Reference no: EM13909829

Part I

Caselet 1

Mahesh and Raja met while at a Compaq disc production company. Mahesh was in charge of editorial and production, Raja ran the sales force. Mahesh decided to start his own company and invited Raja to join him. Raja would handle sales and administration, while Mahesh managed the clients and directed production.MR communications seemed like a perfect partnership. Things seemed to be going well, and they even landed a major project. As time went by; Raja decided that he wanted a "creative" job too. He spent most of his time producing Compaq discs rather than looking for new business. Mahesh's loyality to Raja made him blind to many things that were obvious to others. Because of their friendship, he trusted that Raja was taking care of his side of the business. As it turned out, Raja was not very good at the task she had taken on. He made mistakes that reduced expected profits. He was not making new sales contracts, which was supposed to be the main part of his job. If that were not enough, the feelings that he was letting his friend downmade Raja feel even worse. Raja began to avoid talking to Mahesh. He stopped coming into the office. Finally, he stopped returning phone calls. By the time Mahesh realized what was happening to the business, it was too late. There were no new sales. What Mahesh thought were profits was the result of Raja not paying their bills. Mahesh was left with more than Rs 5,50,000 in unpaid bills and other debts. A tearful message on the answering machine from Raja "I'm moving out to Chennai for a while. Sorry it didn't work out."It took Mahesh three years to dig out of the financial mess and get his new company up and running successfully.

Questions: 1. How could Mahesh and Raja have avoided the problems that led to the end of their partnership?

2. Why is this situation a good example of the difficulty in maintaining partnerships between friends? 

Caselet 2

Reliance Engineering is a manufacturing firm with about 160 employees. The founder of the business, Manoj, is not active now, and his son, Amit, is the person responsible for the business now. One of Amit’s sisters, Ashwini, runs a small branch distribution office. Her husband, Arun works out of that office as a salesperson. There are two other people in the office. Amit is reorganizing the business and planning to eliminate the two other office functions by moving them to the home office. Ashwini wants to hire her 21-year-old daughter, who has a degree, to fill the soon-to-be-created position of office assistant. From everything Amit understands, this is not the right thing to do. However, Ashwini cannot understand why. Amit has two sons about to leave college. His other sister, Veena, has one son, now out of college, and three daughters still in school. Amit is not yet sure who else might want to join the business, but one of his sons, who will graduate with an industrial engineering degree next year, has expressed some interest.

Questions: 1. Is there a list of do’s and don’ts regarding employment of family members in a family business?

2. Amit has not got down to documenting a family employment policy yet. Help him frame one.  

Part II

1. Study the Second and Third All India Census on SSI and prepare a comparative analysis of the results of the survey.

2. “Innovation generates entrepreneurship”, justify.  

Part III

Caselet 1 ITies like giving PR interviews, print ads, local campaigns, FM-ads, posters, etc. The present scenario of the IT industry was that there was a huge demand in the IT industry with 200% manpower growth for the year 2006-2007. Therefore, all IT industries were in the hiring phase. Big companies were looking for new hunting grounds and poaching was common from mid-size companies. Average industry attrition rate was 14-16%. Lateral hiring had become Titus Technologies was established in the US in the year 1996, by a young engineering graduate, Nitesh Khare, from India who had come to pursue his Masters’ degree in Computer Science. After obtaining his Masters’ degree from Michigan University, he served there in a couple of organizations like Scientific Computing Associates, Linda and 4D Corporation before the idea of Titus Technologies germinated. Before coming to the US, he had founded Titus InfoTech in the year 1991, just at the age of 21, at Bhopal, his hometown from where he had graduated. The cost of living in this city was lower. The distances between places were lesser and so it was easier to maintain a balance between one’s professional and personal life. Many reputed educational institutions were coming up. The city was developing at a fast pace and moreover, the people had strong family bonding. The availability of professionally qualified persons made Bhopal a good hunting ground for human resources. The company was basically a mid-size software developing company that was into services like up gradation and product development. It catered to the software industry and not the end consumers. Initially, the company at Bhopal developed a product for the newspaper industries called ‘News-Sever’. The initial start at Bhopal was with seven to eight members who were all computer graduates. Meanwhile, Nitesh got an opportunity to go to the US for pursuing his Master’ degree in Computers. In 1996, he registered Titus Technologies as a software service company in Cupertino, USA and Titus InfoTech became the 100% subsidiary to this. Titus Technologies USA, provided services to premier software companies like 4D Company, Delta Soft, Lantive, InfraOne, Logistics, Night Mire Software, etc. In its expansion move, some more members like Vice-President Sales, Director Engineer and President Marketing of the company were inducted into the company. Most of them were fresh computer graduates and shared alma mater with Nitesh. Titus InfoTech at Bhopal started focusing mainly on software product development and Titus Technologies USA concentrated on the marketing and the sales functions. 90- 95% of the revenue of the company was from the US market. In 2001, Titus InfoTech started its branch at Bangalore and in 2004, at Gurgaon with all corporate functions centered at Bhopal. All the three centre’s functional with the same facilities and parity were maintained in salary structure of its employees. The organization was almost at per with the industry in offering its packages. The Bhopal centre had more than 350 software engineers in the age group of 22-35 years who were engaged in upgrading systems, developing new products, etc. At present, the company was operating in two buildings on three floors. The workforce had male/female ratio of 3:2. The company had the vision to continue to be a strong outsourced software product, R&D and services company to provide compelling benefits of global distributive development. Titus, in its aim to have customer focus, tried to offer higher value to its customers by suggesting improvement is ‘Changes in processes through technology initiatives’. For this, they had developed ‘White Box Offshore Engagement Model’ which allowed a fast-paced client development group to engage with the team without losing any control

and visibility ay any time. This was a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) since most of the IT services followed ‘Black Box Engagement Model’ where a client did not have complete knowledge or control over the team and its process and cared only about contracted deliverables. On the contrary, the ‘White Box Offshore Engagement Model’ ensured adequate one to one communication and enduring relationship with the client. The company in its attempt to pick up the right team often engaged the client in team selection and refrained from shuffling the team members among the different projects. Some of their employees had been working on the same project, albeit in different projects roles, for the last five years. The company also took care in maintaining customers’ confidentially by ensuring data and information security and by working with the direct competitors of their clients. In 1998, it co-founded Logistics, which was involved in project architecture. Titus InfoTech encouraged open and free work environment wherein they opted for open door policy to encouraged communication at all levels and the senior management made themselves accessible to every employee. The participation of the employees was given high priority irrespective of their level in the organization. The management encouraged employees to put forth their suggestions while working on a project. All the team members had total involvement in product development through full exposure to all facets of project development. This was further accentuated by the size of the team that would not exceed 20 members. The company was totally result-oriented and had no fixed working hours. The organization had a flat structure. The company had a half-yearly performance appraisal system where every employee was appraised at two levels. The first was the self-appraisal and the second was at the supervisory level. Since the employees directly interacted with the clients, there was an appraisal from the clients, which was taken into consideration while evaluating the performance. Based on this evaluation, the team leader would give the feedback to the employees and also have the feedback from the employees and help them to upgrade their performance. Based on the performance appraisal, the employees would be promoted to the next higher level as per the career growth chart of the organization. Titus had an induction policy wherein new recruiters were made to stay in their guest house and, helped in settling down by giving them the feel of the place. They also founded SPTCS (Social Pool of Titus Computing System), an informal group of employees that would look after the activities like picnics, birthdays, anniversaries, festive week, etc. The company had also founded hobby groups who would look after Yoga classes, Gym facility and Titus Band. Both these groups were regulated by HR dept of the company that was headed by young localities, Amit Sharma, a 31 year old MBA who had earlier worked with mid-size organizations like Celtron, Mumbai as Executive Marketing and Shruti Industries, Bhopal as Ass. HR, before joining Titus InfoTech. He had been with Titus InfoTech for the last five years. The informal talks. There was also a small pantry operating, for 24 hours. It served lunch, breakfast and tea etc. at subsidized rates. Since, the employees had to work late at night, pick-n-drop facility was also provided. To look into the satisfaction level of the employees, Titus InfoTech had started programmes like ‘know your Team”, wherein the team leader took his members for lunch or coffee once in two months outside the company premises, to have an informal interaction and have an unbiased feedback from the employees. The team leader communicated this feedback to the top management. He also provided counseling to the employees when the need arose. The company would also provide in-house training for skills up gradation as and when required. Besides, there was HR-helpline, finance helpline, administrative helpline, where employees had direct access to respective departments to seek instant help. The respective helplines were bound to reply within 3-4 days. The company also had the system of exit interview. In their recruitment policy, the company recruited fresh software engineering graduates and gave them rigorous training according to their requirement. They claimed that their six months trained engineers were equivalent to other engineers in IT Industry, with two years experience. To have the best from the campus Titus conducted pre-placement talks, career counseling and arranged seminars for the students to impart them the awareness about the company. They offered pre-pre placement live projects wherein the students would get an opportunity to have the exposure to the job requirement and a direct interaction with the clients while pursuing their studies. During this time, they also paid stipend to the students. Recognizing the importance of brand Examination Paper: Entrepreneurship Management consciousness among the software professionals, the company began investing heavily in advertising and PR active a costly affair. There was a high demand for skilled employees, which had made the scenario all the more complicated. Highly skilled employees wanted challenging jobs and always sought better career prospectus and thus, were always on the move. Brands had become their first priority followed by metro facilities, comfortable work environment, and lucrative packages. Moreover, the employees further looked for tax benefit packages. This had made difficult for the industry to retain the knowledge workers. Titus InfoTech was no exception to it. it had to experience the brunt of the competitive environment of the industry. The attrition rate at the middle and the lower level was high almost, 16-17%, though it was comparatively less at the senior level i.e. 3-4%.While reviewing the exit interviews of the employees who had recently left by stating the reason of leaving for better job opportunities, the HR head, Amit Sharma was wondering how to define better job opportunities and what steps should be taken to cater to the job opportunities that could be termed better.

Questions: 1. Critically evaluate the Human Resources Policies of “Titus InfoTech”.

2. What other strategies would you suggest to reduce the attrition rate at the lower and middle levels?  

Caselet 2

Tycoon Technologies was an Australia based multinational company having offices in Australia and India. The company was dealing in the onsite project development and offshore software development like Healthcare, Financial Services, Insurance, Supply Chain Management, Telecom, MIS and Migration & Up gradation. Besides handling various offshore projects, the company had values partnership with other successful software companies such as Bea, IBM, Sun Microsystems to name a few and outsourced software R&D and supported services to software companies. It also offered expert product engineering services with higher value benefits than merely the outstanding advantage. The company focused on solving the unique and challenging problems of building and supporting cutting-edge software products. Their processes complemented the best practices of their Software Product Development Maturity Model (SPDMM). Tom Hanks was the President of Tycoon Technologies and had served as General Manager and CEO at IBM earlier. He focused on the development, satisfaction and expansion of client relationships for offshore services. Sumit Tandon was the CEO the founder of Tycoon in India, a visionary responsible for the success of these ventures. In India, the office was located at Pune, Maharashtra. The company was working on the component-based and service-oriented projects using J2EE, NET, various operating systems, relational and object databases and application server platforms. Initially, the company started with a team of ten technical members only and successfully progressed to a term of forty-five. The company believed that their Knowledge and competence was a key differentiator and practiced knowledge – Innovation – Technology (K-I-T) philosophy. It adhered to their four principles to work efficiently, be focused on detailed system specification and project planning, meticulous division of work, roles and responsibilities between the clients. This kept the client team updated with the progress of the development efforts, through effective communication of e-mails, conference calls, weekly updates, and regular reporting procedures. Tycoon Technologies while undergoing the concerned project had to meet specific customer requirements that were tackled for the first time in the IT Industry was operating like any other website based on ‘pull technology’ i.e., if the user working on the net made some changes at Application Server and wanted that changes to be visible at the browser end then refreshing of the page was necessary to pull back (or get) data from Application Server. However, the requirement of client was to get rid from the compulsion of refreshing the page i.e., the changes submitted to the Application Server must be visible at browser end at that particular instance without refreshing the page, the data from the application server must be pushed back to the browser. For the implementation of push, the company maintained a queue at the web server end. In this queue concept, the technology used two invisible frames for asynchronous subscription of data over the heterogeneous applications. The first frame performed publishing of data that is, putting back the data to client. The second frame made sure that the connection was always there to push back the data. The subscribed call was asynchronous and every time a new object was required. The object used two fields’ call number and customer id to push back data. The coding was about 15-20 thousand lines of JavaScript and due to limitation of Java Script the implementation was quite complex and took 6-7 years. After the implementation of project, the client faced an operational problem when one of its users opened several windows of the web site by pressing Ctrl-N button. After opening the successive browser windows, user was not aware that same object code was shared amongst all the windows while HTML code for individual browser window was different. The first limitation that was found during usage was that maximum four instances of browser windows could be made functional. Another limitation was upon closing the main browser window; all the instances created by main browser window became un-operational. To resolve the problem few options were there, the first option was to associate separate object with each instance browser window but the problem with this option was CPU cycle got elongated because of each new object code thereby decreasing the CPU utilization. The second option was to make the main browser window as the leader and the declaration that it is dying and then new leader is selected on the basis of a separate algorithm and operations go on as normal. This option was found effective in terms of CPU utilization as well as meeting client requirements. Hence, it was implemented for the successful completion of the project module in this line, the features incorporated by Tycoon Technologies in the Website had been implemented and was running successfully since four years. The clients patented the developed modules.

Questions: 1. What were the factors of KIT philosophy that helped the company in being successful?

2. While were the leader is dying what could be the possible criteria for selection of a new leader in the algorithm?

Part iV

1. ‘Liability of Third-party network vendor s is must’ Justify.

2. ‘VAN agreements are executed between a value added data communications service provider or VAN and a party desiring data communications services, typically for EDI.’ What are the necessary agreements? Elaborate.