What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?
I was having a chat with a friend of mine, who has a delivery role in a well known IT company. It was appraisal season, which is typically a precedent to salary revisions. Naturally, the conversation steered into hopes and expectations of ‘numbers’, as I am sure you know what I mean. The justification was clear in his mind: Critical resource means significant money. But I had a question: What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?
For an example, let us take a company ABC Inc which has, say around 50-100 accounts, each of which has several projects within them. Each project may have different teams within them. And that is just the delivery side. When a resource is critical to his/her team, is he/she automatically critical to the project? That would depend heavily on how critical the team itself is to the project. On the same lines, the project may or may not be critical to the account. And perhaps most importantly, are you fully aware of what the organization feels about a particular account and its bearing on the long term business plans? Maybe...just maybe...the organization is thinking about winding up the account you work for. So what will it look like if you walk in and demand a raise, just because you consider yourself to be a 'critical resource' on your team?
Think of it as a mathematical function. The absolute value of each term relies heavily on the coefficient attached to it. It is unfair to make an assumption about any coefficient unless you have considerable knowledge of the business and the future. The issue is relevance to the bigger picture.
Think about it, and you’ll see the principle applies to several aspects of life you would come across.
