"Needless to say that these are interesting times," begins Sami Siddiqui, Manager, Business Solutions at the company. Sami was from the population who worked through part of the dot com bust and had a few keen insights to share. "The sales team needs to take the lead, refining the pipeline, identifying core sales resources to manage the short term costs and over heads. The company has to identify profitable customers and relevant resources which will help to support those customers and, in the process, bolster engagement agreements and SLAs placing emphasis on worst case sales cycle." Sami goes onto say that the team should be downsized based on skill, turn-over and ability to manage different requirements so the company can focus on resources that can multi-task. "We need to define a leaner and most effective sales team based on skill set, network and relationship, while retaining niche resources that are critical to business development."

Nadir Khan, a senior PM at the company summarizes the current situation into one phrase: survival of the fittest. But before changing the strategy of the company, Nadir says he would need to have an idea just how long this downward trend will last. "Until the experts figure the answer to that question, I would ask myself the following: Do I want to warm the bench during this period? Am I willing and in a position to take a risk by staying in the game?" Remember, he says, if things are bad now then other people are already out of the game. That, Nadir says, means potentially less competition, which could possibly mean larger profits.

Nadir's list of questions continues. "Keeping all this in mind, should the business scale up and continue its acquisition of assets? Do I currently have any bad or excessive assets that can be offloaded?"

Think like the boss

(don't necessarily act like one)