Finding the “Source for Change”

This was a great week for our BPO (which we recently christened with the name SKARV - Source for Change) with just the right combination of luck helping propel our project to the next level and hard work in putting down the ground-work for future success.

Before discussing the business development side of my responsibilities, it is important to note what my colleague on the operations side has done. We have finished 30 out of 32 districts of our first contract on time; it is a tribute to the women, our employees / business process associates (BPAs), who have quickly come along the learning curve in executing this contract. On the first day, the women took approximately 13 minutes to finish one form. On the second day, they took 7 minutes to finish one form; now the women are finishing each form in only one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half minutes. Their enthusiasm for working is infectious and it’s amazing to see our BPAs take full advantage of the opportunity that we have been given to execute this project. The one thing that sets our BPO apart from the dozens I have seen to date is the infectious energy that the women approach their work with; an amazing culture has been set and we need to really maintain this energy and culture going forward.

We have recently, however, had a couple of the BPAs get into arguments because one of the BPAs was “overly” critical about another BPA’s work quality. We are very concerned about arguments such as these as it implies that there may be additional politics brewing. It’s great that the arguments are about work quality and not other tangential issues; we nonetheless sat down with the BPAs and discussed that as a team we need to work together and work to make our organization and ourselves better. We will soon be implementing sessions on how to give constructive criticism and receive constructive criticism and how to handle conflict to hopefully minimize further non-constructive arguments.

On a business development front, this was an amazing week for our BPO. I have continued to hit the road, going to Gurgaon, Delhi and Jaipur trying to spread awareness about our effort to leverage the potential of rural women to provide outsourcing solutions to global clients. It’s always interesting to go from sleeping on the floor of a Rajasthan Roadways public bus to going to meetings with business executives in 5-star hotels in Delhi; going from Bagar to Delhi is like transporting between two parallel worlds six hours apart.

I have previously had a lot of failure in trying to get new business for our organization. I have done a poor job articulating to organizations our goals and have not done a good job of being up-front and aggressive about what we want. I often find it easier to hear a “maybe” rather than a “no”, so I will talk to potential project partners about “figuring out ways to work together” rather than asking for exactly what we need. During my most recent trip, I did a better job of articulating our vision and of asking for our proposal work working together. This last week was great as I found a research firm in Gurgaon who has (tentatively) given us a pilot project that involves processing >8,000 forms in 30 days; an amazing opportunity to showcase what rural women can do when given the opportunity.

Another extremely exciting and promising development was a meeting with a BPO executive in Gurgaon. In our meeting I asked for leveraging the business development teams of BPO’s to get a specific amount of projects over the next 12 months. Although very preliminary, this executive was very excited to work with us and really believed in our vision. Additionally, she really understood the education levels and attitudes of people and rural areas, which should be an amazing asset as we, partner together to develop a world class BPO. She will be speaking with other BPO executives on our behalf to develop basic data entry work on our behalf.

My goals for the next week are to facilitate the transfer of operations activities to our local entrepreneur and to finalize the business development wins from last week.