Resign today for that long awaited raise!

So here is a common script that I've seen played over and over again.
An organization 'values' a potential hire based on the 'standardised' parameters of (a) number of years of experience (b) current compensation (c) current position (d) existing pay scale in the organization etc. The candidate is made an offer (position and salary) in the 'best interests' of the organization which turns out to 'under-value' the 'potential' of the candidate. The person joins the organization and turns out to be an extra-ordinary performer and adds value to the organization way beyond his brief. When the first performance cycle comes, unfortunately the company is not able to promote him because the minimum period an employee has to spend in the company before a promotion is 12 months. He is rated at the highest performance level and gets the 'best' raise possible in percentage terms. But because he was under-valued at the time of hire, a high percentage raise does not correspond to a high raise in absolute salary and he continues to be under-valued. At the same appraisal cycle, he sees his lesser performing colleagues who had spent more time in the organization getting promoted by virtue of being ahead of him in the 'waiting line' for promotion. Our protagonist feels dejected and de-motivated, but having the DNA of a high performer, he is again motivated by the challenges at work and continues adding value to the organization. The great appraisal fair comes calling again and our under-valued poster boy gets that long awaited promotion with a considerable raise in percentage terms. But, the fact that he was initially under-valued continues to offset the promotion and raise that has been doled out. Interestingly, the organization remains ignorant to the fact that a high performing employee has been under-valued and does nothing to correct this imbalance.
One fine day, revelation finally dawns on our hero that he is grossly under-valued by the organization and decides to quit his current job. When our hero breaks the news, it's received with extreme surprise and disappointment by the organization. Management goes over-board to pacify our protagonist and let him know how much he is valued by the organization. They also ask him what they can do to change his decision and some people even promise that anything can be done to keep him in the company (which will be carefully worded like, 'We can 'work' it out!). After couple of rounds of negotiation, both parties reach an agreement and our hero continues to be with the company. The employee is either promised an astronomical hike, or a long term foreign assignment or a certain role he had his eyes on.
What surprises me most is this reactive response from organizations - they seem to wake up only when they realise that an exceptional employee is resigning! HR and management talks about salary ranges, salary parity within the team, restrictions on promotion etc. to justify their weird decisions during an appraisal cycle, but when crisis hits (like when a high performer resigns) all these 'standards' seem irrelevant and insignificant. If this is not opportunism and hypocrisy, what is?!!

Here are my take-aways from this post:

(a) A high potential employee who is under-valued at the time of hire, will continue to be under-valued in the organization, unless the employee deliberately tries to change this condition.
(b) Standards defined for employee appraisals including salary ranges, parity within team etc. are not golden standards and can be altered as and when required by the management.
(c) There is no mechanism or process to measure the value of an employee, other than archaic employee appraisal mechanism that rates an employee based on colours, numbers or alphabets!
(d) As they say, 'A great employee is 'x' times more valuable than a good employee' (I've put a value of 'x' as I've seen different values quoted for this parameter by different researchers). If that is true, what are you as an organization doing to recognize the 'value' of these great performers and retain them in the company?

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.