Building Trust - Key to Successful Leadership

The most important factor in business or any relationship is TRUST. You can easily attain authority by virtue of a position. Although authority will make people do what you ask them to do, it won’t necessarily make them believe in it, only getting you so far.

To gain commitment from your team, you must first build trust. It is critical that people truly believe in the direction you are setting, and you attain their buy-in. When your team is committed, they are more likely to stay with you to push forward through challenges and put in their best efforts to get the job done. The key is that people recognize you have their best interests in mind. Their endeavors will be more worthy if they believe that your leadership will create a better future for them.

Through my journey in the corporate world, I have witnessed many distinct types of leaders, some that built trust and others damaging it. When people start doubting the motives of their leaders, collaboration starts falling apart and only leads to questioning credibility, reliability and ultimately causes a decline in all key business metrics.

Building trust is not a one-time activity. Instead, it is a series of small, consistent, and daily actions that fosters trust with others. Being authentic is of prime essence; true leaders do not pretend to be one in public and act differently in private. When you say and do things that you really believe, people will start trusting you. Authentic leaders can put the mission and goals of the organization ahead of their own self-interest. Being authentic is not easy… it requires consistency, focus, and determination.

Partnering with Microsoft to grow your SAP on Azure business

Listen to experts talk on what it takes to deliver a strong value proposition for SAP on Azure to customers. Learn what works best and what to avoid. You will also hear me share how to successfully build a SAP on Azure practice and capabilities.


I thoroughly enjoyed being on the panel and presenting along with Microsoft (Don McCormick, Chris Dearing and Tanya Beutler), Infosys (Danette Seward).

Microsoft Inspire, Las Vegas, July 2019 - Session Catalog

Scope Management - How Projects Result in Scope Creep?

Scope creep represents uncontrolled changes to a project scope. Scope creep is also called as focus creep, requirement creep and feature creep. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled.

Typically, scope creep includes addition of new features, functionalities or products to the project scope without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As a result, the project team risks drifting away from its original purpose, timeline and budget. This generally tends to occur when new features are added to product designs that have already been approved.

Based on my experience, I find the following to be the primary causes of scope creep:

1. Poor Project Management: Poor control of the project by the Project Manager is one of the primary causes for uncontrolled shift in the project scope. Ineffective communications and inability to establish proper project expectations could lead to drastic scope creep.

2. Poor Requirements Analysis: Clients don’t always know what they want and can only provide a vague idea. The typical "I’ll know it when I see it" syndrome. Refinements often come during the latter stages of the project when users, analysts, developers and project team have gained more experience with the business functions and transactions.

3. Not Involving the Stakeholders Early Enough: Thinking you know what the users want or need is a serious mistake. It is important to involve them in both the requirements analysis and design phases.

4. Underestimating the Complexity of the Project: Many projects run into problems because they are new in an industry and have never been done before. Nobody knows what to expect, there are no lessons learned and no one to ask. “I can do this by reading the manual” attitude could cause major project risks.

5. Lack of Change Control: You can expect there to be a degree of scope creep in most projects, therefore it is important to design and establish a process to manage these changes. A simple process of document, consider, approve and resource must be implemented.

6. Gold Plating: This term is given to the practice of exceeding the scope of a project in the belief that value is being added. These changes inevitably consume time and budget and are not guaranteed to increase client satisfaction. The project team must focus on efforts that provide business value and that are crucial for the project success.

Delivery Management & Project Success - The New Definition

It is imperative to stay focused and make every effort to be successful in today’s competitive and challenging market conditions. I strongly believe that intelligent delivery management is the key to project success. We must strive to create a great experience for our clients. Intelligent execution and long-term commitment to our clients, is going to keep us ahead in the race. It is important for us to understand the answers to key questions like “what is our client expecting” and “what the success criteria’s are”. The questions appear simple but you would be surprised how difficult it might be to get the right answer. Depending on whom you ask the question the perception of the project success and expectations might be very different. We must get to an agreement on these upfront, then continuously manage and measure our progress to these success criteria.

The definition of project success in the current times has changed. It is no longer limited to the triple constraints – time, cost and quality. We might be on-time, on-budget, the project deliverables might satisfy the requirements and still the client might not be delighted. At the end of any project, client reference ability is extremely important and a must for consulting organizations. Today’s definition of project success is managing and driving the project for the value that is expected at the end of the project. So, just getting the project completed within the time and budget might not drive the project value at the end.

We might need to do change orders to add more scope, cost and/or time. Clients today understand that change orders are inevitable. Clients seems to be quite willing to accept change orders as long the changes are aligned towards making a project successful and generate business value.