Understanding of your organizations ways of working and making connections across teams.
Understanding how your organization works: This is not about sucking up to 'important' people (atleast not when it concerns productivity). This has got to do with understanding which how the different organizational parts work, so that you can be most effective.
e.g. There's tons of planning for resources/budgets that happen once in a year and if you are aware and can put in your requirements into that list, it would help.
Making connections across teams: In large and complex organizations/products, a lot of knowledge is tribal. It helps to have friendly relations and people whom you could chat with informally in teams that you depend on. Many conflicts can be resolved faster.
An apartment association is a legally recognized body, which collects service fee and pays service taxes too!
Large apartment associations employ few staff on own payroll, but mostly Security, Housekeeping, Plumbers, Electricians, STP operators,etc are on the payrolls of manpower agencies.
Members of the association are owners of individual flats. Tenants do not participate much ( and not encouraged either). This ensures a skin in the game and service fee goes towards activities contributing to long term value of the property (including liveability).
Managing an apartment complex (pro-bono) alongside a tech job. In Bangalore, it is normal to have a committee of apartment owners who oversee the operations, set up rules for residents, take up mini-projects for efficiency / beautification /long term maintenance and also manage the finances. This committee operates for a year and then passes on the reins to the next committee.
Our apartment complex has 850 apartments. This scale has interesting challenges:
- Communication (mostly Whatsapp, sometimes email) : how residents with different language abilities understand/misunderstand instructions and announcements
- Managing outages of electricity, water, lifts for maintenance ( Childrens exams, residents with medical conditions, work from home)
- Employee politics and the need to break up unholy alliances ( e.g. Employee tie-up with particular vendor, some employees creating emergencies so that some large expenses are quickly approved, one group purposely slowing down a diligent employee)
From a tech perspective, it's the machinery and equipment that is interesting
- distribution of water, electricity, gas
- Sewage treatment plant
Since ours is a 10+ year old apartment complex, almost all of the equipment needs some work and there are frequent failures. It requires the committee to understand and make decisions about quick fixes vs long term , validate costs of fixing and manage inconvenience caused by outages.
4 months in, this has been a great experience outside of the usual tech company issues :)
Understanding how your organization works: This is not about sucking up to 'important' people (atleast not when it concerns productivity). This has got to do with understanding which how the different organizational parts work, so that you can be most effective. e.g. There's tons of planning for resources/budgets that happen once in a year and if you are aware and can put in your requirements into that list, it would help.
Making connections across teams: In large and complex organizations/products, a lot of knowledge is tribal. It helps to have friendly relations and people whom you could chat with informally in teams that you depend on. Many conflicts can be resolved faster.