“A lot of work” from home, during covid-19 lockdown.

Around second quarter last year, when we started building capability for the data science & data engineering practice in TVS motors, we made a few key platform investment decisions. While we always knew the benefits of these platforms, little did we know that those choices will be significant benefits for our team to be nimble and effective during the last 40 days Covid-19 lockdown.

Around same time last year, after much deliberations, research and our collective past experience, we decided to invest in 3 key platforms.

1. Microsoft Azure for Data lake development, data modeling and Machine-learning work-bench
2. Atlassian Suite Cloud Platform (Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket) for project management and Collab
3. Microsoft PowerBI for BI visualization and making data-sets available for our business partners. (self-serve mode).

In Addition to investments within data science & engineering group, TVS motors IT department invested in Microsoft Collab Platforms like Office365 Suite and MS Teams that allowed my team to collaborate effectively to broader business partner teams.

These platform decisions are helping us be very effective and productive during lockdown.

1. New joiners Onboarding : New joiners who joined during lockdown, started hitting the ground running without stepping into the office (the physical one) even once or without meeting the team in-person. One of our principal data engineers who had a virtual onboarding during lockdown, designed the Data ingestion framework on ADF (Azure data factory) and built > 100 ETLs jobs on ADF during lockdown period.
2. Pace of work : Data engineering work picked up pace, due to more working time in hand, less distractions and meetings. Data architecture decisions are getting reviewed on confluence (with draw.io plugin), code reviews, data engineering jobs deployment on Azure, all of it while working from home. Data scientists and BI developers could access data, develop and deploy ML models & BI dashboards ; thanks to our data engineering team and Microsoft Azure.
3. Online Agile ceremonies can be effective : E-standups on Microsoft teams, Zoom and Microsoft calls, with a combination of Atlassian Suite for collab and our insistence on sending pre-reads are beginning to make meetings very effective now.
4. Successfully responding to business requests : As i write this note, we have entered phase-3 of lockdown. All districts have been divided into red/orange/green zones and our business teams are devising marketing & sales strategies in anticipation of retail end-points (dealerships) opening again. Any adhoc analysis, a quick visualization dashboard is all getting delivered with the help of these cloud platforms.

A lot of commentary on my linkedin network is about this phrase — “WFH is the new normal”. I thought I would share how we are living this phrase everyday.

All of this became possible for 3 things coming together — thanks to the amazing team, thanks to the platform choices made and of course, thanks the the platform providers themselves.

Hopefully in a few days from now, I am really looking forward to step out of the house. But not necessarily to work or to get work done alone. This time around my agenda for stepping out of the house would be to meet my office friends & colleagues, meet our customers, for visiting dealers and for visiting my favourite eating joints in koramangala. As for work, it can happen anywhere, on my laptop and on cloud platforms.

If you have similar stories to share, we would love to learn stories on WFH stories and practices from you too.