One of the most frustrating things about working in Pakistan is that you have to face delays in almost every thing. I work in a vendor environment and I have to deal with customers on a daily basis. Right from the time of conception of a project to implementation and deployment, we have to face unnecessary delays. Initially, the customer doesn’t know what their requirements are and they take their own sweet time to wake up and realize their requirements, sure we stand by them all the time and help them identify their needs, but we cannot move forward until the customer is crystal clear about what they want, which takes painfully long. After the solution has been proposed to them, and all their questions and concerns have been addressed, the project is stuck in approval stage. If the organization is multinational, it takes forever for them to get the project approved from their regional office. Even if our prospective customer is a local company, the time they take to conduct internal meetings and what not to finalize the purchase is agonistic. But all is not over yet. The solution that was just purchased after months of waiting is yet to be deployed, and the customer is not yet ready for it. So we wait and wait until we get the green signal from the customer. My engineers go for implementation at the site and it turns out that some of the prerequisites are not complete; despite the fact we told them everything. So we wait again until all the requirements are met, which is usually nothing more than what could be done in a matter of hours, but it takes a couple of weeks. Finally the deployment starts and even in that we face delays due to unavailability of customer staff that have to be present at the time of deployment.
I have countless examples of projects that complete within a month in organized worlds but take several months in Karachi. We are working with a company for over an year and they still haven’t finalized their purchase.
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