Hyderabad-based Satyam Computers has come up with an ingenious strategy to ensure that its strategy of using China as a market for sourcing software developers works.
India's fourth largest software exporter and one of the first to enter the China market, Satyam's development centre in glitzy Shanghai's newly developed Pu Dong area, has something called an English Corner.
The English Corner according to Raghavendra Tripathi, Satyam's regional manager (Greater China), is one of the factors that ensured that Satyam's strategy of 'synch and source' worked.
"When we came to China we were sure about a couple of things. We wanted to treat this as a market to offer our services (synch) and also wanted to source developers from this market to serve at client locations outside China," Tripathi points out.
"Today we have a sourcing strategy in China and we have about 25 odd people from China working on Satyam client locations abroad, " he says.
Tripathi gives the example of how Mexican authorities refused to give work visas to Satyam engineers from Hyderabad for a project and then Chinese software engineers from Satyam's Shanghai centre had to be deployed in Mexico.
"The Mexican authorities do not issue such visas to Indian nationals but Chinese nationals are allowed and we were lucky that we had the requisite numbers in China who could then be deployed elsewhere," Tripathi explains.
Satyam is using its China base to ensure that the company's human resources can be distributed globally wherein the domicile factor becomes redundant. But serving abroad means garnering fairly good English communication skills, especially spoken English and this is where Chinese engineers could come unstuck.
Chinese education in the past had laid more emphasis on writing and reading skills than on spoken skills. "Oral communication has been less emphasised," he admits.
To make up for this lag, Satyam China came up with what it calls the English Corner -- which covers the entire staff that the company has in China and includes the on-bench consultants and the engineers to improve their oral English skills.
The English Corner gets going every Monday afternoon between 1700 and 1800 hours. The content varies frequently and the employees are encouraged to speak and think in English.
Presentations are made again only in English and a couple of Satyam's Indian colleagues, exposed to the nuances of the language, dole out a couple of American slangs. This generally ensures that the level of comfort with the English language goes up. Employees are often required to make power point presentations in English.
Yet another method adopted by the company to promote internal English usage is through incentives. Any employee whose article is published in the company's internal newspaper MySpace (which is distributed globally) is awarded a bonus. That apart, employees are encouraged to watch China Central TV 9 to improve their listening ability.
China Central TV 9 is a homegrown Chinese-English channel that reports news and doles out information on different provinces of China and the Chinese culture. According to Tripathi, the English Corner has ensured that associates and consultants have more confidence when speaking in English in public.
The move to impart English skills is important because Satyam plans to ramp up its China operations from about 180 odd employees at the moment to about 1,000 people by the end of 2006, and to 2000 by the end of 2007.
This apart a recent report by Chinese authorities has pointed out that the country lacks special institutions to train managerial staff for software development. Thus software students do not find suitable employers, while companies have difficulty in recruiting qualified programmers.
Satyam also has made a smart beginning in snagging accounts in China and today has 20 customers in the three years that it has been there. Some of the marquee customers in China are Alcatel and Astra Zeneca for which it has done SAP implementation.