Those were the Capgemini Days - The Other Half

In my 15 days stint in the JDE practice at Mumbai – 2 I met Ajay Agarwal (my N+1), RamKumar Iyer, Vinay Rayas, Abhishek Chauhan, N Sriram and Sridhar Iyer. After making a modest beginning at HPCL where I came across quite a few guys into the JDE practice. I came across Rajesh Dahale (my reporting boss and counsellor), Satish Kadam, Santosh Patil, Fauzan Patel, Mathew George, Nilesh Savant, Nilesh Rajadhyaksha, Anand Bais, Surendra Arora, Satish Kumar Joshi, Milind Bam, Sanjay Joshi, the great Chetan Sabunkar, Pramod Jaiswal, Sivaramakrishnan, Dinesh Kumar, Sandeep Shejwalkar, Narayan Prasad, Manoj Kumar and a couple of more guys. I also happened to meet all the big stalwarts of the HPCL project – Srini, Rajni Mehta, Surana, Nishi, KVS, Parihar and a few more. Thereafter I was sent to JK Paper Delhi and I knew most of the guys on the project. My project manager happened to be Dipanjan Banerjee. We were provided a guest house exclusively for the project team and we all stayed as a strongly bonded team for the next year or so. The team comprised of myself, Fauzan Patel, Ramkumar Iyer, Nilesh Savant, Abhishek Chauhan, N Sriram, Rajesh Agarwal, Raman Sibal and Satish Kadam. Ram Iyer and Rajesh Agarwal left us pretty soon and were replaced by Sridhar Iyer and Anish Agarwal. Naveen Gupta and Rajiv Mittal were also part of the project. We were briefly joined by the APS team of Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Agarwal, Satish Joshi and Pramod Jaiswal and their exit from the project was also pretty soon. Anil Sinha was our Change Manager on the project and was hardly visible onto the project. At the time of Go-Live we were split up into the HO and plant teams and were joined by Shankar Iyer, Vinod Bhat, Narayan Prasad and Vishwas Ghanekar around the Go-Live. We also had Aashish from IAL on the project. The JK Paper guys involved on the project were WTD, CFO, Kapoor, Subramanyam, KK Rustagi, Atul Agarwal, Bijoi, Saurabh Agarwal, Sanjeev, Prabal Mahapatro, Doctor sahab, Bose and Pragyan Mohanty. After Go-Live support of 1 month I was sent back onto the HPCL project wherein I was sent to assist the Purchase team in solving certain issues. I met Sanjay More, Paresh Hule, Hanumant, Nitin Kane (my N+1), Abhishek Pandya, Murali (My booze partner and a friend) and ofcourse Sivaramakrishnan. It was a great learning experience which I would treasure. I was sent back to Orissa on JK Paper project for 2 weeks and then all of a sudden was asked to continue on the project. I met a few more guys here – Suresh Kumar, Sudal Acharya and Nihar Padhi. Luckily for me the project ended pretty soon. After coming back to office in April 2006, I was shifted to the SAP practice and within a week or so was asked to move to Schneider-Electric India deployment project in Delhi. I was very reluctant to go there but had to eventually go there. My role here was of a PMO and I had replaced Niraj Ruparel(IIM-C) guy who had decided to move onto purely Management Consulting roles. The Project Manager here was Tushar Wahal who is pretty much a workaholic guy. I met some nice guys here like Jagdish Misra, Amit Panjwani, Manij Kumar, Manoj Bhoota, Ponnuraj, CS, Nitin Goel, Daljit Singh, Anil Tanwar, Dipak Dolas, Sudheendra Nyamati, Nilesh Edwankar, Aashish Shekher and Inderpal Singh. That was my project history in brief at Capgemini.

I started planning for my exit way back in November 2005 and finally got through by June 2006, a solid 6-7 months. Though the seriousness started to grip in only late March 2006 and by mid-May I had an offer with me. July 3rd 2006 happened to be my last working day in Capgemini-India and the CG saga for me came to an abrupt end.