Introduction:
I was lucky to taste the flavour of doing a business while I was in the 3rd year of IIT. Without any formal introduction to basic fundamentals of business, I had an engineering-influenced idea of doing a business: getting some bucks for doing something or selling something and whatever you save after covering your cost for doing that is your profit or saved earning! In those undergraduate days, earning some pocket money was considered to be a great achievement to cherish. With limited pocket money allowance, everybody used to go through a tight-rope situation throughout the 4 years of study. Winning some prize money in some competitions or getting some grants for doing well in academics was the target for all across the seniority level of the undergrad students.
Due to my good networking with the students bodies, once I landed a lucrative part-time job opportunity with the Institute IT-admin department. It was kind of a 2-3 weeks long paid project and was on offer to interested students, who were nominated through referal process only. Anyways, thanks to my classmate, then Vice President of students council, who gave my reference and with little interview I landed the project. The project was laborious and did not call for high intellectual skills for completing it. Some working knowledge of MS word and excel would have sufficed!
What was it?
The project was an internet-based project for improving IIT Kharagpur website content improvement with a focus on refurbishing the info on all the departments. The project involved a lot of text data to be uploaded in a prescribed XML format mandating format transfer using Word & Excel. The project leader was a professor who was in charge of the institute website revamping project. He explained to me how to do the data migration overcoming the laborious challenge of format transfer from one to another. The final deliverable was to send the data in a uploadable format. As the work was huge and seemingly not possible to be completed by one person in 2 weeks time, it was delegated to two students, myself and a student from 2nd year. Each one was entitled to get 5k at the end of the successful completion of the project as the fund for the project allocated was total 10k. The work looked laborious, boringly repetitive but it was easy and cool. The money looked too good for 2-3 weeks time window. I felt lucky as 5k was too good those days (2005-6) during undergraduation!
The start and the beginning:
I and the 2nd year student started working on the project, though separately and independently. Nature of work and load was same for both the parts.
On the very 1st day, I started working on with lot of vigour and enthusiasm. I thought of working hard for completing it in 2 weeks expected time and getting paid 5 k! With this goal, I had set up a plan for daily work schedule accommodating classes, studies and other activities. Nice start it was, but got bored within 2 days because of the repetitive nature of the project!
Then came an idea, which not only changed the way I completed the project but the way I had the notion of getting things done and working for making money! It was a true encounter with the world of business and management, experientially! And it was an amazing learning experience!
My goal was to make some extra pocket money by completing a work within a prescribed time. Its true that the task was given to me but it was not a PhD thesis or writing a book or creating a piece of work which calls for my originality ethically and legally! Then why the hell should I do it myself putting all the hard work where learning is also not much! I kept wondering: what if I delegate the work to somebody, who has nothing to do and can do it for me! It was possible as I was a 3rd year student and could have leveraged my seniority to get any 1st year or 2nd year student working for me! I can get the full 5k almost without putting any hard labour! would be right? why not? what if I pay the 'poor' fellow who's doing it for me..with a some bucks without any labour exploitation probably?! But how much to pay? Whom to delegate? How to decide? How to control the quality of the work as I as accountable for the integrity and accuracy of the data? So many questions and queries were crowding my mind. Then I went for this "Outsourcing" idea and chalked out a comprehensive and promising implementation plan: my 1st business plan!
I was lucky to taste the flavour of doing a business while I was in the 3rd year of IIT. Without any formal introduction to basic fundamentals of business, I had an engineering-influenced idea of doing a business: getting some bucks for doing something or selling something and whatever you save after covering your cost for doing that is your profit or saved earning! In those undergraduate days, earning some pocket money was considered to be a great achievement to cherish. With limited pocket money allowance, everybody used to go through a tight-rope situation throughout the 4 years of study. Winning some prize money in some competitions or getting some grants for doing well in academics was the target for all across the seniority level of the undergrad students.
Due to my good networking with the students bodies, once I landed a lucrative part-time job opportunity with the Institute IT-admin department. It was kind of a 2-3 weeks long paid project and was on offer to interested students, who were nominated through referal process only. Anyways, thanks to my classmate, then Vice President of students council, who gave my reference and with little interview I landed the project. The project was laborious and did not call for high intellectual skills for completing it. Some working knowledge of MS word and excel would have sufficed!
What was it?
The project was an internet-based project for improving IIT Kharagpur website content improvement with a focus on refurbishing the info on all the departments. The project involved a lot of text data to be uploaded in a prescribed XML format mandating format transfer using Word & Excel. The project leader was a professor who was in charge of the institute website revamping project. He explained to me how to do the data migration overcoming the laborious challenge of format transfer from one to another. The final deliverable was to send the data in a uploadable format. As the work was huge and seemingly not possible to be completed by one person in 2 weeks time, it was delegated to two students, myself and a student from 2nd year. Each one was entitled to get 5k at the end of the successful completion of the project as the fund for the project allocated was total 10k. The work looked laborious, boringly repetitive but it was easy and cool. The money looked too good for 2-3 weeks time window. I felt lucky as 5k was too good those days (2005-6) during undergraduation!
The start and the beginning:
I and the 2nd year student started working on the project, though separately and independently. Nature of work and load was same for both the parts.
On the very 1st day, I started working on with lot of vigour and enthusiasm. I thought of working hard for completing it in 2 weeks expected time and getting paid 5 k! With this goal, I had set up a plan for daily work schedule accommodating classes, studies and other activities. Nice start it was, but got bored within 2 days because of the repetitive nature of the project!
Then came an idea, which not only changed the way I completed the project but the way I had the notion of getting things done and working for making money! It was a true encounter with the world of business and management, experientially! And it was an amazing learning experience!
My goal was to make some extra pocket money by completing a work within a prescribed time. Its true that the task was given to me but it was not a PhD thesis or writing a book or creating a piece of work which calls for my originality ethically and legally! Then why the hell should I do it myself putting all the hard work where learning is also not much! I kept wondering: what if I delegate the work to somebody, who has nothing to do and can do it for me! It was possible as I was a 3rd year student and could have leveraged my seniority to get any 1st year or 2nd year student working for me! I can get the full 5k almost without putting any hard labour! would be right? why not? what if I pay the 'poor' fellow who's doing it for me..with a some bucks without any labour exploitation probably?! But how much to pay? Whom to delegate? How to decide? How to control the quality of the work as I as accountable for the integrity and accuracy of the data? So many questions and queries were crowding my mind. Then I went for this "Outsourcing" idea and chalked out a comprehensive and promising implementation plan: my 1st business plan!