Train 18 series, part 18...hitches and glitches

My writings here are more like musings and so forgive me if it is rather disjointed. I am writing from my memory, not some notes that I or someone else kept taking. I have to strain my mind to remember stuff. Lady Macbeth, as she executed her devilish plots, expounded that memory, the warder of the brain, would be in a fume when plastered with alcohol; and here is mine, not plastered at all but in some fume all the time.

By June end we knew that transformers were going to transform our delivery schedule negatively. Transformers form a part of the propulsion system of the train with one each employed in one basic unit, i.e., four in total. It was a new design. The model worked out by the manufacturer of propulsion and allied systems was to get the first five transformers from a firm in France and get them to manufacture the rest in, for 2nd rake onwards, in latter’s factory in Baddi in India. One of the five transformers was going to be tested thoroughly in the manufacturers’ premises and then in test centres. I remember meeting the French team twice after the delay looked like calamitous. Long discussions about their need to go carefully, this being a new design, and concern about delays led to childlike bargaining. But the lady manager heading their team was unmoved. In our last meeting in July, the best she offered was delivery, one by one, by beginning of September, cutting down the schedule by all of two days. Where else would this Persian saying fit better? Zameen jumbad, na jumbad Gul Mohammad, meaning the whole world may shake but Gul Mohammad does not move an inch. Be that as it may, we have no option but to respect their professional cussedness and rework the famous perennially changing PERT charts I had talked about in some jest earlier.

I had the key team members Sri Dash, the calm, quiet capable Chief Design Engineer/Electrical and Sri Manish Pradhan, the efficient Chief Workshop Engineer/Furnishing, headed by Sri Shubhranshu, the new masterly Principal Chief Mechanical Engineer to fall back on. Sri Dash worked out some possible manipulations in the test schedules at the manufacturers’ and installation at ICF quickly, like taking the risk of testing and installation on two different transformers parallel, to tell us that even with this transformed schedule, the train could still be turned out by September end. Sri Shubhranshu asked the manufacturer to airlift the transformers from France and he agreed to do so at his own cost. By the way, airlifting was something we had already forced many manufacturers to agree to, many times beyond the scope of the contract.

Reworking the PERT charts was fine but the danger was that once everyone, including other vendors, knew about the imminent delay, things would slip at every front. Fortunately, some major manufacturers, like the suppliers of brake system, wheal assembly and bogie frames etc, were too far gone to slip too much; some critical supplies had already been received and many other were under final touches or bench testing.

It was my job at this stage not to fret and fume but to keep the stakeholders energized, particularly our design and manufacturing teams, including the teams of the industry partners. Having christened the train as Train 18, there was no scope of a slide back beyond 2018. I am not very cool and calm, like a level 5 emotionally-intelligent leader must be, but this was the time to force myself to deal with the delicacy of the situation with composure, not panic. 

Let me give an example. A firm in Chennai, a manufacturer of the interior panels and toilets, perhaps the best in India in terms of capability and quality, was chosen by Sri Srinivas, Chief Design Engineer/Mechanical for Train 18 interior works;  remember that the key team, headed by the Chief Design engineers had a kind of carte blanche to decide the list of such vendors and the mode of calling bids. This firm was not used to the speed and volumes we expected from them. They were struggling and all kinds of measures were being thought off by the team to keep them as close to the schedule as possible. There was an exasperated view that the firm had bitten more than they could chew. In spite of the design team opposing it, I placed an order on another firm as a desperate measure, a fall back option. But we made it clear this Chennai firm that they were our first choice and we would like all but one coach to be done entirely done by them, reserving only one coach for the second order. They were pursued so vigorously and relentlessly by so many officers that occasionally their managers would disappear from the factory, the phone network and perhaps the world; I thought it was all in the game. They would not take even my phone calls but that they were making the effort of their life was clear. There were some who would say that we made a mistake in placing all our eggs in their basket but this was not the time for “I told you so”; we were married to them and we had to remain married. I had always said that excusing of a fault was worse than the fault itself; here I don’t think it was a fault at all. Sri Srinivas was authorized and he took the decision; it was now the decision of the team which we had to back all through. We had reposed confidence in the best company for train interiors of trains in India and we needed to support them to help ourselves. Sri Shubhranshu and his team intervened in their external and internal issues, including many of them not related to our contract, like their cash flow situation, to make sure that they deliver. I can say with an experience of 37 years chasing suppliers that such an effort to pursue a firm has perhaps never been done by IR. At the end of the day, time would bear us out that, in spite of all the glitches, hitches, bugs and snafus, the firm did deliver a quality product of a kind not seen on IR earlier.

Meanwhile, I had kept my soft initiatives on. There was nothing more than a clear leadership role; no technical discussions, no drawing, no specifications, just remove all impediments and keep the morale high. My job was only to keep meeting the core team, mostly with at times with industry representatives in attendance as well, and keep their morale high. The message I always tried to communicate, in my own way, was a sort of repetition of what all I had been saying since the beginning:

·      “You are best team I could hope for, quoting Maxwell, “Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team.” I perhaps had a vision but without this team I would have come a cropper.

·      You are not merely laying bricks in a wall, you are building a grand cathedral. You will make mistakes but treat them as opportunities to do it better. Remember the bard when he wrote, “Oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.” There would be no blame games, only singularity of purpose for all of you.

·      There is no shame in failures. There is a whole lot of shame in not attempting.

·      We may not be the best brains in the business of train making but we are Indians and Indians can work hard. You have to burn your midnight oil both in design and manufacturing interactions with industry partners; if Train 18 becomes Train 19, all of us will sink in oblivion.

·      Treat your vendors from industry as partners, I was very keen that a change in our outlook, and in our disposition, that our vendors were our companions in this enterprise of great significance had to be inculcated at every level in ICF. Every single manufacturer, big or small had to feel a part of a great endeavour, a part of history. I found to my happy surprise that the key members of the team were already ahead of my thoughts, notably both the Chief Design Engineers.

I do not remember the exact lines but I am trying to catch the essence here; move ahead fearlessly, you do not have a speed breaker in your leader but a facilitator:

Na  aala afsar na hi speed  breaker hain,

Ye qismat hamari  tumhare rahbar* hain

*leader

And this was indeed the time for us to demonstrate our sense of purpose to all stakeholders. All the participating CEOs were taken for a bit of surprise, trying to explain their development and delivery schedules in the middle of all the hammer and tong sounds of a the Shell shop. It was war now and we would have our war room meetings on the shop floor right next to the unfinished shells. As expected, there was some scepticism but we had our first shop floor meeting with all the stakeholders in attendance, including some from abroad. I cannot say how much it helped but everyone agreed that the meeting succeeded in conveying the sense of purpose for the novel project as well as the urgency. “Never attended a meeting like this. You guys mean business, I can see that”, said one of the participants from abroad.

Yes, sir, we did mean business. The poet Ali Sardar Jafri covered it well:

Naya chashma hai patthar ke shigafon se ubalne ko,

Zamana  kis  qadar  betaab  hai   karvat  badalne  ko

A new stream is bursting to boil in the stones, the world here is passionately agitated to turn a new leaf.

(to be continued...)