Case for employee motivation in IT Maintenance and Support projects

Projects in the software service sector fall into the following broad categories - consulting, implementation, upgrade/migration, IT maintenance and support. A mature IT service organisation will be executing projects under all the above categories at any given point of time. Studies show that a large chunk of the work carried out in India fall under the last two categories of IT Maintenance and support. The nature of maintenance and support projects (especially the latter) is much different from an implementation or pure consulting. Support projects are in most cases long term engagements that involve the monitoring and maintenance of the existing IT infrastructure of a client. This is not high end work and in most cases involves going through or executing a series of predefined sequence of actions to accomplish a task. Moreover a number of systems being supported are highly stable, and thus will not involve any significant technical intervention nor creative problem solving. Thus, a maintenance and support project in most cases reduces to a laborious routine monitoring job. Moreover, the scope of learning is limited by the system itself, project associates have to act within the boundaries of the client IT system and rarely get an overall view of the implementation life cycle or the intricacies of technology as majority of the time they are required only to work on the already developed system.
So it is little wonder that employees look down at IT maintenance and support projects. Considering the narrow scope of learning and the drab nature of work, this type of projects are the least preferred in the IT industry. Typically because of this motivation of employees involved in a maintenance and support project need to be given special attention.
The argument of this thesis is the following:
Software engineers involved in a development/ implementation project have an internal motivation due to the sheer nature of challenges offered by the work. Moreover these projects offer significant learning opportunities which will go a long way in enhancing the future career prospects of the associates involved. At the same time IT maintenance and support projects offer very limited learning avenues and offer a monotonous work environment. Lack of meaningful work, engagement in repetitive tasks and closed learning opportunities will automatically drive down motivation of employees involved in this kind of projects. Thus it is my argument that special attention need to be given to maintenance and support projects to ensure that proper employee development and motivation thrives. The organisation has a responsibility towards building the careers of its associates. Employees cannot be seen as a medium to achieve a better bottomline, it is their value creation activities that pump in revenue. Thus, as project allocation is a pejorative of the organisation and as an employee involved in a maintenance and support project could have been well part of a development project, it is the responsibility of the organisation to ensure that associates in a maintenance project are not handicapped by a lack of adequate learning opportunities.

Critical Attrition and the Organisational Faultline

How do you measure the effectiveness of your HR department and policies? By the attrition rate? A random Employee Delight Index? Industry wide surveys? Resumes received per day? Slot occupied during recruitment drives on Day Zero? Whatever the unit might be, the department has come across as an administrative policy machine, disconnect from the ground realities and vibes of the employees.
It might be a lofty idea to keep every single employee 'happy' (amidst the claims by many HR practitioners that it is impossible to keep an employee happy) in a mammoth organisation. But the HR practice is not a statistical exercise where the satisfaction of the majority can be taken as an acceptable criteria of success, the vision of the HR function should be to address the aspirations and concerns of every employee in the organisation.
A policy or an idea is only as good as its implementation....and this is exactly where the HR operations in many organisations faulter. A number of organisations fail badly in understanding the aspirations, abilities and skills of its employees and rarely succeed in drawing up any meaningful career path. This is extremely important in the case of attrition of high performing employees which i would refer to as critical attrition (another irony is that a number of high performing employees are not recognised as high performing by the organisation at all!). For companies in the knowledge space, critical attrition will mean loss of significant tacit knowledge and more importantly decreased ability to create incremental business and organisational value which will ultimately reflect negatively on the overall organisational performance. For me, critical attrition is thus one of the most important challenges an organisation in the knowledge space faces. Critical attrition is never a result of an impulsive decision, rather its the culmination of derogatory employee relation practices. That is good news!! For it implies that there is an organisational faultline, a gap in the organisation's people practices.
I would not attribute it to the HR Team nor their policies, rather the HR Team rarely has a significant impact on the 'experience' of employees in the organisation - it all boils down to your manager, your team lead.
A Team Lead is the most significant component in this chain of events and relationships. He is directly responsible for the development and satisfaction of an organisation's employees and acts as the first envoy of organisational representation to the employees. It's my take that the organisational honchos as well as the HR Team clearly underestimates the role played by the Team Lead in employee satisfaction and rarely focus on providing people management skills to Team Leads.
In the current scenario, a person with 2 or 3 years or experience can be leading a team, irrespective of his/her experience it is imperative to ensure that any employee who assumes the role of a team leader has the right people management skills and is given the authority to do things which he deems necessary to contribute to the development of his/her reportees. I do not know of many organisations in the knowledge space who do that. Organisations are obsessed with quality and process compliance, they ensure that team leads attend programs that make them conversant with the organisation's process standards, but I am yet to come across an organisation that mandates that any team lead has to undergo a People Management course.
I am sure that by making every leader aware of the right People Management practices and by ensuring that they practice it (we could have an HR Audit in the lines of a Quality Audit!!),organisations can go a long way in containing Critical attrition.

All Indian IT Companies are not body shops - All Software Jobs are not monotonous

Yes, that is a statement!!
It has continually amazed me when people in most IT firms in India chant the same line 'IT is so monotonous, get stuck doing the same rote work'. Don't know if its negative propaganda or general disillusionment, but something is wrong when fresh recruits spend week days in the training rooms of their new companies and weekends in the training rooms of management entrance coaching centers.
Some random thoughts -
# A practical 'orientation towards working in IT' required, either during the training period or before the recruits join the organisation? Very little is done towards spelling out how dynamic the industry is and how fast one can grow professionally. Perception Management has become an imperative.
#Branding the IT Profession? I would say why arent we on it yet?!
#Can this be an effective method to cut down on entry level attrition?