BSPIN Diary 1: Woes of Indian IT Industry

Key note address delivered by Mr. Ashok Sootha, co-founder of MindTree in the BSPIN Annual Conf at B'lore was very much thought provoking. He talked about the woes of Indian IT industry and I was able to connect with the real time problems faced by me as a service delivery manager.

He was quoting an interesting piece of statistics- 62% of all projects are having time overruns (both effort overruns and schedule slippages) and with this background think of most IT companies that claim 90% of their revenue comes from repeat business. How come this is possible? Customers have nowhere to go except India? It may be partly true till China and Indonesia catches up with India.

Ashok felt the following are the main reasons for this poor project performance

• Estimation techniques not reliable and mostly off track
•  Poor risk management- only done generically not done specific to the project, environment, customer etc.
• Poor domain knowledge (if you don't know the domain, you should not be trying to provide a solution. There is nothing called technology solutions)
• Not able to keep pace with technology giants (mind boggling innovations in the mobility and cloud space)
• Poor resource mix - top 5 IT companies are doing a decent job on this front. But medium and small companies are struggling
• Attrition rate - how can a company survive with 20% attrition?
• No harvesting of knowledge- we don't learn from the past mistakes, other's mistakes

The list is endless. I can produce at least 25 reasons on the fly based on my experience. But this is Ashok's list. My favorite is the poor resource mix which I very often emphasize in my own company. can you guys add yours?