Nurturing the blooming quality revolution The Times Of India, May 15, 2002 QAI Executive Director Navyug Mohnot has contributed quality time to nurturing the assessment and consultancy revolution in the Indian software industry. He set up QAI in late 1994 as a joint venture with QAI USA. QAI has since grown to be the market leader in the process improvement and quality management  in software organisations. Mohnot is India’s first Certified Quality Analyst, a candidate P-CMM® Lead Assessor and a trained ISO-9000 Lead  Auditor. Mohnot tells Ravi Menon that QAI has acted as a bridge between vision and technology at the management layer: How did the idea of starting a sole consultancy for software projects and allied assessment and management issues originate? While working in the US over ten years ago, I could anticipate the huge software growth in the decade to come. Being an engineer, I inevitably had to work in this space. The interesting part of the whole thing was the question that software companies then, unlike their old economy counterparts in steel or cement, did not have well defined business process or management and assessment blueprints for software engineering, development and delivery. This was a lacuna and opportunity QAI could fill. We are a 70 per cent consultancy and training company and have been growing 40 per cent in the last few years. This year, we expect to grow at at least 45 per cent . Our different areas of operations- software management and assessment, training, conferences, e-learning have leveraged each other in adding value to the customer’s knowledge base. How did you come up with a blueprint to add value to the software management and consulting space? The approach I took was an involved way of doing things. First, we had a grand vision for our consultancy process, regardless of time it would take to evolve one. Secondly, we wanted to narrow down the battlefield where we could emerge among the global top three companies in our areas of operation. It was a question  of narrowing down our focus and still being global in our consultancy functions. Thirdly, we worked on the reality that companies of the future can score over the competition not based on superior products and services, but on the basis of superior business models. We have given a lot of thought to evolving unique and ideal business models for our customers and focused on consultancy as well as training, unlike most consulting groups , coupled with idea of bringing the software development community together through tutorials and conferences. The training business is our cash and customer acquisition engine. QAI has aimed to consult, train, benchmark and facilitate. What roles have you defined for yourself in specialized consultancy services? Till date, we have trained over 40,000 practicing professionals from multinational, private and  public sector companies and defense organisations in India. Our role has largely pertained to being an interface between the top segment of the quality  triangle – strategy, visioning and missioning – and the bottom segment which is addressed by the basic training organisations. We address the middle segment comprising software quality and project cycle management, knowledge, change, risk and test management services. Obviously, your purely consulting functions seem to have helped you stay clear of the economic slowdown effects. You stay steady about how you build software, how you manage projects, test and deliver a software  product. Most people don’t look at the core of the matter. There are too many layers in the strategy space and hundreds in the technology space. Very few understand software project consultancy and services on it which to us is quite surprising. Back