the cheers from my clients with a smile on their face saying GOOD JOB .

Everything what so ever – we (Me, My Mentors, My Team) did so far is not a one night miracle achievement neither its going to be a one night stand. There is lot of hard work and thought process involved in making our journey pleasant and easy. Some core principles which I stick around for over a year, say Impact & Risk Assessment, Focusing on Domain Knowledge, TDD, Resolving Dependencies, Cross border team Interactions etc. given me prominent results. We made up our minds to stick to our basics in the complete execution process and now we are here standing on a very robust base and uplifting ourselves and fellow partners in 2012.

Importance of Understanding Business process

Over the year 2011, I went through a lot of case studies, no matter whether it is a success or failure there is always a lot to learn from these common ups and downs. At this junction, I would like to address one important concept which I noticed – "Importance of Understanding Business process". Most of the folks who come across to me are of different kinds – some are exceptionally talented technical persons, some are completely non-technical business users, some are geeks etc. Irrespective of what kind you are, these people always focus on getting a solution to the clients BUSINESS problem. One common mistake what most often I come across is the level of thought process which needs to be done around the business problem which we are trying to solve. We got to remember that even a phenomenal technical solution might go useless if that does not solve customers business problem. So I would suggest to spent up enough time with your customers before you are trying to solve the problem technically.

Afore mentioned points are always a bit tricky to understand and implement. There are lot of if’s and but’s, do’s and don’ts wrapped around this concept especially in client interactions. The only one statement which made my life easier and better was – "Ask Right questions at right times". And when you are anticipating certain risks, do convey and escalate them at proper times. When you start sensing something is going wrong, step back – think – talk – ask questions. One more important criteria which can influence overall goal is Prioritization, we should set up right priorities and re-visit them as we progress.

One last thing what I want to talk about is Ambiguity. Landing up in shady areas in software engineering is inevitable, most of the times but sometimes it can be avoided, I am the first one to be in that situation because of my job role . But often I see people getting confused, loose confidence and instill dis-interest because of this particular and peculiar property. There are and can be many reasons why we usually get into these ambiguous situations, some quick scenarios were communication sync, technical barriers, understanding business problem etc. To handle this property what I would suggest is to calm down, step back and re-visit the problem with proper HELP. Especially technical folks should focus on maintaining stability in their day to day job, rather than creating instability for themselves by panicking. Last but not least, I do enjoy this particular ambiguity for most of the time, because it makes me think and think better. It helped me growing not only in my professional career but also in my personal. I believe in – “Ambiguity never lasts”, so don’t get stressed of being wrong, enjoy in exploring the right ways.

People with me

2011 has been an outstanding year for me because of some great conversations I had with my mentors (Venu, RK and Stephen). They thought me not only in the direction of professionalism but also in psychological perspectives which has significant impact on welfare of an organization. Right now while I am writing this sentence I was able to recollect topics of vast diversifications and interests starting from product development, management and to general topics like personal health care to present day international politics, were part of many conversations which I had with my mentors. Thank you one and all for such a great support, guidance and encouragement. Apart from these prolific people, I am blessed to work with such a wonderful and beautiful team. All team members are hard working, committed and strongly excited towards what they are doing in their routine jobs. We worked on different technologies across different platforms, but we never doubted about the completion of work, no matter what work we handle, it will be reaching to its business conclusion at the end of the day. One more interesting thing I remember was – with this team (US and India) work kept on running 24 hours a day, thanks to my folks back at US along with team in India for such a brilliant commitment and support throughout. Lastly, In 2011 I did interacted with many other beautiful people across boundaries – I wish one and all a very happy and bright new year 2012.

2011 Personal Life

Hmmm…nothing much in personal life, I always had fun throughout the year with my family. Thank you Mom and Dad. Thank you all my family. Even though its only very small laps of time I spent with my family over 2011, I shared a lot of joy which brought me back to my real life to its fullest. I miss them a lot.

My Upcoming Perspectives

Okay, here comes the interesting part for me. I oblige to the fact that my contribution to my blog/online community is very limited in 2011, so now I have to get back to my equilibrium with more consistent and systematic approach. I started planning it and this post was my first step.

As far as my future articles are considered, definitely majority of them are going to be on technical frontend, especially Microsoft technologies. But at the same time, I would like to concentrate more on definitive areas of expertise such as Project Management, Testing, Planning and Implementation (Back bones) for project, Source Control versioning, Dependencies Identification, Risk and Impact assessment and other related areas of making development process much better. I know many of my readers are technical folks, for them I would narrate posts varying from Administrative Scripting framework like PowerShell to Web technologies like ASP.NET, MVC, also from Mobile Technology for Windows Phone 7 Development to Enterprise Framework like SharePoint, Dynamics CRM. I would also put up considerable focus on Client side technologies like JQuery and Rich Application Frameworks like Silverlight. At the end, C# would be my buddy.

I am planning not to rush, so please bear with me. At this point of time, I thank all my readers for their interest in my blog, do please let me know if there are any specific areas of interest where you guys are expecting some blog posts from me. I may not be the right person to solve all queries but I will try my best to point you to the right direction.