“What could it be?” thought Hareesh Ramanna. As project manager in Motorola, he was in London in 1995, overseeing the installation of the new paging system for London. The new system, would switch four hundred thousand subscribers from the existing system to the new one. It was slated to go live at midnight and the adrenaline rush among the engineers—they had developed the system entirely in Bangalore, under Ramanna’s watchful eyes—was palpable. Suddenly, despite numerous test-runs, two hours prior to the climax, the system gave way.

“It was chaotic,” he recalls. Suggestions flew in all directions, but Ramanna egged his team on to look at the basics. The bug, inadvertently, was out in ten minutes—a tripped wire!

It was a classic case of, as the Senior Director at Motorola Devices Software team puts it, ‘looking beyond the technicalities’. Ramanna cites a recent example where this approach helped. One of the engineering teams felt that the product roadmap they had formulated did not reflect the true picture.

“Simply because they did not have the external view,” he says. Technocrats tend to be engrossed in their own world, and lose track of the requirements in the outer world. Notwithstanding the regular visits to standard bodies, exhibitions and seminars—a must in his scheme of keeping his team in tune with the outer world, on this occasion, they could not foster the foresight and connect to customer needs. “We gave them the external view, the ‘looking beyond’ perspective, and the problem was addressed.”

It’s this approach, combined with a ‘seeing first’ mechanism that forms the backbone of Ramanna’s managerial faculties. As a Senior Director today, he is responsible for the delivery of Software platforms, features across GSM, 3G, CDMA and iDEN devices, and has under him a sizeable group of software engineers working in India, China, Italy, and Malaysia.