There are as many ways to lead a team as there are stars in the sky. But none is as effective as leading by example. From the triumphant tales of kings leading their forces at the front to modern-age stories of founders and CEOs leading with pioneering ideas and work ethics, all are immortalised in history. There aren't many who can lead by example, but Nitin Narkhede is one of them. Time and again, his work has garnered immense praise from customers to such an extent that they specifically ask either Nitin or someone like him to lead their projects.
With a desire to learn how he cemented himself as such an in-demand leader, we sat down with Nitin to figure out his methods.
Hunting Down the Problem
Nitin has one of the largest telcos in Australia as his customer. Through his interactions with the customer, he figured out that the hurdles they were facing were two-fold. First were the technological constraints where they had been using a platform that was at the end of its lifecycle and needed updates. There was also a requirement to increase the throughput of the platform.
The second aspect was the business constraints. They needed a customisable model that could adapt anytime they had to implement something. They also needed to improve their time-to-market, which required a lot of hard coding.
The Road to Transformation
While making fundamental changes that would attract new customers, Nitin had to implement his solutions in such a way that the current end customers who were using their services weren't affected. This required migration from the existing legacy systems, involving almost 70+ integration points. Nitin had to evolve the on-premise platform architecture, which ultimately led to it reaching 99.999% availability. This meant that there was almost no downtime in the network for the end-user. He believes it was their biggest achievement, which had never been done on a pre-paid system.
In order to allow customers to enjoy current services along with the new features resulting from the upgrade, in the solution design phase, Nitin and his team derived all the end-to-end flows, such as the by-journey, change journey, and pre-paid recharge journey. All these journeys were then defined and discussed with individual components to arrive at specifications that were finally implemented. This was followed by different testing cycles.
With security being an essential factor, Nitin tested the platform at 16,000 transactions per second, and it worked successfully while passing all the security and vulnerability tests. His solution was so massive that he ended up creating a 320-page solution architecture document.
Impacting the Positioning of the Customer
Having a 99.999% system availability really made the platform reliable in the eyes of the end user. Nitin also managed to increase the response time of the APIs (Application Programming Interface), which was well within milliseconds for the highest peak time. A major plus point was the possibility for end-users to have an unlimited data plan, which wasn't possible before in the entire geographical area. They were also able to provide additional features like data banks.
With such drastic changes that directly affected the end-users, Nitin could re-affirm his identity as a positioning pioneer.
Advice for Budding Techies:
Nitin believes that IT is here to stay, and only those who get accustomed to new technologies and make themselves flexible while upskilling will be able to sustain.
He also thinks that people should face whatever comes their way without any fear. They just need to face it with positivity and remember that no results will come with just a snap of their fingers.
"Sometimes you have to wait for it. There is a saying that 'as you sow, so shall you reap', right? So, the way you invest in yourself or the way you look at things, it'll come back to you."
About Nitin Narkhede
Nitin is an Enterprise Architect at Tech Mahindra with over 20 years of experience in roles like Principal Architect, E2E Designer, Solution Designer, and Business Analyst. He is a firm believer in leading by example and practices it wholeheartedly. He is a TOGAF Certified Architect with certifications from TM Forum and other sources. Nitin enjoys hiking, driving, and spending time with his family.
