1968: Sell coordination, not a product

Tata Consultancy Services began in 1968; Infosys was founded later, in 1981. Their histories belong to the development of computing services, not to one simultaneous event. A services company can create value without owning the customer's hardware or selling identical packaged software to every buyer. Its product is partly a dependable process for converting incomplete organizational knowledge into maintained software and operational outcomes.

The difficult input is rarely a complete specification. A payroll application may encode exceptions that exist only in an experienced clerk's memory. A migration must discover whether a field is authoritative, derived, obsolete, or used differently by two departments. Moving implementation across locations does not remove this discovery work. It changes who has access to the people and evidence needed to perform it.

Model a project as a dependency graph. Suppose teamA defines an invoice interface, teamB implements calculation, and teamC integrates it with a ledger. IfB begins from an ambiguous definition of “total,” it may include tax whileC expects an amount before tax. Each component can pass its local tests and the combined system can still be wrong. The useful contract includes units, rounding, valid states, failure responses, ownership, and representative examples, not only a field name and type.

Consider a fictional remote team costing 40 units per day and a colocated team costing 60. Five implementation days cost 200 versus 300. But if remote ambiguity causes three clarification cycles, each adding one day of waiting and one day of rework, elapsed delivery becomes eleven days and labor cost becomes 320 before customer-side costs. The nominal rate advantage has disappeared. This is a scenario calculation, not a measurement of any particular company.

A stronger delivery system reduces avoidable handoff uncertainty. It places a responsible person near the domain knowledge, records decisions in shared artifacts, supplies executable examples, and gives each integration boundary an owner. Independent testing should challenge the business invariant, not merely verify that both teams followed their own interpretation. Short feedback cycles make it cheaper to discover that the interpretation was wrong.

Time-zone differences can extend useful coverage, but “follow the sun” is not automatic parallelism. A task waiting for an answer from the sleeping decision-maker can lose a day at each boundary. Partition work where evidence and authority can travel with it. Keep highly coupled decisions together until a stable interface exists. Escalation paths and overlapping review time are engineering resources.

Company histories establish the firms' milestones and how they describe their models; they do not by themselves prove a universal explanation for industry growth. Labor markets, education, infrastructure, customer trust, procurement, and policy also matter. The technical lesson is that distributed software work needs explicit contracts and feedback just as distributed programs do. Evaluate total delivery quality and cost rather than treating wage differences as a complete causal account.

Reconstruction exercise

Two teams disagree about whether invoice.total includes tax. Write a small contract covering fields, units, rounding, and one worked example. Using the fictional daily rates, calculate the remote labor cost with five initial days plus three rework days, and distinguish that cost from eleven elapsed days. Propose a handoff artifact and an accountable owner that could prevent the ambiguity without requiring every decision to be made centrally.

Worked solution

A contract could define subtotal and tax as integer minor-currency units, total=subtotal+tax, and a named rounding rule applied once to each taxable line. For subtotal 10000 and tax rate 10%, tax is 1000 and total 11000. Eight paid remote workdays cost 8×40=320 units; three separate waiting days increase elapsed duration to eleven but are not automatically paid implementation days in this model. A versioned interface example with boundary cases, accepted jointly by calculation and ledger owners, makes the interpretation inspectable. One integration owner resolves disputes and maintains the contract, while each team retains implementation freedom behind it. This reduces central bottlenecks without leaving cross-team meaning unowned.

Test the limits and transfer the idea

1. Exact arithmetic and interface design · allow 25 minutes

Resolve a business rule before teams integrate

Two invoice lines each have a pre-tax amount of 0.05 currency units and tax rate 10%. Team A rounds each line's tax to the nearest cent, with half cents rounded upward. Team B sums exact line taxes and rounds once at invoice level. Compute both totals. Define a contract that selects one policy, names the rounding stage and integer-cent representation, and includes a refund of one line. Explain why agreeing that total is a decimal number is insufficient.

Get a starting hint

Each unrounded line tax is half a cent. Decide whether the refund reverses a stored charge or recomputes a new invoice.

Compare your reasoning with the worked solution

Line rounding gives one cent of tax per line, two cents overall, so the total is 0.12. Invoice rounding gives one cent total tax on 0.10, so the total is 0.11. Choose, for example, line rounding and store each line's amount=5 cents and charged_tax=1 cent with the invoice. A full refund of one unchanged line reverses its stored 6-cent charge; it does not silently recompute a different invoice-level allocation. The contract must specify rate representation, tie handling, rounding point, reversal identity and whether adjustments are new transactions. A decimal type does not define these semantics. This constructed example illustrates the requirements problem in services work; TCS and Infosys histories are corporate retrospectives, not authoritative specifications of tax arithmetic.

Check your reasoning

• Finds the one-cent difference with explicit tie handling.
• Defines representation, rounding stage and reversal behavior.
• Avoids presenting fictional arithmetic policy as tax law or company practice.

2. Dependency trace · allow 25 minutes

A time-zone handoff changes the critical path

A project has requirements R taking 2 days, then implementation A taking 3 days and independent migration M taking 4 days. Integration I takes 2 days after both A and M finish. Calculate earliest completion. A remote handoff adds one day after R before A can begin, then a clarification adds two more days before A resumes; M is unaffected. Recompute completion. Does removing the handoff always improve the deadline? Compare the handoff-only case with the case containing both delays. Use days as elapsed work slots with no weekend effects.

Get a starting hint

Track both paths R-A-I and R-M-I; a delay can consume slack before it extends the project.

Compare your reasoning with the worked solution

Initially A finishes at day 5 and M at day 6, so integration runs from 6 to 8. A has one day of slack relative to M. With the one-day handoff and two-day clarification, A finishes at 2+1+3+2=8, while M still finishes at 6; integration finishes at 10. Removing only one day of clarification improves completion to 9. Removing only the original one-day handoff also improves it to 9 once all delays exist. However, if the clarification were absent, eliminating the one-day handoff would not improve the original day-8 deadline because M remains critical. A general claim that every saved handoff day saves a delivery day is false; its effect depends on current path lengths and dependencies.

Check your reasoning

• Computes initial and delayed makespans as 8 and 10 days.
• Tracks the critical path and one day of initial slack.
• Qualifies which delay reduction helps in which scenario.

Check your understanding

Two teams pass local tests but disagree about whether invoice.total includes tax. What intervention targets the failure?

• Removing the field’s type declaration.
• Choosing the cheaper team’s interpretation without review.
• Separate additional tests based on each team’s existing interpretation.
• A shared contract with units, examples, invariants, and an integration owner.

Explanation

The failure is semantic disagreement at a boundary, not merely insufficient local test volume.

A remote team bills eight days at 40 units but waits three additional days for decisions. What should the report separate?

• Eight elapsed days because waiting never counts.
• 440 units of labor as an unavoidable consequence.
• Three paid days because only blocked time matters.
• 320 units of stated labor cost from eleven elapsed days.

Explanation

The model distinguishes paid work from waiting; contracts may allocate waiting costs differently.

Sources and further reading

• Who we are: Tata Consultancy Services institutional history
• Company history and milestones: Infosys institutional history