Qatar and the health cards

Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha was a different kind of organization from anything I had worked in before.

HMC was, and is, the largest hospital network in Qatar. The IT department I joined was a stable, well-funded, somewhat slow-moving environment. I was hired as a programmer. My manager was a man named Moorthy. My initial work was on an oncology software system. I worked on it for about two years.

About eighteen months in, I started to feel a thing I had not felt before in my career. The system we were building was not being used. There was no rollout plan. There were no users on the other side asking for the next version. We were developing something that was, at best, going to sit on a shelf. The team’s morale was the morale of people who suspect their work is going nowhere.

I had two options. I could keep my head down and take the salary. The salary was good. The work was light. The hours were predictable. I had two young children and a wife who was new to the country.

Or I could try to move to a different project inside the same hospital network.

I tried the second.

I started making friends with managers outside my immediate reporting line. The hospital had a number of Qatari managers who ran specific verticals. I made a real friendship with one of them, whose name was Badr Al Ubaidan. Badr was a man whose career inside the Qatari government health system was on a different trajectory from mine, but our conversations were the conversations of equals. He saw me as a person, not as the Pakistani programmer in the IT department.

I asked Badr whether he had any project he could use me on.

He had one. The project was the transformation of the State of Qatar’s national health card system. It was a country-level project. The current health cards were paper-based. Qatar wanted to move to a national identity-linked digital card. The project was sitting in his queue waiting for someone to run it.

He proposed me as the project manager.

There was a tussle. The IT department I worked for did not want to release me. The vertical Badr ran did not formally have the authority to pull me. The conversation went up the chain, came back down, and eventually I was moved to the project. I became the project manager for the transformation of the Qatar national health card system.

This was the move that changed my career.

I want to write about why, because the move is the kind of move that does not appear on a resume.

The move was not technical. The move was not based on my engineering credentials. The move was based on the fact that I had spent eighteen months at HMC making friends with people outside my immediate reporting line, while the work I was officially being paid to do was going nowhere. The friendships were the work. The official work was the cover.

I have used this pattern many times since. Inside any organization, especially a slow-moving one, the formal reporting line is rarely where the most interesting work is happening. The most interesting work is one or two friendships away. The price of finding it is the price of being the kind of colleague that people want to bring onto their projects. That price is paid over months. It is not paid in any single act.

I ran the project. The vendor was an Egyptian company that handled the hardware and the software stack. I managed them. I learned how to run an offshore vendor as a project manager. I learned how to manage a multi-year, country-level engagement. I learned how to translate what a hospital CEO wants into what a software vendor can build.

The project shipped. The card system was rolled out. To this day, every citizen and resident of Qatar carries a health card whose origin I had a hand in.

I started preparing for the PMP certification during this period. I printed the entire PMP study guide on the office copier. I read it during evenings and weekends. I never sat the exam. I had every intention of sitting it. I just did not get around to it.

The PMP study turned out to matter for a different reason. I will tell you what the reason was in a moment.

In Qatar, our second child was born.

The Qatar years were the years I made the friendships that have lasted. The expat community in Doha was tight. There were Pakistani families, Indian families, Egyptian families, Filipino families, all sharing apartments and weekends and Eid dinners. There were Qatari friends, including Badr, who became lifetime friends. The version of me that knows how to make friends across cultures, which I had first started learning in Dubai, was finished in Qatar.

There were also the spiritual practices that I have written about elsewhere on this site. The discipline of the five daily prayers. The Friday congregations. The Ramadan rhythm. The Hajj that I would eventually perform several years later. The Qatar years were the years where the spiritual operating model that I have used for the rest of my career was set.

By 2007, I started feeling restless.

I had run the country-level project. I had become a project manager. I had made the friendships that could have kept me in Doha indefinitely. But the next move at HMC was unclear. The hospital was a stable system. Stable systems do not promote you quickly. I started looking outside.

I applied on the Emirates Airline portal for a project manager position.

A man named Graham Parker, who was at the time running an Emirates IT function, called me for a phone interview. The phone interview went well. The PMP study, which I had never sat the exam for, turned out to be the perfect preparation for the kind of questions the interview asked. I aced the phone screen.

Then I was flown to Dubai for the in-person interview. I was supposed to be interviewed by a man named Dilip. Dilip was unavailable. I was instead interviewed by a man named Mohan Asangi.

Mohan asked me a different set of questions. He was looking for something different. The conversation was longer than I had expected.

A few weeks later I had the offer.

I joined Emirates Airline on the 1st or 2nd of January, 2008.

The Qatar move had taken me from programmer to project manager. The Emirates move was supposed to take me from project manager to senior leader. It did, briefly. Then the world changed in 2008, and the Emirates years became something different from what I had imagined when I signed the offer letter.

I will tell you about that in the next chapter.