Priyanka Swain of Tally traces her two-decade journey in tech, advocates open inclusivity in organisations

One day, during the first year of her engineering course at the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneshwar, Priyanka Swain’s father was dropping her off at college for an exam, when he stopped midway on a bridge.

“My father stopped and asked me to step down. There was some construction happening, and he thought it was important for me to understand why it was being done, why soil testing was critical, etc. I was on my way to write my structural and building sciences exam, and he knew this was important,” says Swain, Director of Engineering at Tally Solutions.

Swain describes this experience as one of many from her childhood and teenage years that instilled in her a love for all things STEM.

Later, when the results of the exams were out, Swain’s professor called her into his office to find out how her answers were so detailed. She credited her father, an engineer himself, who had opened her eyes to the vast world of science.

“I remember as a child, I was always interested in science and mathematics because my father was continuously trying to teach us to find these subjects in everyday life, bombarding us with riddles and puzzles at the dining table. I could say these subjects came very naturally to me,” she recalls.

Swain, who grew up in Cuttack, moved to Bhubaneshwar for her BTech degree in instrumentation and electronics. Following this, she pursued an MTech in instrumentation at IIT-Delhi.

Her research years at IIT-Delhi were spent on critical projects involving defence organisations like DRDO and ISRO, which gave her an insight into their operations. Her professors would have liked her to continue with research, but, like most engineers in the late 90s, Swain too was bitten by the software bug and soon joined the boom.

Being part of the software boom

Swain joined Infosys through a campus placement in 2002 and stayed there for 15 years. Having been exposed to computers right from school, she found joy working with a software firm. Her love for programming had not diminished over the years, even if she failed to secure a seat in computer science engineering.

When Swain joined Infosys, the employee count was 13,000, and by the time she left the company in 2016, it had over 2 lakh employees. She also recalls the first billion-dollar celebrations in 2004.

Swain traces her role in the organisation, one that saw many successes and a few challenges.

“Right after induction, I moved into a unit called Finacle, the only product offering from Infosys during that time. It’s a banking product used by 80-90% banks during that time. As part of the team, we all got mentors who taught us not just banking, but also various architectures that were in place. This helped us to make changes whenever it was necessary, as we had the options to do so,” she says.

She remembers her first project–improvising cash withdrawal performance as there were a lot of complaints from customers that cash withdrawals from ATMs took 10-15 seconds.

“We burned the midnight oil for two months to understand and implement the changes. After three months, we saw that in effect, when I tested it at my bank’s ATM and withdrew cash,” she says.

Among the many international products she worked on, the one for Russian bank Uralsib was challenging because of multiple reasons.

Russia had a very different kind of accounting system in place, while the product was generic enough to be supported in the United States or United Kingdom. Swain recollects carrying her fourth-month-old daughter along with her nanny to office, as she had still not taken to external feed.

She says the support of her family, especially her husband, helped her through this challenging period.

Support network for women is crucial

In 2016, Swain joined Tally, following some of her mentors. It was a very big shift in terms of team size and the work.

“Here my team size was just one-tenth of what it was at Finacle. Also, the way we worked was completely different. In Infy, everything comes down to processes. Here, there was one critical process–a thorough design process. There were no timelines, and, at the end, you had to show your design was foolproof, no matter what time it took,” she elaborates.

Over 2 million businesses work with Tally, and one needs to handle immense diversity, she points out.

As the director of engineering, Swain leads the centre of excellence for the client vertical.

“I am globally responsible for driving Tally’s releases and various product innovations. In my day-to-day role, I am into designs, people management, managing delivery, excellence and process creations. I also manage multiple organisational-level initiatives like the Tally Alumni Chapter, the engineering internship programme, and have fun at work with the League of Geeks, and more,” she says.

Despite being a senior woman leader in technology, Swain admits that a lot of women find it difficult to sustain in this field. And it could be due to various reasons like family responsibilities and lack of a support network.

“There should be a support network specific for women, because most of them are normally very reticent to talk about themselves or their work and there is a need for continuous mentorship. I think the absence of this network and family responsibilities are leading women to move into non-challenging domains,” she reasons.

Swain believes the various flexible and employee-friendly policies at Tally help employees, especially women, to return to work after a break.

She feels organisations should offer support and encouragement from top down. Open inclusivity is crucial for any employee to feel at home in a company; it’s also important to have a physical connect, she adds.

“Most companies haven’t really mandated five-days work-from-office; it’s usually two or three days. My physical connect with my team actually helps them feel much more at home than when I am with them on a call. We have a mandate of working two days from office; there’s also an option to work from home as and when we feel the need,” she says.