Excerpts from GS Lab’s Effective Habits program documentation
An initiative designed by engineers for engineers

… Each one of us as professionals needs to ensure that we are effective at what we do and that the end product we deliver is of the highest quality. When we are in the middle of meeting deadlines we may sometimes lose focus of this objective. Hence we need to make sure that these Effective Habits become second nature to us, so that we always follow them and we become highly effective. Distilling the knowledge and hind sight of experienced professionals, we have come up with a ready-reckoner of these habits.

If we look at these habits, none is out of the ordinary nor is it something alien to us. But the rationale behind highlighting these habits is to enable us to introspect on how we are following these habits and also to serve as a reminder of the core values that we need to inculcate and make part of GS Lab culture.

As we slowly move away from a cost-driven business model and approach the expertise-driven model, having these habits becomes a matter of survival. Having a list of habits will facilitates assimilation of new talent at GS Lab. New colleagues can then see and learn the culture at GS Lab in a much faster and effective manner.

Let’s all consider these habits a must have for every colleague and recognize those who are excelling at following these habits in the form of the Effective Habits Exemplar Award. … ”

“ … Each of the Effective habits makes a definite contribution to a GS Lab engineer:

	Asking right questions at the right time helps spot problems and opportunities faster.
	Effective communication keeps everyone informed, enables sharing of knowledge and helps everyone become more efficient.
	Healthy debate helps one explore more alternatives, identify possible problems in a solution much earlier and come up with an overall higher quality solution.
	Keeping things short and simple enables one to focus on accomplishing a few things efficiently instead of getting overwhelmed by everything at one go. It also enables others to understand your work better.
	Walking the talk is essential for colleagues and customers to gain confidence and for them to start depending on you.
	Adopting past knowledge will not only enable you to accomplish your tasks faster but also ensure that your solution is much better because it capitalizes on prior effort and work.
	Automating repetitive tasks eliminates errors, reduces boredom and makes one more efficient.
	Testing the end product we deliver to make sure that it is complete in all aspects and it does what it claims is paramount to develop a reputation of reliability and to reduce costs.Repeating a work to fix errors increases the overall cost of the products we deliver.
	Packaging the end product in a way that the end user will be able to understand and use it easily will lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction. …”

- Ram, Purnima, Shivraj, and Chetan