The Cubicle Diaries Q3 2018

Note from Champions Annual Day - CSR

ACS newsletter Sathyashila of the Year SPARC Update
Muddem 2018 2018
Click Here
2 4 5 6
AHIP Expo Top IT/ITES
Exporter.
GGK Women Shyam @HYSEA 2018
summit award
BD Updates Squad

7 8 9 10 12 14
COMMUNICATION
Training

Life at GGK 7 Health tips Lateral Hires: Hiring Independence

for a Rainy day Campus Hires: Super heros Day celebrations

15 16 17 18 19 20
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Diaries Q3 2018

We, as ‘Team GGK’ have been doing a wonderful job over the years and most our
customers are extremely happy with our services. We know, ‘Engineering Excellence’
has been one of GGK’s major strength. My definition of Engineering Excellence is -
application of technology and computer science principles to provide solutions to
solve business problems by designing and building efficient, scalable, maintainable
solutions/systems with excellent quality (better than others).
I have been working with customers and engineering teams over the years and
would like to share the small things which can make a substantial impact on our
delivery and relationship with our customers.

Understanding Customer’s Business: We provide technology solutions to

customers in different industries like healthcare, retail, logistics, etc with a primary
focus on technology. However, we must develop a healthy curiosity and consciously
put some effort in understanding the customer’s -business, industry, clientele,
competitors, how our solution help them and their customers etc.

This information, we need not gather instantly, but gradually over a period of time.
“Why do I need this? “, “ I am a .Net / Java developer “, “Is this relevant for my role?“.
These are a few questions which I can see coming from you. Well, I say, it will be fun
understanding various businesses, and it will help immensely in understanding the
customer’s requirements, in providing better solutions, asking the right questions,
making good conversations, getting the big picture etc. If you know how your
solution is helping the customer’s business, it will give you a great sense of
achievement and personal satisfaction.

I would like to share a recent example of how we worked with this philosophy here:

GGK Internal and Confidential

 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

In a batch process, few hundreds of records were getting failed for some reason (s).
This was our thought process- Do we know what this job does? It calculates insurance
agents’ commissions payable on a weekly basis. If a record is failed, agent will not get
commission into his/her bank account. If 1,000 records fail, 1,000 agents will not get
paid and they will be inconvenienced. So, this is time sensitive, and must be processed
before the pay cycle. Also, the root cause must be fixed, so that agents are not
disappointed due to the system’s problems every week. Imagine if our salary is not
credited at the end of the month? How would we feel? This discussion potentially
changes our perspective to the problem. Trust me, it works well... try it out.

Understanding our stakeholders: We work with the customer’s staff closely. In most
cases, they are remote, and we haven’t worked with them for long. Also, we have
never met them. We speak to them for few minutes in a day or week, we write a few
emails. We don’t know as much as we would like to know about them (Say, as we do
about our team members). We must have healthy working relationships to run projects
successfully. So, understanding each stakeholder well with what you know, what your
team members know, or what your manager knows, on the basis of their interactions is
very important. Can we build stakeholder’s image, with what he/she likes/dislikes,
what is their style of working, what are their hobbies (if you can get) etc.? These can
help in building good relationships. Few examples: Some clients like more status
updates, some like more functional/business discussion (than technical), some like
those who ask right (and more) questions, some don’t like to get onto calls every day
etc. Identify your key stakeholders, discuss with your teams gather information and
start utilizing to build great relationships.
To quickly sum up, understanding customer’s business and stakeholders personality
and utilizing that information to build stronger and healthy relationships is definitely a
smarter way of working.
Sathyashila Muddem
GGK Internal and Confidential
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

Champions of the Year 2018

EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR

Prudhvi Srinu Gedela Pavan

Manish Kumar
Uddaraju Seepana
MANAGER OF THE YEAR
Rahul Konduru David Roshan Ravi Teja Venkat Allamraju
Bhallamudi

Praveen

Chanakya Vijay
Manoj Palla
Gujarathi
Aditya Vajjala
Regalla Pottabattini

Nishanth Himanshu Deshmanth Arun Kadiveru

Venumula Sourav Chennuri

Srinivas
Supraja Darisa Mousumi Sravani
Shekar Polasa Sabbani
Mohapatra Kanchamreddy

Srinivasa Rao Praharsha Rakesh Satelli Prasad Derangula

Gude Bejju
PROJECT OF THE YEAR
: Reporting Data Lake (Big Data)
Maniratnam Dhanraj : MarketGuard365
Karthikeya Raja Srinivas
Katakam Pervaram
Mandava : Manual + Automation QA

Nagalakshmi Ragavendar Anant Choudhari Rajanikanth

Alavala Basangari Katakam
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Diaries Q3 2018
Annual Day - SPARC 2018
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Diaries Q3 2018
CSR Updates

Volunteering comes from the heart, and it makes us stand for who
we are. There were multiple CSR activities organized in the last three
months:

Ÿ We had invited kids from our flagship project Kishori Vikas Yojana
to the Annual Day Event. Ten kids performed a cultural dance and
they were given school kits.

Ÿ We distributed school kits to the underprivileged children to

promote education in Slum/Tribal areas. GGK Tech has donated
1000 School kits. About 100 employees have volunteered for
packing the school kits, and the bags were distributed in Govt
schools in rural areas of Telangana.

Ÿ Few glimpses of our employees during our Annual School Kit

Packing Drive held at Mahila Sikshana Kendram, Habsiguda and
PNM High School, Kukatpally.
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Diaries Q3 2018

So far, it is in the second stage. We had a good number of teams

registered from both the locations - 10 teams from Uppal and 11 teams
from Waverock.

BD Updates 40+ds
Below are the clients we signed in last 3 months. Lea

works by having specially trained nurses regularly visit young, first-time moms-to-be, starting early in the pregnancy, and continuing
through the child’s second birthdayIntegrating third-party system, Developing AMS, Power BI reports, DevOpsFor Purple, please reach
out to Vasudevan Dandey for details.

Investment technology solutions for asset managers, fund product manufacturers, fund distributors, life and pension companies, and
fund service providers ; Maintenence - Java & React

Microcred - digital financial group focusing on serving individuals, micro and small businesses ; Optimized clients backup and storage
process by 96% reduction of the time taken

Shipbob - Warehouse Management System provider to Retail companies; Maintenence & enhancements - .Net

ProcareRx - pharmacy services company; App development - PHP, Joomla to .Net MVC 6.0 & .Net Core 2.0

Nitrogen - an artificial intelligence powered data and analytics platform that provides predictive and prescriptive models ; App
development - NodeJS, Python, React, AWS Beanstock, Spark, SQS, Lambda
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

AHIP Expo
GGK Tech was a proud sponsor @ AHIP
Institute & Expo 2018 held on June 20th - 22nd, 2018 in
San Diego, CA. Click here to know more.

GGK Women Squad

All About Assertiveness & Self-drive- In an attempt to inculcate the habit of practising Assertiveness, a
session was organised for the GWS on Self-drive and Assertiveness in both WR & Uppal. The tips and
experience from the participants helped each other to get an exposure to the real-life examples.

GGK Internal and Confidential

 The Cubicle
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Top IT/ITES Exporter.
Shyam @HYSEA 2018 summit award
We are deeply honored to be felicitated as "Top IT/ITES Exporter-
Midsize" by Hon'ble Vice President of India, Mr. Venkaiah Naidu at
the 26th edition of Hyderabad Software Enterprises
Association(HYSEA) Annual Awards. We would like to take this
opportunity to thank all our employees, customers, partners and
everyone who help us deliver exceptional quality software time and
again. We are very grateful for your continued patronage.

Also, CurisHealth won the finalist award at HYSEA

Annual Summit 2018 (HYSEA Product Awards & Expo
2018) under Established Products – MNC/India
category.
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

It gives me immense pleasure to travel. This is something I learned to enjoy

after getting married, upon my wife’s influence. Apart from the set of
experiences that travelling enables, it also helps me stay more focused and
innovative at work as it helps me break the monotony of daily routine. I like to
plan the travel on my own instead of relying on packaged tours from Online
Travel Agencies. This gives me the flexibility to choose my own cities, places of
stay and experiences. The overarching goal is to check out the most
popular/touristy places, learn about that place’s history, create an opportunity
to interact with locals, and do activities which are not ‘normal’ in our existing
day to day arrangement in Hyderabad.

More often than not, it is the two of us travelling together. Having been to
some of the European countries in the last 4 years, we decided to visit South-
east Asia. Neither of us had really explored that region. We narrowed down our
interest to Vietnam. Economical enough to not burn a hole in our pockets, it
provided many opportunities to self-indulge on those specific experiences
where we sought opulence. It was an 9-day travel plan in the month of May
wherein we would explore the country from North to South. I booked our stay
using AirBnB at the four locations we planned to check out.

First stop was the capital city of Hanoi. Our trip began with a tiny
misadventure. We didn’t have any local currency yet to spend as we were
carrying US Dollars. We roamed the streets of suburban Hanoi for two hours
on-foot before we could find the ATM that accepted Indian cards to get
Vietnamese Dong. That got the ball rolling.

We spent a couple of days in this city. We had a great time trying variety of
foods. Although we are vegetarians, we could find many options at some of
the most renowned eateries across the city. The weather was mostly overcast,

GGK Internal and Confidential


with winds blowing that made it more pleasant
than what the temperatures indicated. We had
local SIM cards installed in our phones, that gave
us cheap and fast internet. We booked Grab taxis
for fast intra-city mobility. We experienced
sensory deprivation for the first time there, which
is an induced meditation technique. It was unique
as it was the first time I was in a state of trance.
They put us in dark salt bath chambers which had
a controlled environment, and left us there for 90
minutes. It was at the markets where we got used
to counting the currency in hundreds of
thousands or millions. A million Vietnamese Dong
are equivalent to Rupees 3000.
From there we went to the city port, to take an
overnight cruise at Halong Bay. It was quite
luxurious and the natural scenery was something
to behold. It was shallow sea all around the ship,
with hundreds of small green mountainous isles
peppered all over. We went to historic cave sites,
did Kayaking, and looked at very beautiful sunset
and sunrise. I did Tai Chi which is a Chinese
defense martial art but not unlike Yoga, since it
brings focus. I cooked a Vietnamese meal too
while onboard that ship.
We then took a flight to Da Nang to spend three
days in the city of Hoi An, which is just a couple of
hours away from the airport. We stayed at an
apartment right next to the South China sea. We
checked out the Old Quarters which is a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, walked across the beautiful
Japanese bridge, had exquisite food at some of
the most beautiful restaurants. We took a boat
ride wherein we got opportunity to float lanterns.
Hoi An is also famous for its leg massage
experience. We booked an appointment using
Trip Advisor. It was extremely relaxing.
We then flew to Ho Chi Minh City, which is also
known as Saigon. Spent 3 memorable nights here.
We shopped at the famous Ben Thanh market.
We went on night tour of the city where local
varsity students took us on their mopeds around
the famous sites and local eateries. We had
interesting conversations with them about
education, family culture, work and life in general.
I tried to classify things into two buckets in my
head, habits that made us Indians similar to
Vietnamese, and those
The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018
that were very different. We took a kickboxing
session too at one of the most famous Mixed
Martial Arts club in the city. Going-in, I felt
confident since at that time I had been regularly
exercising for over 3 months. But within 15
minutes of the training schedule I realized this was
extremely different. I was left out of breath and
out of stamina by the time we were done. After
the conversation I had with the trainer who
himself was a pro MMA fighter and the one
training session I underwent, I learned to
appreciate this sport more. We checked out the
war museum, which tells story of Vietnam war
through heart breaking images and artifacts. I
almost had myself tattooed in this city. I gave up
at the final moment, when I felt the design wasn’t
compelling enough to last a lifetime.
On the tenth day, we took our flight back to
Hyderabad. On our way back from any such
voyage, we usually have conversation about
where we will visit next. That keeps me pumped
up.
GGK Internal and Confidential
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

Srinivas Mallisetty

#1. How did you feel after getting the Lead of the Quarter Award? What helped you
focus on and achieve this?
I was very surprised and overjoyed when my name was announced as Lead of the quarter. It is
just happened because of the wonderful team and the challenges that we received from the
different clients.

#2. How do you balance your work and life?

It is just a matter of choice and setting proper priorities for the career. If you have that, then
everything will be balanced.

#3. Whom would you nominate as the Super-Man and the Wonder-woman from your
team? Why?
Sai lohith Dhanakonda, Srikanth Chandaluri, and SaiKumar Pragallapati are the REAL
superheroes and Medha is the Wonder-woman.
Because, while everyone in the team is trying to be 1 extraordinary person, they each are
trying at a level of 50 extraordinary people (Our team quote: One machine can do the work
of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of 1 extraordinary one).

On a serious note, they are the real energy behind the team to keep everyone active.

#4. What powers would you like to develop/possess?

It will sound more like a fiction but there should be an application which will take the
requirements document and generate the production-ready application.

#5. Describe your life using film titles.

As usual, entire life can't be related to a single film but most part can be related to Arjun
Reddy.

GGK Internal and Confidential

 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

Ashok Goparaju
How did you feel after getting the Lead award? What factors helped you focus and
achieve this?
It’s always good to be recognized and I am glad to receive the Lead award. Tremendous
support from the team and management in terms of understanding the things quickly
and doing what it takes to get the best from a lead generation campaign helped me to
achieve this.
Flat layered hierarchy providing ease to connect with anyone within the organization
helped me to collaborate with others and hit the right area.

What part of your work you enjoy the most? And what’s the coolest thing you’re
working on right now?
I come across hundreds of businesses a day and that’s what I enjoy most to observe
companies from Innovative startup’s to Fortune 500, to witness how they perform and
what factors that are to be considered according to the trends.
The coolest thing that I am on working right now is on AI and learning how this
transforms the businesses all over the world.

How do you balance your work and life?

Setting the achievable goals and prioritizing things helps me a lot in balancing the work
and life. Flexibility in work timings is something that assists me in prioritizing things.

Whom would you nominate as Super-Man/wonder-woman from you team?

I would nominate Supriya Singireddy a wonder-woman from our team to do the job in
the smartest way possible.

What powers would you like to develop/possess?

Would like to possess the power to be in any part of the world within no time, as my
mind flies by – be it just sitting in the White House and capable of being in the Amazon
forest the next instant.

GGK Internal and Confidential

 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

Talkmasters is an initiative by Learning and Development to enhance the public speaking skills of the employees across the organization.
This program helps the participants by encouraging them to talk and also provides tips to work on language and presentation skills. The
program started on June 2016 at both locations (Uppal and Waverock) with a minimal participation of 20 employees. Currently, 40-50
participants, register as speakers or audience every month,.
Every month the Talkmasters event sets the stage for the speakers to share their opinion on varied topics given by the panel.

March:
The topic for this month was ‘colors of life’ , the
speakers spoke about their favourite colour, how
they relate to this color and finally how important
it is to have colours in life. The talkmaster for the
month was Keerthi Kurra from Uppal.
April:
The topic for this month was ‘summer’ , the speakers mostly
shared memories of their school and college days. They spoke
about the time spent with their grandparents. The talkmaster for
the month from Uppal was Pavan Seepana and Waverock was
Swetha Mullamala.

May: June:
The topic for this month was ‘travel- experience the joy’, the speakers The topic for this month was ‘A habit-that you
of the day were excited to speak about their favourite travel are proud of’. Though the topic was easy to
experiences and the fun during those trips. All the speakers were understand, the speakers needed to be smart
brilliant and shared their individual episodes of tours. The talkmaster enough to pick up a habit and churn a story
for this month from Uppal was SriHarsha Puttapaka and from Waverock around it. Surprisingly, all the speakers of the
was Charanjhot Singh. day had different life stories to tell and shared
their own experiences with fervour. The winners
of the day were Ajay Padamata and Navya Teja
Yarabothula from Waverock and Uppal
respectively.

Life at GGK
to take a dig at thorny, critical issues
and lead teams to solve large and
complex technical problems. Besides
these, my interest and passion
towards cloud computing and
Microsoft technologies remains
strong and alive
I started my stint at GGK with an
interesting project - Zero Chaos. We
The days when a “large IT project”
played a key role in releasing Version
effectively meant “enterprise-wide
13-16 to production. I also led a team
system installation” are long gone.
developing a CRM application for the
Businesses today deploy large scale
in-house business development team.
systems using services and
This application would enable them
microservices across their
to manage customer data, customer
organizations. With systems being
interaction, track leads, potentials and
woven together in a complex
accounts.
tapestry, technology projects and
initiatives need to be precisely
Next, I managed the RBC application
coordinated, especially while making
development team, which researched
large scale changes.
on building connectors for different
cloud storage services like Google
My role, as a manager, has evolved
Drive, Share file and Evernote. For this
over time to stay relevant in this
application, the team also developed
changing environment. Combining
APIs using .Net framework and
technical skills with
integrated them with Flow tool,
program/project/process
developed using Delphi. Post that, I
management skills, has enabled me
led a team that built an application
for Riviera, a luxury yacht building
company. This was the first
application at GGK built on .Net Core
and we were excited to be a part of
the team.
Apart from that, I led a team working
for Renaissance Learning. The team
delivered cloud native applications
using the latest technologies like
Angular, AWS, .Net core, Terraform,
Liquibase and GraphQL, and based
on the Microservices architecture. This
application gathers the most reliable
students data and measures the
students growth based on the recent
activities and suggest activities for the
future. It helps educators to ensure
that all students reach their full
potential.
Currently, I manage a few streams for
the Inovalon client related to Risk
Adjustment, Star Advantage, Pharma,
Data Intake and Data Insight. As a
manager, I am responsible for the
team development, fostering a highly
The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018
collaborative work environment and
ensuring that the projects adhere to
Agile methodologies reporting
metrics to measure quality,
performance and burn down.
We, as a team, researched, learnt and
successfully implemented a wide
range of technologies across Inovalon
products. Apart from this, we created
a design for Internalization and iTCC
Next applications.
Over the time, I have started working
towards empowering the team. I have
built processes around people instead
of building them around tasks.
I act as an enabler, helping them
achieve what they are working on,
help them out when they are stuck,
and provide them with the right
resources whenever needed.
Thanks to GGK for playing such an
important role in helping me pursue
my passion towards technology and
achieve my career goals.
GGK Internal and Confidential
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018
COMMUNICATION The following programs were conducted by
Training the L & D team over the months of April, May, June and July.

Ÿ ECEP
Ÿ Languascent Communication Training
-A program designed for improving general English
-Activity based English training for learners at basic level
Ÿ ECEP for Leads
Ÿ BD Training
-A language program for Team Leads
-Specific training for BD team
Ÿ 100 steps -
Ÿ 1-1s
A remote learning program consisting of periodic learning
-Language correction in 5 one-on-one sessions
checks.
Ÿ Freshers Training
Ÿ Talkmasters
-Language training specifically designed for new joinees.
-A forum that gives a platform to hone public speaking
skills Ÿ Nirmaan Series
-A series for the SE and the SSEs with a view to enhance
Ÿ Talkmasters for Leads
their professional skills and guide them to be efficient
-A platform that provides opportunities for the Team Leads
leaders.
to showcase and polish their public speaking skills.
Ÿ Gurukul
Ÿ Email Etiquette
-A program designed for the leads that is driven by the
-A program that focused on effective email writing by
Senior Managers
looking into the basics of planning, drafting and formatting
emails. Ÿ UBIKA
-A leadership program for the Team Leads
Ÿ Writing Skills
-A program focusing on improving writing skills Ÿ Leadership Mentor Program
-A mentorship program for the Team Leads and Managers
Ÿ WinSpeak
-A program exclusively devoted to pronunciation
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

7 Health tips for a Rainy day

Extra clothing, Extra Care: It is highly Street FOOD Should Stay on the streets: Pack
recommended that you carry an extra pair of your lunch, switch to healthy alternatives, and stop
clothing with you at all the times during Monsoon. looking at those roadside stalls with hungry eyes.

Rain Repulsive Gear: Carry rain-repulsive items Herbal Dosage: If you somehow end up getting
and lower the chances of any disease catching you drenched in the rain, quickly prepare some herbal
by surprise. tea for yourself.

Wash Your Hands: Washing you hands remains at 'Shoe' the infections away: Your feet, if left
the top of the list when it comes to taking exposed to all this poison, can cause unwanted,
precautions during Monsoon. ugly and be sure to ‘shoe’ those bacteria and
viruses away!
Face Touching is a Big No: Flu virus can enter
your body through the mouth, eyes, and even your
nose, So try not to touch your face very often.
 The Cubicle
Diaries Q3 2018

Lateral Hires:
We have onboarded 170+ experienced professionals this year, from
various technology backgrounds like Java, .NET, BI etc. There are
40+ hires in the pipeline for the next few months. This is a great
value addition to our existing talent base, and we are happy to learn
from each other.

Campus Hires:
It has been a season of campus drives for the HR team at GGK. We
have hired freshers who will graduate in 2018 and 2019. So far it has
been an enriching journey for all of us, as we were able to explore
not only Hyderabad but different places like Ghaziabad, Surathkal
and Indore . Since our Company is expanding and we are in a place
to hire fresh talent, which helps us in bringing newer perspectives to
our organization. So far we have 190+ campus hires with us from
Institutes like BITS, NIT Surathkal and 127 hires from Tier 1 Colleges
in the pipeline. Despite the huge quantum of hires, no compromise
on the quality is made. Our sole purpose is to bring in the most
passionate and fresh talent to the organization, where it will be a
Win-Win situation for the organization as well as for an individual in
the future.
 The Cubicle
Hiring Super heros Diaries Q3 2018

Requirement | Skills | Experience

.NetAsp.net/Asp.Net
MVC, WebAPI, Angular/ReactJS ( Any JS framework/SPA)
4-6 yrs

Hadoop
3 years of Experience in SCALA & Hadoop with 5-6 yrs of
experience in Java/SCALA programming 5-7 yrs

Java Lead
Java, J2EE, Spring, Hibernate and experience on UI
development 4-6 yrs

Marketing Executive
Minimum 2 yrs of experience in Marketing related activities
with MBA/PGDBM from Premier institutes only 2-3 yrs

Front End Developer

Angular, Client-side Scripting, JavaScript libraries, JQuery,
HTML5, CSS3 UI Designing 3-6 yrs

Data Engineer
*Strong SQL Skills + Any ETL or Reporting tool 2-3 yrs
Independence
Day celebrations