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Secondly, it had also been found that the company had been typically focusing its attention on the individual technical skills of IT. However, where the company and its top leaders were often challenged was managing the range of talent, and many a times, wide-ranging personalities. This management of human resources was found to be important
to achieving not only technical success but also smooth and productive business operations that were reliable even during significant changes. It had also been found that human factors such as poor communications and processes, unclear objectives and change adversity, were causing project failures more than hardware and software factors.

From the customer's front, employees were being assessed based not only on what they did, but also on how well they forged relationships and tapped into new sources of knowledge, because knowledge within a firm - processes, customers and operations - ultimately exists within the people who do the work. In this process, they are accelerating the learning curve of business process which is highly dependent upon the employees' ability to connect their daily efforts to the overall organizational mission and their ability to influence others. In learning to interact and build trust, the employees begin to better shape their technology design solutions, their implementation methods, their operational management processes - all of their work - so that it's more in-tune to what people need and how they use it.

Thirdly, now though the workforce of the company had multiplied rapidly by number, it was very much apparent that enormous volume of employee centric transactions and records were processed manually leading to huge errors and increasing re-work associated with non-availability of data for decision making throughout the organization, slow cycle times and poor service to employees, more reliance on human involvement resulting in the use of more head-count, and wastage of time as well as money. Moreover, HR employees were forced to focus on low value added activities, rather than on work that supported the organization's strategic goals.

In addition, concerned with the complex needs of the business, the company's senior executives were pressed for time and could afford to tolerate few excuses from their subordinates. Given the pressures on them from the Board and from market forces, most executives were focusing their attention on the business in the near term and didn't have a great deal of time to spend on long-term goals such as building warm and fuzzy relationships with their subordinates.

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* Contributed by: -
Joydip Dey is a Post Graduate in Human Resources from XLRI Jamshedpur, and has spent more than 15 years in the Fortune 500 Technology Companies, and is currently VP-Human Resources at Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd., New Delhi.