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Surendranath Mohanty
Surendranath Mohanty

Surendranath Mohanty

Director - Software Engineering

Novell Software Development (I) Pvt Ltd.

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My views on India Technical development
I believe the main inhibitor is our willingness to take risk. We are kind of happy to see a stable pay cheque @ the month end and satisfy our immediate need. Said that we have some social obligations and we tend to forget our responsibility stating these needs. Some kind of ecosystem of funding to the people coming up with good ideas and taking them further to make a reality is the need of hour. That would give individuals to take some risk as the immediate needs are met thru some support system i.e Nasscom's 10,000 start-ups. This is an wonderful initiative, but needed some passion to reach to our talents. Bottom line encourage innovation and facilitate that is the way of life for future. There are tons of opportunities in the area of Virtualization, Cloud, Big Data, Mobility, etc & we have talents. We need to Light approval process to establish an execution/incubation center. That would help individuals not to take alternate approach of registering @ other developed nations i.e USA.
Excellence in Management
Beyond product releases I have been involved in these following activities...
1. Formed technical council to drive product innovation.
2. Partnering with product management, Sales and consulting to identify the customer need for the product line we drive as well as market trend.
3. Initiated skill building program i.e Mentoring the next level of our technical leader. The mentoring program (Making Cocoon Fly) is a two phase program for overall grooming of individuals.
4. As an innovation council members @ our organization started initiatives to generate momentum on Mobility, multi tenancy, data analytics.
5. Visited customers to understand their need
6. Enabled engineering team to take up product ownership and contribute to overall product roadmap.
Notes: Most of these initiatives are with my team and peers. They have contributed significantly to make thess initiatives reality or close to reality.
Family background
I am from Orissa and came from a faming family. We are a big joint family of 4 brothers and 2 sisters. My father was a carpenter and mother was home maker. I lost my father @ very young age & mother on 2008. My three elder brothers are married with children and grand children. They are into farming and two sister are married. Their children are working for some of the Orissa government organizations. They are all settled in Orissa. I moved to Bangalore as placed here from campus. I am married to Sibani and having two daughters (Shreya and Shruti. My wife is a school teacher. It is been 13 great years with Sibani.
Managing personal and professional life
I do try to keep the stake holders involved for the decisions. Being a goal focused person I tend to make swift decisions. I am sure such decisions many time not liked by stake holders. Most of the time when we take up some challenging responsibility we put good effort to understand others recommendation and align. I find difficulty when people say will get back, when there is urgency. In such cases I prefer to take risk to large extent. Not very much guarded in my interaction and communication. Sometime these may lead some misunderstanding. I am strong believer of direct and candid communication. You know it is difficult to connect so direct in a corporate kind of structure in times. In personal life I believe it goes very well with my wife. But my wife would be right judge how she takes:)
My advice
Balance your effort on these following three activities...
Product and technology - Think of product space and continue the improvement for product through value addition and keep up with technology movement.
Project execution - Coming from engineering, it is all about quality on time delivery. It is the bread and butter for engineering leaders. We should make our workforce understand this and take pride of the fact.
Build and retain people - Build skill and provide the right tool for them to excel. Give them stretch goal. Do not shy away thinking of setting a stretch goal. Long run they would reap the benefit and appreciate you as a leader.

Create an environment of
Involvement
Risk taking
Empowered
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