This document summarizes the journey and evolution of Srijan Technologies from its founding in 2002 through 2014. It describes how Srijan began without a grand vision, took on small custom projects, and struggled with financial difficulties due to fixed-cost projects. Through serendipitous meetings and opportunities, Srijan adopted Agile practices, gained long-term clients, and improved employee engagement and financial stability. By 2014, Srijan had grown to 75 employees working on long-term contracts across multiple industries while continuing its commitment to improvement.

1. My Journey With Srijan
© Srijan Technologies Private Limitedwww.srijan.net
Role of Luck, Serendipity, Agile &
Letting Go!

2. About this talk

3. Luck in Business?

4. Entrepreneurs & Success
● “Six Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs”
● “The 7 Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs”
● “10 Important Personal Characteristics of
Entrepreneurs”

5. Entrepreneurs & Success
● Intuition
● Tenacity
● Tolerance of
ambiguity
● Flexibility
● Rule-breaking
● Vision
● Passion
● Hands-on
● Self-belief
● Listen & Learn
● Inherently creative
● Willing to take risks
● Great people skills
● Goal-oriented

6. World Changing Vision & Mission!
Source

7. World Changing Vision & Mission!
● Only a fortunate few find a grand vision:
○ Disney -- “To Make People Happy!”
○ Microsoft -- “A computer at every desk”

8. No Grand World Changing Vision!
● Virgin Group started as a Mail Order company
● 3M was a mining company which nearly died in
a few years
● Sony (earlier Totsuko) used to make wire-mesh
bread heaters after WW-II
● Nokia started as a paper-pulp company

9. No Grand World Changing Vision!
● Serendipity happens!
○ Origins in a persian fairy tale where the
princes “were always making discoveries, by
accidents and sagacity, of things they were
not in quest of”
○ Fortutious happenings

10. Fortutious things happen
● Serendipitous events happen often when you
are searching & preparing for a leap:
○ a chance meeting with a ‘future partner’
○ a lucky lunch meeting with a big (potential)
client OR a reference
○ an apple that falls from the tree when you
are engrossed with questions of gravity
○ a meeting with struggling wall painter (re-
birth of 3M)

11. Fortutious things happen
● Few entrepreneurs, specifically in the west, like
to offer credit to occurrences outside their
endeavours / skills / traits
● Luck is not a bad word!
● You can work at making yourselves lucky!

12. Role of Luck & Serendipity

13. Luck & Serendipity -
By Invitation Only!
“Lucky people have an openness, an authenticity, and
a generosity towards embracing people - without
overthinking ‘what’s the value exchange?’”
~ Anthony Tjan,
Co-author of “Heart, Smarts, Guts & Luck”

14. Luck & Serendipity -
By Invitation Only!
“Learn to live, and you shall learn to write”
~ Shama Futehally

15. The Story of Srijan

16. No Grand World Changing Vision!
Source
● Estb 2002
● No grand articulated
vision
● Personal search and
pursuit of purpose &
meaning
?

17. The Journey :: 2002 - 2003
● Srijan was doing custom PHP and ASP -- hand-
coded CMSs
● Got opportunity to have a booth at ICT4D fair in
Geneva via the World Bank
● Breakthrough: IDRC -- ENRAP on Postnuke; wanted
help

18. Tryst with Open Source :: 2004
● Impressed with what Open Source Postnuke could
do, searched on open source
● TYPO3 happened!
● My jaw dropped on reading the feature list -- all
open source and free!
● By June 2004 we had an enquiry from a 200-chain
retail store from Germany

19. The Journey :: 2004 - 2007
● Small Team 10-15 people
● Short-term projects
● Fairly Profitable
● Mostly incoming leads
● Nearly all TYPO3, Germany + Netherlands
● Airtel, Bharti -- TYPO3; Srijan was among the first to
implement open source CMS in enterprises

20. Emerging Values & Culture :
2004 - 2007

21. Emerging Values & Culture :
2004 - 2007
● Experiments with transparency & participative
decision making
○ Open Books / Finances
○ Open Salaries
○ Set your own salary
○ Profit Sharing
○ self-organizing teams with independent P&L

22. Emerging Values & Culture :
2004 - 2007
● Team oriented
● Take on challenges
● Work very hard
● Nimble, Responsive, Responsible
● Less processes (lots of chaos + self-organizing)

23. Tougher Years : 2007 - 2011
● Bigger projects ( < $30K)
● Fixed Cost
● Incorrect estimations (nearly always)
● Tail of the projects always dragged (endlessly)
● Each time we bore the brunt (of such cost over-
runs)
● Change requests were “difficult to capture”, “scope”
and “estimate”
● Fingers pointing all over (sales -- devs--managers)

24. Tougher Years : 2007 - 2011
● Financial constraints led to staffing developers on
new projects (before completing one at hand –
endless project tail!)
● One-person-team staffed on a project, was not
unusual
● Low developer morale
● Low leadership morale
● Poor financial health (even after a lot of hard-work
for years)

25. Role of Luck & Serendipity
NASSCOM #EMERGEOUT 2011
● Heard a speaker from the NASSCOM mentoring
program:
“Infosys knows its revenues 2 years ahead”
“I got out of projects; looked for clients offering
long-term contracts”

26. Role of Luck & Serendipity
NASSCOM #EMERGEOUT 2011
● A woman from the audience heard my questions to
MindTree’s CEO (KK Natarajan) on my internal
conflict of “rapid growth”; invited me to a biz
program she was attending
[was an act of generosity without any consideration of
a transaction]

27. Role of Luck & Serendipity
NASSCOM #EMERGEOUT 2011
● A woman from the audience heard my questions to
MindTree’s CEO (KK Natarajan) on my internal
conflict of “rapid growth”; invited me to a biz
program she was attending
[was an act of generosity without any consideration of
a transaction]

28. And i got thinking...
“How could i get long-term contracts for Srijan?”
“How could i negotiate with clients wanting to build
products, that fixed costs won’t work?”

29. Role of Luck & Serendipity
Agilecon - Feb, 2012
● Speaker presentation on “Distributed Startups”
● Met an Agile Coach who shared:
○ Break your projects down into phases
○ charge for estimation (whoa!!)
○ bad idea to write hundreds of pages of
requirements & tech documentation upfront
○ Client education/agreement on Agile
contracting is tough; but do you have a choice?

30. Fresh ideas were emerging
● Was wondering how to find a product development
client; convince them on Agile contracting &
development
● Got into Agile-SCRUM trainings with a leading Agile
coach
● Joined the business program (CIAM) -- “The
purpose of a business is to do business!”

31. Role of Luck & Serendipity
Management Consulting firm; 2011
● A Phone call -- the most important one i ever
received!
● Small beginnings with a huge ‘management
consulting’ firm
● Our single biggest client now

32. Managing the stress!
● Started to refuse fixed-cost projects, incl a “really”
large one
● Had stress with my then partner -- lifestyle OR
scale?
● Partner-CTO moved out (merger; de-merger)
● Meanwhile, the management consulting firm
offered the financial cushion needed

33. Role of Luck & Serendipity
Varun Singh;
From Dharamshala;
Pursuit of “purpose”
Krishnan N., Bangalorean
22 yrs in embedded sys
Mountaineer

34. Role of Luck & Serendipity
View from our Dharamshala office;
2011-12

35. Breakthroughs!
● The management consulting firm were Agile
believers -- our “common language” struck a chord
● Converted a fixed-cost product development client
to an Agile engagement
○ our refusal to do business under fixed-cost
attracted them
○ they loved “our integrity”
● Our first SCRUM trainer had moved out of his
company; accepted offer to spend 2 days a week

36. Breakthroughs!
● Our first SCRUM trainer had
moved out of his company
● Accepted offer to spend 2
days a week and work across
teams rigourously
Avienaash Shiralige, Agile Buddha

37. Breakthroughs!
● I found a business coach
● CEOs often have “loneliness”
factor to deal with
● Further, accountability for a
CEO goes missing
● The business coach solved
this, and together we set
goals, and enrolled leaders at
Srijan in those
Darshan Bhat, CIAM

38. What was now changing?
● Staffing “Teams” (not offering costs based on
hours-estimates)
● Focus on delivery every 2 weeks
● Client Demos
● Engaged clients
● Billing cycles became month-wise / sprint-wise;
leading to financial health, better cash-flows
● Project changes were being managed well

39. What was now changing?
● Devs were focussed on one-project-at-a-time
● No one-person-project-”team”!!
● Long-term contracts and cash flows enabled hiring
better people
● Higher employee-engagement, satisfaction

40. Where are we now in 2014?
● Still -- chaos!!! :-)
● In pursuit of excellence. But dissatisfied/discontent
with where we are!
● Agile adoption is not uniform
● Sprint Cadence missing in a lot of projects
● Not enough SM leadership (we’ve been a company
of engineers!)
● Sales team and processes just beginning to evolve!

41. Where are we now in 2014?
● Long-term contracts with a few clients -- we’ve
“hugged” them
● Our customers love us!
● Deeply “motivated leaders” -- to uphold our core
values
● Big leads still come in serendipitously, just when
we begin to feel the heat

42. Committed to this journey!
● “Continuous Improvement” is our stated mantra!
● Raising the bar on all staff members
○ by restructuring roles and responsibilities
○ hiring better, motivated, passionate people
● Changing tools -- Pivotal Tracker to JIRA
● Holistic “Performance Management system” --
Customer Happiness, Internal Process, Self-
Learning, Financials

43. Ta-da! A new Goa office!

44. Standard sales pitch about
Srijan

45. About Srijan
● 11 year old web services consulting company based
in New Delhi, Dharamshala (India) and Delaware, USA
● 75+ motivated team members
● 150+ happy clients across US, Europe, Middle East
and APAC in 10 Industry Domains
● Consulting, designing and engineering products and
solutions for online businesses
● Supporting / maintaining applications and websites

46. Areas of Expertise - Technologies
Web Server: Search Engine:
Database Management:
Document Management System:
Content Management System: Coding Languages:
Quality Assurance:

47. Reaching me
● LinkedIn -- in/rahuldewan
● Twitter -- @rahuldewan
● Email : rahul@srijan.in
Thank You!