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Faisal Khan, CEO of NetAccess, has announced a Rs.100,000 internship challenge for 1st to 2nd year students.NetAccess Communications was one of companies out of PK to be funded by a US VC, and is a very successful network security and solutions company (dont let their webpage fool you - they have a fantastic profile).Here is his official take on this internship:

I have been toying with an idea for the last couple of years to have a ‘meaningful’ internship in our company. By meaningful I imply – worthy of learning, challenging, tough, the most intense / learning 8 weeks you will ever spend anywhere.The no-frills – eat, sleep, drink and talk technology kind of an internship… but (yes there is a but)… it has to be fun!!!Here is how it works: they will pick 12 students to participate in a grueling internship program - not only do they get the usual internship stipends and learning ability, the “winning” team will get a Rs.100,000 award to be divided equally amongst the members of the team.

Sound interesting? Go to their site to contact them directly about this (or Faisal maybe you could add an appropriate email address to the comments)

This is a guest post by Mansoor Adenwala. Mansoor is a blogger, corporate trainer, process advisor, and generally a solution-finder in the world of ICT. He currently works for Business Beam Pvt. Ltd in the capacity of Managing Advisor and is based in Islamabad, Pakistan.Almost all organizations in the world are started on two basic premises. 1) To change the world and 2) to make lots of money and create wealth for its founders and shareholders. So how does one do it?

You ‘grow’ into it.

You cannot start up an organization with thousands of people on the first day and expect results immediately. Maybe you can with tons of equipment and large office space, but not with as many people. I say ‘cannot’ because of some very real and very basic reasons. Companies are nothing by themselves. It’s not the factories, it’s not the machinery and it’s not the office space or even the image. A company is a group of people, working towards a common goal.

And as with everything human, it takes time to build up that team, that sense of belonging and that commitment towards a goal. Some of the worlds (and Pakistans) leading organizations are those whose people are committed to it, and not thinking of their jobs as a means to earn a living.

By now, you must be getting an idea of what it does take to grow into a successful company. As the journey proceeds, and you build up your initial product or service (or throw it aside and start with a totally new idea altogether), you promote it and sell it and start getting a profit (or you don’t and scrap the whole idea for a new one) you learn several things along the way. One of these is ‘operational excellence cannot come from machines’. Sure, you can get efficiency that way, but not excellence. Unfortunately, this lesson is not such an easy one to learn, nor is affordable for many.

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Mansoor wrote an interesting post a couple of days ago that spurred some intelligent discussion. I want to continue the conversation by adding another perspective to one point in the post.

It seemed like Mansoor said that specialists who are very good at one thing alone can create silos within organizations. That may not entirely be true.

I define Silos as two things:

1- Groups within organizations who are making decisions solely to benefit that group/dept even at the cost of the bigger picture. I.e. if something benefits me but conciously impacts, disturbs or damages another dept, so be it.

2- Silos are groups that - in the process of making solo-focused decisions - are unable to communicate their roadmap, plans and progress effectively outside of their group. Other groups neither have influence nor a way of preventing a path the silo is taking.

To me, Silos aren’t a problem of specialists or generalists but a communication / collaboration / knowledge management problem.

Read on for some thoughts and a suggested approach to breaking silos without the need for major restructuring.

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This is a guest post by Mansoor Adenwala. Mansoor is a blogger, corporate trainer, process advisor, and generally a solution-finder in the world of ICT. He currently works for Business Beam Pvt. Ltd in the capacity of Managing Advisor and is based in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The corporate world is a funny place. Everyone is in a constant battle to make more money, get more clients and more prestige. Each thinks up of new and innovative ideas to spur growth, ‘out of the box thinking’ they call it, all to get that one big client or that one big dividend, yet each one of them ends up following the same basic strategies just packaged up in new words and phrases. One of these basic strategies which I will discuss here, relates to both human resources and organizational change. I call it the ‘specialists vs generalists cycle’. Lets dissect these two strategies and learn what we can about them. (Feel free to disagree with my point of view, afterall that is the true power of discussion)

For the purpose of this discussion, let’s assume you are a CEO of an organization which is involved in many different verticals. Areas of business which just kept crept into your day to day workings because you needed the jobs done and done well. You’ve got people who are doing everything under the sun, whether it be marketing or quality assurance, because there was a need to do it in the first place. A problem emerges! These people, while performing adequately and getting the job done, are still performing adequately! They’re not proficient in any one area and therefore they’re cutting into each other’s productivity by re-doing work. A marketing person, spending time doing QA will not be able to give a 100% to marketing, and vice versa. (Also, let’s assume that outsourcing is not an option for now).

Read on for more…

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Over time there has been a lot of posts which lament the quality of work force available ethics and professionalism, I myself have written posts about these issues facing tech companies in Pakistan.

However, there are people who have proved me wrong. They have shown my why even after so much trouble we still have a country running towards prosperity.

The last whole month has been one of the toughest for a small product-focused company that could be - rioting occured on the streets with recent events, electricity started going for unknown durations and long hours of darkness, gas shedding started for the first time (the lowest temperature while I write this is -2 in Islamabad). During these darkest hours I found the people of our industry inspiring, and these are not only people I work with at CDF, but the stories of persistence against all odds could be heard across the country,. Following are some of the many incidents I heard about or experienced which highlight to what extent our people will go so that the work goes on and this country moves forward.

The engineers who were unable to work during day time because of load shedding shifted their hours to night time and stayed awake all night to meet deadlines; to avoid the risk of not reaching office next day they slept at office premises; used their cell phones for long calls to give status when internet was not working; went out of their homes to places where electricity was available to have the work done; worked through police blockades through small streets to make it to office; denied family pressures to make it to office and worked insane hours to ensure work doesn’t get disrupted even when there was no electricity no gas, no public transport and on some days even getting out of house was considered dangerous; they worked nights, they used their own resources to make up for any loss of time or productivity that would have happened. And all this when it was understood that staying at home was not a problem - they could easily have said that the situation is tough so lets let the deadline slip, their companies and the clients would have understood; they voluntarily proved that no matter what goes wrong they will continue to shine.

And they made me believe that we still are the best nation in the world we still have the most brilliant minds who perform against all odds, So no matter what comes in their way they will succeed.

Here’s to these shining stars of our industry. Here’s to our workforce.

In the Startup Insiders session in Karachi, Faisal Qureshi summed up the art of the pitch as follows (paraphrased):

“I may be a very good person, and have a very good personality - but do you give a **** about that? All you care about it is ‘what can I give you in 30 seconds?’ And if I cannot give you that, you’ll just go to someone who can”.

That about sums it up - if you cant sell a message to someone in 30 seconds, it doesnt matter how good your product is, the company will buy someone elses.

Well Zaheer A. Kidvai, aka ZAKintosh is holding a special workshop in Karachi and Lahore to help everyone fix that. This initiative is supported by PASHA, but I think this can benefit anyone - startups ; students ; managers. So do check it out.

TPS and Alchemy are already sending their staff to the workshops.

The Karachi one is sold out - so book your place for the lahore one today.

For more details about the 3 hour workshop, look here and here

This is a Guest Post by Mansoon Adenwala - a Green & White enthusiast, and process expert. He is a consultant with Business Beam, a leading consulting firm dealing with CMM and quality improvement processes.
Ask any senior manager of an organization, and the one thing they will tell you is the need to ‘improve the bottom line’ or the balance sheet.  That is eventually what keeps a business in business.  It does not matter how good a product is considered to be by its developer, if it’s not economical and it’s not useful then it’s not a good product.  Most senior managers realize this dilemma and are keen to take steps to resolve it or at the very least, control it.

The question then becomes, how do we give a good product, while still keeping its costs under control.  The answer lies in process improvement.  Process improvement is an activity that seeks to identify and rectify common causes of poor quality by making basic changes to the underlying management processes.

First however we must understand what are management processes.  Management processes are an encapsulation of an organization’s knowledge on how to perform work to deliver quality product in a controlled and consistent manner.  Processes are normally not defined by an outsider, but exist as an entity within an organization.  They may be formalized in the form of documents, or remain informal as information within the memories of the employees, but in all cases, there are processes which make business output possible.

Thus, the quality of the output, the product or service that an organization produces is directly related to quality of the processes utilized to build and deliver that output.  If we tweak these processes in the right manner then we’re able to achieve not only operational excellence but also higher and consistent quality of delivered products.

This post is carrying onwards what Usman said in his blog, you can read about that here Be Loyal to people, not to companies and a portion of techlahore’s blog post Why VCs aren’t investing in Pakistani companies where there is a suggestion that there should be an emotional attachment to the product. Part of the techlahore post is below for reference

“Due to the supply problems in the labour pool we’ve identified earlier, it’s just hard to see how you motivate a workforce that’s getting 30-50% year-over-year salary increases without having to demonstrate the emotional investment that builds great companies.

It can’t just be about the money! How do we get people to care? Your thoughts?”

So above you see two different views on how an employee should attach himself to a company should it be an attachment to a personality inside the organization — say his immediate boss, the CEO or the director, or should it be the product/project the person is working on? Or infact should it be the organization itself (or the brand of the organization)?

My observation for the few years that I have been in the Industry places them in the following order.

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So, I met another brilliant person who previously had no plans to go abroad, but is now planning to follow the band wagon because of the current country situation and career growth.

This is real hard time for our industry, and I feel that the situation is getting worse every day. We have good professionals going out and are being accepted happily because of global shortage of talented resources. As a result, our nation and industry are losing. This comes at a crucial time when Pakistan is finally beginning to get recognized in the world as a business destination to consider.

The irony here is that after so many years when we finaly get the recognition to atleast stand next to our competitors because of a large untapped talent pool and desire to beat the odds, we start losing our key talents.

Read on for background and more thoughts of the future impact of this to our industry.

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In Pakistan we have a severe shortage of technical resources. It is reported that China graduated 600,000 engineers in 2005 and India produces 500,000 graduates in technical fields annually. But some analysts think that huge quantity has been achieved at the expense of quality. But beyond the numbers there’s another issue - the quality and training of the new graduates.

It has always been a challenge to induct new graduates to professional technical jobs. There are large gaps in the skills and culture. Lately the curriculum has also grown distant from what the real life companies need. For CS grads this means that they may not be ready for industry when they are out of college.  As one example I saw this  recent news that International Business Machines Corp. and Google Inc. are starting a program on college campuses to promote computer-programming techniques for clusters of processors known as “clouds.” Each company will spend between $20 million and $25 million for hardware, software and services that can be used by computer-science professors and students.

This example shows two things. One, we need good industry-academia alliances. Second, that we need to reasses our thinking and focus on the future needs. I see some signs of this already in the top schools so that is encouraging. But are we doing enough?

Read more about cloud computing (reported by WSJ) after this.

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