8 Million Sq Kms, 1905 Locations, Logging Data For 1.5 Years!

This was one of the first and the toughest projects that our Expert Field Force of 25,000+ ex-soldiers took on. The lessons it taught us led to our subsequent explosive growth. I share this because those lessons hold true for every corporate, NGO, and government organization wanting to expand its influence massively across India.

The project, in brief, was this. The customer - a large organization - wanted environmental data logged across India for one year plus, across 21 states/union territories, using a physical grid of sensors at locations approximately 20 km apart. The project was conceived just before Covid-19 hit the world and was executed during the peak of Covid-19.

I had recently registered Brisk Olive as this Expert Field Force to provide large-scale surveys, audits, project execution, O&M, distribution, events, security, training, and even recruitment and temp staffing of ex-soldiers. These were tasks in which military veterans are thoroughly trained and experienced; as soldiers, we were always either conducting operations - combat, combat-support, or in support of the nation - or training for them - across both non-tech and technical domains like civil, electrical, electronic and mechanical engineering, healthcare, air and marine operations, these being the fields in which soldiers operate. Brisk Olive too focuses only on tasks at which soldiers are experts and avoids those at which soldiers are untrained.

The task too seemed simple enough, in the outline. But geographically distributed operations in India are never simple. Whilst the project validated our premise - that reliable, expert ex-soldiers are best suited to help an organization scale across India - we learned many lessons. Here are the 4 major lessons:

1. Centralized Planning must be Backed with Highly Localized Execution Capability:

The internet and tech tools help us envision and plan across India, and even globally. However, local execution expertise is what makes those plans possible, especially in a country like India, where everything changes practically every few kilometers!

• No internet or extremely low bandwidths, an extremely poor phone network, hardly any smartphones, and little knowledge of mobile apps! So our carefully laid online plans fell flat! In addition, we employed non-soldiers with excellent references in places where no soldiers were present. But we faced great difficulties in getting them to use our mobile app. Covid-19 has helped overcome this reluctance somewhat, but this continues to be a significant challenge in rural India. We used our call center to overcome this problem, but the quantum of work expanded massively. However, the inherent reliability of our military veterans' field force saved us. They are used to following Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) without reminders.
• Poor or non-existent postal mail. Snail mail in India is crippled. Significant numbers of our data sensors never landed up where they were supposed to. Many landed up in the wrong places. And those that reached did so after significant delays. Again, the closely-knit community of ex-soldiers made physical cross-delivery amongst the network possible.
• Besides, there were extreme weather problems, local incidents in insurgency-affected areas, covid related casualties, and other unforeseen problems.

But we still prevailed as our local field force helped us overcome local challenges with local solutions.

2. The man/woman on the ground is Everything in a Field Force: No amount of contingency planning can foresee every situation on the ground. Therefore, the man on the ground becomes the ultimate decision-maker and upholder of the Service Level Quality (SLQ) promised to a client. This is what each customer must focus on, to ensure that plans in the board room translate into equally good execution on the ground. Here, we had an inherent advantage as our field force is not nameless and faceless. Every member has a history of education, tech qualifications, experience, and performance to back up his or her claims. We further choose from this vast pool depending on the task at hand.

3. The Reliability of an Outsourced Worker trumps all other qualities. Reliability is the greatest challenge to outsourcing a service to 100s or 1000s of persons. How do you ensure reliability across a nameless, faceless just-in-time field force? Most companies do so by outsourcing to the biggest names, but those names too further outsource, as hardly anybody in the world has expensive field forces standing by to service large, one-time assignments.

Our biggest strength here was the "do-or-die" spirit of our ex-soldiers. For a soldier, the spoken word is usually a commitment to be lived up to. With the right set of people with the required basic technical skills and this attitude, all else becomes easily trainable.

4. Never allow Cost and Quality to become Competing Parameters. Such errors are harakiri, for both outsourcers and the outsourced. During negotiations, Cost is paramount while negotiating, whereas quality is all that matters thereafter. But if the outsourced team is forced to choose between the two, quality usually takes a hit. You as the outsourcer must guard against this. Either go easy on the cost negotiation or ensure that your vendor can demonstrate the right capability. Here again, our modeling helped us. A country-wide mapping of the right talent - down to each district - reduces our administrative costs like long travel and stays to the barest minimum. Further, modeling our assignments as full-time, part-time, and just-in-time for the field force members reduces the financial burden on the end customer.

We have gone on to deliver many such large-scale projects across India. But the lessons from those have only not lessened the importance of the above basic learnings.

Ultimately, a field force is that man or woman in the field. Ensure reach, reliability, and quality through that man or woman, aided by whatever else you can. Do this, and you prevent yourself a million headaches later.