Sahaj Software Solutions is a premium software consulting and development company which believes in simplifying complexity. It reeks of brilliance in whatever it does. Sahaj’s culture has redefined how people interact and mingle with each other. The solutions that the company thinks, designs, and provides to its clients are way different and simple. Currently the organization has a very simple but tall vision. It envisions being one of the most disruptive and innovative, consulting services company globally.
Also, according to the organization, in the last few decades, the entire software industry has undergone a massive change and the basic tenet of the industry, respecting humans is forgotten and Sahaj was started with a simple notion to reduce human exploitation in a corporate setting, practices like open salary, profit share, unlimited leaves, no roles or grades, no employer-employee construct, are just a few steps to redefine a new way of working.
An Experienced Leadership
The very foundation of Sahaj rests on the shoulders of its Co-founders, Akash Agarwal, Sunder Malyandi, Rohit Bansal, and Nitin Dhall. Prior to Cofounding Sahaj, Akash was responsible for leading an 800+ person strong organization named ThoughtWorks India within the capacity of a Managing Director and COO. As part of his tenure there, Akash was hugely successful in setting strategy, streamlining operations and improving profitability manifold, all the while adopting an open, collaborative style of leadership. Before joining ThoughtWorks, Akash played various technical and leadership roles at HCL, Infosys and Aditi Technologies.
Akash holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from Nagpur University. He is deeply passionate about sustainability on earth, specifically around sources of renewable energy. The best part is that the founding team of Sahaj brings with them 100+ years of collective IT consulting experience. A large part of it is in agile consulting and enablement and not only the founding team, but the entire consulting team at Sahaj has extensive agile Software development and consulting experience.
Refining People Interaction
Sahaj’s atypical culture has redefined how people interact and mingle with each other. Not just this, but the solutions which the organization cultivates and provides to its clients are distinctive yet simple. The company believes when people are not bound by the employer – employee construct, or constraints of roles, grades, position, promotion and above all maximizing profit, then the outcomes are unimaginable.
The organization also prefers to provide absolute freedom to think and speak, be it within the team or with the client. Absolute transparency and openness, allows each employee to have a candid conversation with its clients and question them with a clear intent, resulting in creative outcomes. Complete ownership and the ability to act like a CEO, allows Sahaj’s team to not only own and be accountable for the decisions within the company, but also for the project/product design and decisions the company makes every day.
By having such a crazy culture, Sahaj has eventually helped its clients to think out of the box and innovate. The culture of extreme ownership and transparency backed by sheer passion, has led to the creation of a unique method of delivering software development projects. Sahaj has helped its clients to cut process wastage by more than 50%, there by achieving a much faster time to market.
A Distinct Organization
Sahaj believes that, software development world is changing pretty fast. With advent of technologies like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, problem solving has become quite complex and seldom do service providers think holistically about providing a simple solution. This is where Sahaj’s basic principle of simplicity stays true to its values and develops products by retaining simplicity. Designing simple solutions is not easy and needs extensive understanding of the technology space. It is an art and to master the art, an organization needs a team of expert artists who are passionate about solving complex problems.
Sahaj believes that every complex problem has a simple solution, and its passionate and experienced teams are well poised to find that solution. The organization’s hunger for designing simple solutions using distributed computing, cryptography, micro services, machine learning and artificial intelligence is insatiable and it is always looking for more.
Prioritizing Compassion
Sahaj was started with a very simple notion, to reduce the exploitation of human brain. The organization also believes that the software industry has grown in leaps and bounds, which has reduced the real value of humans. The organization also believes, nowadays leaders have started considering humans as machines, and have undermined the human emotions. Treating people like a resource and creating specialized departments like Human Resources to deal with their problems, is a huge disrespect. However, Sahaj respects human emotions and the power of human brain. It believes if an environment of openness, freedom and empowerment is created, then human brain can do incredible things and achieve unbelievable results.
The company believes in promoting human interaction more than documenting things. Not only its projects but also its practices across the organization are based on this principle. Sahaj has faith in encouraging behaviors where the guiding principles are understood by everyone and the implementation is left on to the individual. This also allows people to ask more questions and get more context rather than reading a document and drawing boundaries around what is written. The organization prefers to tell stories rather than prescribing things.
Overcoming Travails
The biggest challenge that the organization derives in the agile world currently, is of understanding what ‘agile’ really means. As agile software development becomes more mainstream, organizations and project teams are forced more and more, to adopt agile practices. As a result of this, the time and efforts needed to understand why agile, and what is agile, is lost. Today, teams and organizations are spending more time in ticking the checkboxes and becoming agile compliant on paper. However the reality is very different, if one does an in depth study of the practices, then surprising practices like waterfall-agile will come to the fore.
Sahaj likes to call these practices as ‘waterfall-agile’ because people are trying to use the same waterfall practices but bringing all of them in a two or four week sprint. So on paper it is agile because there is a sprint cycle now and other agile practices like stand ups, showcases etc. are being conducted. However in reality it is actually a waterfall methodology with a shorter cycle.
Sahaj has also witnessed few situations at many client places and it is much tougher to bring in a change at such places, than traditional waterfall teams. Even on the development side practices such as Test Driven development, pair programming etc., are widely abused and people ends up checking the boxes without understanding those.
Foreseeing Newer Horizons
In the last 4 years of its perseverance, Sahaj has evidently made its mark in the APAC market. Right from developing a large scale education platform, to designing a disruptive clinical trial process management product using Blockchain, Sahaj has been at the forefront of designing and implementing solutions using new age technologies.
Recently, the organization has expanded its operations in the US market and has established two offices; one in Bay Area and the other in Raleigh North Carolina. The organization’s focus is to perform local work in areas of cryptography, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Currently, Sahaj is looking to increase its global footprint and having creating a foothold in Europe and Asia Pac in the near future.
Sahaj is the company which is redefining the way software is being developed. It is creating newer and faster ways of delivering software projects without any boundaries. Sahaj thinks there is always a simpler way of solving problem and one has to use that thinking in not only solving software problems, but also in conducting organizational design. By keeping the information hierarchy flat in an organization one can get rid of many evils and can create a diverse culture in an organization.
Source :-The 10 Most Innovative Agile Solution Providers 2018
