Working as a Engineer, Analyst, Consultant pick whichever label you can, it was fun time to be at Strategy and Tech consulting for a short span. A lot of people have asked me in the past few years what you learnt at the firm and when people ask I can keep picking random examples from my direct experience or from the surroundings.

Here are few of such pointers and practices as an engineer from the mail I wrote long back to my mentors at McK before leaving the firm. These may not be catch all but have been good reminders for me to keep looking forward through these years,

Never write for just for yourself! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”a794”}

Consider that you are not writing any thing for yourself neither code nor literature.Practice: Write application logs while developing the application and they should be expressive enough to debug the application.

Audience First! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”cb19”}

One should be able to express or narrate any scenario. The understanding of context and scope should be neat, well defined and clear. Practice: Keep track of stories, bugs, features and understand the domain at the level where you can explain it to others.

Ask the right questions! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”efe8”}

Think thrice and ask the right question and get the right answer. Asking the right question saves waste of time, miscommunication, lose in trust and unhealthy debates. Practice: Frame your questions in a way to answer all the “So what” responses.

One thing at a time! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”b7c1”}

Context switch is important to scale, but you need to optimise and avoid context switching overhead. Context is critical for problem solving, break the problem into logical parts and solve one logical unit at a time. Focus should be on one thing at a time and working towards logical closure and pause before you switch context. Practice: make atomic commit and practice Pomodoro technique to context switch.

Be slow but be steady! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”e632”}

Story of Hare and Tortoise and philosophy around Consistency v/s Pace are well know. Practice:gather knowledge consistently by reading.

Time Box to make decision! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”f975”}

Always time box things based on priority to make decisions. Dealing with uncertainty is important and could be blissful or joyless. Remember there is no silver bullet. Iterate over failures to reach success.Practice:Time box your spikes and analysis to move ahead.

Commit to yourself! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”bfdf”}

Keep a singular goal in mind and target to finish it in the time you have assigned or committed for yourself. Practice:Have a todos with committed time to complete.

Be transparent and set right expectation! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”9d41”}

Calibrate yourself and set right expectations with your peers and be as transparent and honest about your feelings and views as you can. Practice:Say no if you can’t!

People first! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”4be7”}

Care for people more than you do for work. Keep asking for feedback and help others with it over time. Surround yourself with positive energy, people around you play a very important role in this. Understanding motivations is important, make hard decisions if its necessary for greater good. Practice:observe and put effort to do feedbacks and learn from each other.

Chose your next word wisely! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”45f5”}

Look around and think twice before you speak or act, as you are the king of the words which you haven’t spoken yet and slave of the words you have said. It is hard to get what you want to achieve out of a conversation, if you don’t speak the right words. You need a lot of patience, courage and trust to get someone right without right words. Practice:Write down your thoughts, writing helps in clarity of thoughts.

Right people! Right time! Right decisions! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”b3cd”}

Discussions are always healthy, but with the stakeholders to drive conclusions. Always discuss with the correct set of people at the correct time and proceed, this avoids a lot of alignment hassle, rework and saves time. Practice:Share and involve all stakeholders in**problem solving activities for efficient context setting and execution.

Balance is yet another optimisation problem! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”5620”}

Try to understand the balance between time, responsibilities, priorities, and learnings to churn out best possible of your capacity. As its an optimisation problem there are no hack, learn to profile**for performance optimisation. **Practice: audit daily/weekly todo list at the beginning and end of the week.

Never point fingers! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”3fa9”}

Never ever point out finger on others, always try to get what can be done better from your side as a individual for people. Practice: retrospect yourself before feedbacks to others.

Optimise for yourself! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”fd01”}

Optimising for yourself does not mean you are being selfish and its okay to be a bit for your work and people in favour of supporting your goals.Do all the positive what makes you feel happy and motivate you to reach your goals with dedication. Practice:Be honest about things you want to do or your don’t want to do in favour of your goals.

Be Aware! Be conscious! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”4cc8”}

Stay calm, healthy and always be aware of your mental and psychological state to control your acts. Always be true and honest with yourself. Never let you emotions reflect on your acts. Practice: No decisions or forming of strong opinions when you are angry.

Debate healthy and Never avoid conflicts! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”9452”}

Try to make logical sense out off each and every step you take and always seek for healthy debates. This will gift you an ability to counter yourself in an argument which makes you right in the corse of time if you chose to. Practice: always clarify intentions before getting into debates and conflicts.

5 Why’s {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”3544”}

Ask yourself “why” five times at each step of dilemma. It helps in decision making and moving forward without second thoughts. Practice:ask 5 why’s to peers while debating over code.

Move towards the goal! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”ca2a”}

Ask yourself to improve execution efficiency and choice of directions, “Does the step I am doing, helps my current task or goal?”. Practice: just ask yourself.

Float with your thoughts! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”d6f8”}

In your free time, practice to leave your mind free and observe how far it goes. This is one of the most interesting ways of learning new things about yourself. Practice: find your meditation.

Elevator Pitch! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”80e5”}

Chose right set of impactful but less words to deliver your message. You snooze it, you loose it. Practice:try to deliver your message with 2 minutes rule.

Don’t Repeat Yourself! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”26df”}

Watch out for your mistakes, Try not to repeat them and enjoy the trials. At the end of the day if you are able to fix even a single one, you are a better person.

Focus is the key to gain trust! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”8848”}

Focus on the problem solving and principles is important to gain trust with peers and stakeholders and build up and efficient ecosystem.

Be a team player and lead! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”5c74”}

Contribute individually for the team to make it matter and lead by examples.

Learn to decide your next step! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”fd29”}

Your ability to make educated guess with least amount of information is defines your growth. Practice:make your decisions and own them, no regrets.

Solve problems not people! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”e351”}

Identify motivations to change behaviours, and position your team accordingly. It not easy to change the nature but its important to value it.

There is a small story of A Sage and A Scorpio. In a river once a sage was taking a bath. One scorpio came floating towards him and bit him. The sage left him at the river bank and forgave him. This went on for a while and a person who was observing this trend could not hold himself without asking the sage, “It is troubling you for so long, why don’t you kill him?”. Sage replied with all the politeness and petty on his face,”It is all nature,It can never leave to bite and I can never leave to forgive”.

The way you work matters! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”c54e”}

Take a smaller chunk and do it the right way. its the way, you work what matter.

Situation! Complication! Resolution! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”6e46”}

There is a saying in Tamil for medicines which goes on the similar track as this principle solving any problem or communicating with larger audience. Understand the situation, Assess the underlying complications and propose or arrive to a resolution. Practice: Draft mails following this structure.

Enjoy! {.graf .graf–h4 .graf-after–p name=”905b”}

If you are not enjoying, you are not preforming.