Jai was on a high that morning. His team had been asked to submit a proposal for a project outsourced by Tough Claims, a global insurance giant, to build an automated system for approving or rejecting the claims that they received from their customers. The insurance account manager, Venu, had spoken to Jai the previous evening about the opportunity and asked him to get his best team members working on the proposal.
That same night, Jai forwarded all email that he received from Venu on the project. And by the next immediate morning, he had already sent out the meeting invite to his team members, for a discussion to plan the next steps.
Accordingly at 10 am, all members were assembled in Jai’s tiny cabin. The room felt all the more cramped, and each one could smell the other’s deodorant or the lack of it. All the key members, or so they thought themselves to be, were there including:
Shyam - the marketing maestro, who could turn dusty air into MacBook Air; who could turn a proposal into the client’s signed cheque leaf.
Balaji - the Project Manager who would eventually handle the proposal development, and probably the project development as well, if the project was awarded. How much he would suffer while managing the project was directly proportional to how much screwed up and fabricated the proposal was. So he had a keen interest on how this proposal would go.
Krishna - Balaji’s assistant, one could say. He relied fully on Balaji for his existence in the company. Krishna fully believed that Balaji would carry him wherever he went within the company, and followed him like a pug.
They eagerly awaited further details from Jai on the opportunity. After few minutes of silence, Jai spoke up,
‘Team, good news for the morning. As you would have read from the email I sent you, we have been given the opportunity to submit a project proposal to Tough Claims. This is a big deal for us if we crack it. The proposal needs to go out by the end of this week. The email I sent should provide you with more details to get started. So let us begin on a war-footing.’
Balaji spoke,’But Jai, the weekend is just three days away. I feel it is quite short a time to get the proposal across in good shape. In fact, from the email you sent, it looks like the account team had received the client’s notification on the proposal more than a week back. So why didn’t they notify us earlier? That would have given us more time.’
Jai replied, ‘Come on, we cannot always expect to have ideal situations for every task we do. We have to work with what we have. Three days is still good enough. If you ask me, I can work on this proposal by myself and still send it across in just a day. So three days’ time is still generous, if you ask me. See the bigger picture. If we struggle today and win the project, this client can turn out to be a platinum customer for us in the long run.’
Balaji thought to himself, ‘Sadly we are pushed to a situation where we have to ask an arrogant imbecile like you for opinion and guidance. Don't have the ba**s to question the account team’s delay, but lectures us on how to see the big picture. Every day is just a dirty picture when working with you. If only we had the empowerment to take our own decisions.’
As Balaji stood quietly, but simmering inside, Jai continued,
‘Let me give you a quick background on this. The client already has a functioning claims management system. But their claims approval, or rejection, process is largely human dependent. They want to automate the decision making so that there is no human intervention needed for this process at all. They want us to develop this system using Python.’
Balaji was alarmed: ‘But Jai, we don’t have expertise in Python to take this up!’
Jai: ‘Come on guys, this is where you need to take a 30000 feet view and think out-of-the-box.’
Now Balaji was confused, ‘Why didn’t Jai express anything directly? What was the box doing so high up in the air? He was fed up listening to all the figurative speech shit that was so popular with IT folks.’
According to Balaji, if you thought from out of a box, then it meant you were homeless.
Jai continued, ‘This project is worth at least 5000 dollars for us. It is important because it can bring in more opportunities for us from this client.’
Yeah, Balaji had heard this one before. It was always like that. One small opportunity followed by loads of big opportunities, they would say. But much later, to your horror, you would realize that the small opportunity was actually your big opportunity all the while and nothing was to follow it.
Balaji: ‘But Jai, even if we take up this project despite our lack of expertise in this technology, 5000 dollars is hardly a significant revenue. Are you thinking about taking up this project for so less?’
Jai: ‘That you only have to tell me. Do one thing. Come up with a two slider explaining why this project should cost more than 5000 dollars.’
Balaji: ‘No Jai, I agree with you fully that we can do this project for 5000 dollars. I don’t have any arguments with that.’ (Anything to escape creating the two slider)
Jai: ‘Good, now that we all are on the same page, get started on the proposal. Keep the project cost to 5000 dollars for now so that we are competitive. We can always get additional revenue from the client through Change Requests once the project is awarded to us.’
So this was the strategy! Quote low, win over the competition, get the project, then confuse the client, come up with Change Requests for all minor changes as well, and bring in additional revenue to the project.
Just then Krishna spoke, ‘This is Krishna. I have one suggestion.’
Jai: ‘Yes, yes, I know who you are. Just go ahead. Say what you want to quickly.’
Krishna: ‘It is very important to confirm with the account team or the client if there will be any travel involved in this project.’
Jai: ‘Well, of all the questions that are there to ask, you want to ask about travel. Well, I don’t think there is travel involved. Even if there is, you are not going to travel. I am not going to let you. So just focus on the proposal. Ok?’
Krishna: ‘Ok.’
Jai: ‘So Shyam, I need you to come up with the technical aspects of our solution. In fact I want you to design the whole solution. You have to clearly explain how we will go about the requirement, what methodology we will use to come up with a solution, and so on. Can you come up with the draft version of it by today evening?’
Shyam: ‘Well, the time is short but, sure, I will come up with something by evening.’
Jai: ‘Great, guys, so let’s get started. Remember, this is just the beginning of the end.’
Once again, he had said it without thinking about why he was saying it. This is how Jai thought. He had this ‘thoughtless way of thinking’ capability by which he could come up with completely meaningless disconnected statements in the blink of an eye. It was almost like the one-inch punch by Bruce Lee. Most absurd statements using the least number of words.
That was his talent.
That was his talent.
Back at the desk, Balaji checked Jai’s calendar and set up a meeting invite for 6 pm the same day. Shyam had by then come up with a draft of his proposed solution. As Balaji and Krishna assembled in Jai’s room,
Shyam explained the solution to Jai,
‘So as we understand the requirement, the client wants an automated system that would decide whose claim would get approved or rejected. They also want certain high valued claims to be automatically rejected so that the client organization would incur no costs due to high valued payouts to their customers.
To design such a solution, I’ve come up with a brand new technology called R.A.T (Rapid Assessment Technology) which would help in assessing each claim and choose the appropriate decision, without human intervention. This technology would be based on data analytics and machine learning, wherein, if a person’s claim is rejected, then his neighbor's claim and that of all his relatives, if any, will also be automatically rejected so that they all don’t feel bad about each other. The system would learn from each decision taken and by the end of it will be the most cutthroat claim system ever built.
I am also planning to use Internet Of Things (IoT) technology in this so that the claim system would talk to the insurance customer’s wallet and find out how much money it contained. If the wallet had more than 100 dollars in it, then the claim would automatically get rejected, deeming that the customer already had sufficient money with them.
As a value-add we can also build an emotion sensor that would use big data analytics to access the customer’s medical records and their emotions to find out if they are at risk of suicide or heart attack if the claim got rejected. This way, the claim management system can make selective approval choices while making profit through rejecting all other high-valued claims.
This whole system will follow what I call the C.R.A.P methodology which is CREATE, REFINE, APPLY and PROFIT. I invented both the R.A.T and the C.R.A.P a couple of hours ago for this proposal. A claim request will be created, it will be processed and refined for a decision choice, the decision choice will then be applied to reject a claim, and the insurance company will make the profit.’
Balaji and Krishna were totally flabbergasted by all that they heard. Where did Shyam pull all this from? It was not even science fiction. It was science friction. They suspected that Shyam must have secretly smoked weed during lunch time to come up with something like this. Amazingly unbelievable.
Jai was thoroughly excited with the solution, ‘That is well done Shyam. A very good solution and well explained too. So basically, R.A.T will contain the C.R.A.P.’
Shyam: ‘Absolutely Jai.’
Balaji smirked as he thought, ‘Of course Jai is right. Only a rat like him would know what he contained.’
Jai: ‘It is all fine. But do you think we can build this system convincingly?’
Shyam: ‘Who said anything about the system. I can build the proposal convincingly. It is up to you guys to build the system convincingly, if the project came through.’
Jai looked at Balaji and asked, ‘So tell me Balaji, can we build a working system based on this solution? I only want to hear Yes as the answer.’
Balaji: 'Sure. Yes' (All the while wondering about the procedure to change the team. He had no choice but say yes. If the project came through, they would get butchered, on one side by the client and by the account team on the other side. Then it would indeed be the beginning of the end.)
Jai: ‘Great, so we have work at our hand. Let’s put together the proposal and send out a first cut to the account team by tomorrow for review. I am sure this will be a great project experience.’
Shyam, Balaji and Krishna came out of Jai’s room, lots of thoughts running through each one’s mind. Shyam went away to his desk whistling. His creative juices were already running with phrases like BIG DATA ANALYTICS, 2-WAY PROPULSION, BACK-DOOR SYMMETRY, DEVICE AUTHORITY popping up in his mind. Most of those phrases were entirely made up, but would look good in a proposal. He knew it, but the client would never know.
He would get a great proposal out by tomorrow, Shyam thought to himself confidently.
Balaji and Krishna walked unhappily to their desks. Balaji was worried that this opportunity would screw their lives fully. He knew that if he randomly picked up a team member and asked him what Python was, the chances were that the person would say he was referring to the snake. How was he to get the team organised in short time for such a project, if it came through. From where would he build the expertise in short time.
Krishna noticed Balaji’s gloomy face.
He was quite upset himself as he thought, ‘There would be no travel involved in the project! How could Jai say that he wouldn’t allow me to travel? I will have my revenge on Jai for that. I will take a couple of extra leaves this month, over and above the usual, and travel at least to the nearby railway station and shoot some pictures. I will make Jai jealous.’
Krishna spoke, ‘Don’t worry Balaji. We won’t get caught up in this project. i will take care of it.’
Balaji: ‘What do you mean? How, Krishna?’
Krishna: ‘Because tomorrow morning I am going to break two coconuts in Mylapore Luz Pillaiyar temple praying that this project shouldn't be awarded to us.’
Balaji had a real face-palm moment then.
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