Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Quick Chocolate Cake Recipe

Well while I was reading a blog last week, it mentioned about a chocolate cake. That led to a temptation in my mind for the same. I ended up Googling a quick microwave chocolate cake (Eggless) recipe.

Came across multiple ones but then decided to stick to one, instead of taking bits and pieces from different recipes. Believe me it was a real quick one, the entire stuff was done and ready in about 15-20 mins.

The ingredients were:

Maida 1 1/2 cup
Sugar powder about 1 cup

Baking powder 1.5 tbsp
Baking soda 1tsp
Milk 1 Cup
Butter
Salt
Dry fruits

In a bowl mix milk and sugar well, add melted butter to that. in a separate bowl mix maida, baking powder, baking soda and salt ( to taste). Mix the earlier milk sugar solution to this. Beat really well, make sure there aren't any lumps. Get a microwave vessel coated with butter and pour the batter into it and add the dry fruits as per liking. Keep this vessel with the batter in the microwave for about five minutes initially. Then pierce a knife and see if nothing sticks to the knife your cake is baked and ready.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Are we (IT in India) on the right track?

Well this post is just about my rumblings from my experience in the IT Industry :-( What makes me feel sorry is that lot of (IT) companies in India prefer to play it safe. In the sense rather than intellectual property they go behind constant flow of revenue. Which basically implies that most of the well established IT companies also don't prefer to risk it out to invest there resources into a product development, rather they would prefer to go in for a service contract with their customers which would atleast ensure them a constant revenue inflow for next few years. Part of this could also be because of the prevailing market uncertainties which is making them act double cautious. Having said that, personally i do believe that we (Indian IT companies) some where in the future would be faced with a situation where in we will have to start investing in developing products rather than just providing services. Because today, thanks to the rising salary costs, India is fast loosing its cost advantage to other competitors like Philipines which are much less costly than us. It would be very interesting to see how Indian human resources are prepared to face this challenge.

Importance of Process: Atul Gawande's Checklist

Atul Gawande works are Harvard Medical School and writes for the New Yorker as well. He is also the author of the famous book " The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right".He quotes umpteen examples where in he empathizes the importance of following a process, doing a thing repeatedly every time in the same manner. He is the surgeon who introduced the concept of checklist in the medical field.

Our great struggle in medicine these days is not just with ignorance and uncertainty," Gawande says. "It's also with complexity: how much you have to make sure you have in your head and think about. There are a thousand ways things can go wrong." At the heart of Gawande's idea is the notion that doctors are human, and that their profession is like any other. So doctors as well miss stuff. He realized that they could as be inconsistent and unreliable, and in their case it could result extremely dangerous because a life could be at stake. That's when he visited Boeing to see how they make things work, over and over again they fall back on checklist. The pilot's checklist is an important component not only for take off and landing, but also during emergency situations where in they have very little time to take decisions, checklists come in handy.

Atul came up with a very similar 2 min checklist for the medical fraternity. Today it has become a norm for lots of hospitals across the globe. He also quotes statistics which proves the success rate of following a checklist.

The second of the examples notable in his book is that of a patient who came with a stab wound and it wasn't very serious, but his situation detiorated very quickly. "About 10 minutes later, he crashed," Gawande says. "When they got him open they found that the wound had gone — this is a pretty big guy — straight through more than a foot into him, all the way into his back and sliced open his aorta. And so afterwards they asked a few more questions of the family. 'How did this happen?' 'Well, it was a Halloween party.' 'What exactly went on?' And then they learned that the guy who had stabbed him was dressed as a soldier carrying a bayonet. And if they had understood it was a bayonet, they would have thought about it quite differently."Gawande uses this anecdote, a simple miscommunication with the potential to cause so much tragedy.

I just feel both of these examples one emphasizing the use of a Checklist and the other on the prominence on communication applies to any industry at large. Even to our very own IT industry. Where in lot of times there is a strong push to follow the process but there are lots of managers who would resist the implementation of a thing like process or a checklist, they would say they are already doing fine and this is a definite overheard. But statistically there is already enough evidence on the net about the benefits/savings of using a checklist/ following a process.
A part of this resistance is ( as Atul states in his book also) has to do with our unwillingness to accept our weakness, that's human nature. And the second point is we need to accept that we are fallible only then we will be able to adapt to such things.
To wind up, one of the very simple checklist items they had was to have very body in the room made short introductions before the surgery and this brought down the complication and mortality rates by 35%. "Making sure everybody knew each other's name produced what they called an activation phenomenon," Gawande explains. "The person, having gotten a chance to voice their name, let speak in the room — were much more likely to speak up later if they saw a problem."