Since the Nokia news went out this question gained quite some popularity, so I’ll try to write my experiences and comments to this in here.
Obvious disclaimer: anything I write is my own view at the time of writing. Not my employers view, not the final truth, it is what I think is the right thing to write just now. The links below direct to official company information though.
My experience in brief
After 4 years at Nokia (Enterprise Architect, IT Operations Management) I changed over to HCL in August last year. Since almost 5 months I’m Global Service Delivery Manager to the UPM account, being responsible for all IT services HCL delivers to UPM.
Why did I change?
Providing IT Infrastructure services was not really at the core of Nokia’s business, and overall Nokia has not been a success story over the past years. Both facts are very different for HCL: Professional, highly industrialized IT service provisioning is at the core, HCL is very successful worldwide, in IT Infrastructure, in the Nordics. Looks like a better match for me.
So, how is it then?
HCL is an Indian company. While it has a strong and great focus on transforming to be truly global and diverse, and it has very compelling and innovative thinking coming from it’s top leaders, it is of course, very different from Western or European companies like Nokia (or AXA) in many ways.
Which is no way bad, it just demands unlearning of old ways, openness to doing things different, patience and tolerance, curiosity, and a good deal of sisu to go through a successful integration process.
India, how about India?
I spend roughly 45 days in India since late September – quite some time; except some trip to Taj Mahal I was in Delhi, and mainly saw daily office life, not much touristic impressions. I experienced great hospitality of new friends, sun and rain, heat and cold (!), and quite some smog (which I didn’t like).
I like Indian food, unfortunately my stomach doesn’t like it as much. So I have to be careful or suffer from stomach pain and diarrhea. I usually carry some ten muesli bars with me to have safe fallback food. Maybe that’s a pattern – a lot of good, not easy to digest, and sometimes you need to find your ways to deal with it.
Another typical picture is road traffic: completely chaotic, very diverse, very busy, everybody honking, pushing forward in the smallest gap, and still it works quite well and there’s astonishing little accidents. So, what kind of work culture or project management would I expect from someone who grew up in this environment?
India has many – very many – people. Some are rich, many are well educated, also quite a lot are poor. There might be as much homeless people as people with homes, not sure. Labor is cheap, there is competition to get good jobs, and there’s also competition to get good people. For a middle-manager it would be very normal to have several servants to look after the house or drive the car. The concept of working hours, or for some even the concept of weekends is not quite the same as in Europe. The workers-movement part of Industrialization hasn’t made it so far east.
Nothing above is meant to judge, it’s more trying to catch the differences as I perceived them. If I chose two simple words to describe India, it is chaos and beauty.
And the company?
Big companies have good, great and crap managers. They have functional and some dysfunctional processes, they have politics and passion, they have support functions with dedication and with ignorance, they have their own cryptic language of abbreviations, they have highly skilled people, great friends and mediocre folks who just come and go. HCL is not dramatically different in any of these aspects.
The well marketed “Employee first, customer second” philosophy has some good impact, in its core it translates not into employees getting “nice service”, but into employees being in charge to take things in their own hand – be the change you want to see.
There is a lot of serious honesty and openness, I’m encouraged to speak up and drive the things I see as important. If I sit in the corner and wait for someone to pick me up, I most likely will be run over and drown.
So, is it good or bad?
It’s as good as you make it. It’s not easy, it is unlearning old ways, and adopting new and different ways.
Learning never comes without some pain.
Learning never comes without rich value and joy.
I think it’s a great opportunity!
At last some impressions from pictures of the first few months, mainly from India…
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