Chief Operating Officer / India
The responsibility extended beyond a finished file
- Operating responsibility through five heads
- 138 staff
- ₹34 crore FY 27 expense; separate ₹5.6 crore capital programme
- Reprographics and archive-service operations
- 33 years
- Career from July 1993; COO from September 2020
- Provisional first-board allowance
- 24 days
- No statutory seat; assessment preparation and consent remain
Decisions & consequences
01Withdrawing my cleaner-picture default from the archive offer
In 2022 I supported a service demonstration that made an older sequence appear smoother and more vivid. The commercial team liked the immediate difference. It helped explain why a customer might pay for our work. Preservation lead Ravi Tezqoli asked which reference and authorisation supported the changes. I had endorsed an attractive presentation without adequately distinguishing a faithful transfer from a separately requested version.
The sales sponsor argued that customers expected visible improvement, not a lengthy discussion of the source. Some wanted a version suitable for contemporary presentation. That was a legitimate service opportunity. I did not propose refusing it. I asked that its purpose be agreed explicitly and that it not silently replace the reference-led transfer or source account. Qualified preservation and technical specialists examined the available references and treatment choices with the appropriate client owners. I did not claim that an operating executive's preference could establish historical authenticity or the original creator's intention.
The ₹62 lakh programme reviewed sixty works. Forty-four proceeded as reference-led transfers. Twelve proceeded through separately authorised presentation versions, with the underlying source and processing account retained. Four remained undecided while the relevant owners considered the purpose and evidence. Those were the mutually exclusive programme outcomes at the review point, not a claim that every work had the same treatment or that the twelve presentation versions were more authentic than the other forty-four.
We gave up the simplicity of a single before-and-after sales story. The revised conversation required more specialist time and sometimes ended without an immediate treatment decision. The four unresolved works remained visible. Commercial colleagues could still offer a presentation version where the customer actually wanted it and the relevant permissions supported it, but the choice needed a different description from a faithful transfer.
I would ask the reference question before approving a demonstration next time. My mistake was not appreciating a visually appealing output. It was allowing that appeal to decide the purpose of the service before the owner and qualified specialists had done so. The change made our offer more precise; it did not prove that every later restoration decision would be uncontested or that a record of processing could answer every historical question.
Changing an eight-week promise after examining the material
A 2023 intake programme covered 480 physical carriers. I had accepted an eight-week delivery assumption built largely from item count and routine transfer capacity. The condition review identified 360 ready for routine transfer, 84 requiring specialist preparation and 36 with incomplete identification. Those were different starting conditions. The volume total alone could not establish a responsible sequence or a completion date for the whole collection.
The account manager wanted to preserve the original date because the customer had planned an internal access project around it. The production team pointed out that specialist preparation could not simply be treated as another routine slot. Ravi and the qualified owners examined what work could proceed and which questions required customer clarification. We kept the 36 incompletely identified carriers visible, without inventing titles or assuming that a container label supplied every required fact. Handling and treatment decisions remained with the relevant specialists.
We agreed a twelve-week programme with the customer and incurred ₹48 lakh additional preparation and coordination expense. The revised timetable was an authorised change to the service account, not a unilateral declaration that the earlier promise no longer mattered. Routine-ready material could proceed while other work followed its appropriate path. The reviewed groups described intake conditions, not 480 completed transfers or 84 successful recoveries. Any item whose condition or identity remained unresolved retained that status.
The customer had to revise part of the access plan, and the operating team had to carry a longer programme alongside other commitments. I did not describe the change as a cost-free improvement in discipline. My responsibility was to acknowledge that the original date had rested on an incomplete account and to help produce a usable alternative. We did not ask staff to make the eight-week claim appear achievable through unsuitable handling, unqualified work or unsupported assumptions about the material.
The lesson changed the order of my review. A carrier count belongs beside the condition and identification account before it becomes a promise about pace. That does not require waiting for perfect certainty before any schedule can be discussed. It requires an honest statement of the basis, dependencies and owner decisions that remain. I would rather explain those conditions while the customer still has choices than discover them after a reassuring date has become part of somebody else's plan.
Finding incomplete transfers inside files that had not changed
In 2024 a delivery review covered 920 digital files. All matched the checksums recorded at the transfer stage. The initial completion account treated that consistency as stronger evidence than it supplied. A matching comparison showed that the file corresponded to the recorded digital state; it did not establish that the initial transfer had captured the intended sound and picture completely or in the agreed presentation.
Technical colleagues valued the integrity checks and reasonably resisted any suggestion that they were pointless. I agreed. The question was whether a useful control was being asked to answer a different question. Ravi and the relevant content and technical reviewers examined the deliverable requirements. The commercial team wanted to close the delivery, while the review team wanted the remaining content questions kept within it. I supported the additional examination at a cost of ₹37 lakh rather than let the checksum result become a substitute for acceptance evidence.
Content review cleared 892 files and held 28 for correction or client examination. Twenty of the held files had incomplete sound in the transfer, while eight had a picture-format issue. Those groups reconcile to the 920 reviewed files and remained distinct from the checksum result, which all had passed. A hold was not a claim that the source material had been lost, nor was it a completed correction. The specialists retained the actual diagnosis and remedy, with customer decisions where the intended deliverable needed clarification.
We retained the 28 in the delivery account and explained the status to the customer through the authorised process. The file-comparison evidence remained useful for its own purpose. We did not discard it because it had been overinterpreted. Instead, the report separated consistency, content examination and the agreed acceptance stage, including what had not yet been resolved. Commercial treatment remained subject to the actual agreement and responsible decisions, not an internal status change made by operations.
I would establish those distinctions when the programme is designed, before a green result becomes familiar as a completion signal. A stable copy can preserve an initial omission just as reliably as it preserves a complete transfer. The COO's contribution is to make the service account depend on the right evidence, without pretending to perform every technical check personally. The review produced a more defensible delivery position, not a claim of permanent digital preservation or flawless future use.
Funding custody instead of treating digitisation as disposal authority
By 2025 we faced pressure on the space used for originals after digital work had been delivered. The operating plan was easier to close at the copy-acceptance milestone than at the end of custody. A proposal suggested that delivered digital files should allow routine disposal of the corresponding physical material and release space for incoming work. The actual agreements did not support that assumption across the collections concerned.
The finance sponsor questioned why the company should keep paying for material whose copying work had finished. The commercial team wanted capacity for new commissions. Those concerns were legitimate. Continuing custody needs a viable arrangement, and a service company should not drift into an open-ended obligation simply because nobody has asked the owner to decide. I nevertheless rejected the idea that space pressure or digital acceptance created authority to dispose of entrusted originals. Ownership, the actual terms and the material's preservation value needed their appropriate review.
We approved ₹62 lakh annual specialist storage expense and ₹28 lakh setup cost for an additional arrangement while the responsible teams worked through return, retention and other expressly authorised decisions with owners. Qualified preservation and safety specialists assessed the conditions; commercial and legal owners addressed the agreements. I did not represent the COO's approval of a budget as certification of the facility or as a promise that every item would remain preserved indefinitely. The additional cost belonged in the board's operating account.
The choice reduced the immediate space pressure without making the underlying owner decisions disappear. New intake had to be planned against the actual capacity and agreed obligations, rather than against material the company hoped it could remove. Some colleagues regarded that as an expensive response to completed jobs. I asked that the job definition include what we still held and what we were authorised to do with it. A digital delivery could be complete while a custody obligation continued.
Next time I would make the expected custody outcome part of the service discussion before the originals arrive, with a process for revisiting it where circumstances change. This case is not a universal rule that every source must be held forever. It is a decision to establish authority and an appropriate arrangement before changing what happens to somebody else's material. The cost was real, and so was the responsibility that the earlier completion measure had allowed the enterprise to overlook.