If you have been to Noida lately, you cannot miss the constant buzz of hectic development activity. The industrial town of yore is fast changing into swanky business offices district, as the old factories are being torn down to be replaced with modern office building with imposing glass elevations.
Day before yesterday, as I looked out of my first floor office window, I saw a team of construction workers working in unison carting the bricks. Forming a perfect human chain, the first guy would stack the bricks neatly on a wooden plank, the second guy would hoist the stack on a waiting courier’s head, and a new empty plank would be presented to be filled up with the stack of bricks. The couriers seemed to follow the just-in-time methodology to perfection, and there was always one guy present to take over the stack to be carried. Just as I was observing the whole scenario, marvelling at the use of so many management philosophies in a seemingly low end work, the “hoister” made a mistake and the stack came tumbling down – and the entire chain got broken resulting in a chaos for remainder of the task.
We often underestimate the concept of teamwork in our daily project work. Every project – be it transferring the bricks or designing a new public facing portal – is ultimately successful or unsuccessful based on efficacy, synchronisation and skills of the team executing the project. Any smallest component going out of sync is capable of sending the entire project execution into a disarray, as it happened that afternoon outside my office building.
Every individual in the team has to play their part, and play it to perfection with clockwork accuracy for a project to succeed. The swanky buildings that you see in Noida, were built brick by brick, and so was any successful IT product that you see around you. Each brick is important, and each brick plays it role. In isolation it is just a brick, but together as a team, it creates marvels of modern human civilization.
