Business Spotlight: On the Go

N.K. Shrivastava claims he’ll never retire.

“I don’t like the word retire,” he says. “I have seen that after people retire, they enjoy it, but I don’t see a motivation.”

Instead, the India-native lives by the rule that as long as you’re doing what you love, it will never feel like work.

“You can still take vacations. You enjoy travel more if you work,” he says.

Shrivastava is the man behind a Springfield business working with people from across the globe, including Afghanistan and the United Kingdom. It’s called RefineM LLC, and it’s his quest to help people manage projects specifically through agile methodology.

“Agile is a way of delivering projects faster and at a lesser cost,” Shrivastava says.

The idea is that those developing a product make short-term goals with very definable tasks assigned to each person responsible for a part. The defined period of the small tasks, also called a sprint, typically lasts two weeks to a month, and daily meetings, dubbed scrums, are held to quickly discuss potential hurdles to meeting the assigned objectives. At the end of the sprint, new goals are defined, as well as a timeline, and scrums are continually held until the product, or the project, is complete.

The road to RefineM
Shrivastava had worked at Farragut Systems Inc., a software company in Durham, North Carolina, for three years before he was sent to Springfield in 2001 to help American National with a software project.

“Initially, I was supposed to be here for maybe two or three years,” he says.

When his assignment was completed in six months, however, American National entrusted Shrivastava and Farragut with additional projects, and Shrivastava found himself buying a house in Springfield in 2005.

“Three years into this, I was thinking about renting – that money was going to waste,” Shrivastava says.

By 2011, he began to think about his long career in software development as vice president at Farragut.

“No issues or complaints,” Shrivastava says. “The only thing I was thinking about was my next step.”

Shrivastava figured he had two options: find work at a larger company where he could continue to build his resume or create a startup he could call his own.
 
“I needed more flexibility and more control of my time. So I thought I would go on my own,” he says.

In December 2011, Shrivastava became his own CEO.

Triple threat
RefineM provides three types of training: customized to clients’ needs; instructor-led group presentations; and self-paced online. In the latter, users can login and watch videos, or practice toward earning their project management professional certification.

Many companies often are inclined to begin with project management training, rather than consulting, Shrivastava says. They fear hiring a consultant looks bad on them.

“Sometimes our training engagements lead to consultant engagements,” he says.

Shrivastava says his team typically works with four to six clients at any given time.

For two years, RefineM has worked with the leadership of Enactus’ United States operation. Division President Alex Perwich says Shrivastava and his team have helped Enactus plan for major receptions and career fairs, as well as monthly and quarterly newsletters for the international nonprofit that puts college students into entrepreneurial projects toward improving communities.

“Through them, we have a project management capacity that has helped make us more effective and efficient in our operations,” Perwich says.

RefineM also helped Enactus pursue its national exposition competitions.

“Teams from universities present the projects they have worked on throughout the year and detail what the impact of their projects has been,” Shrivastava says. “Each team is scored and winners are calculated from the scoring. The top winner at the expo gets to take part in the Enactus World Cup, which is in London this year in September.”

In Lincoln, England, client Linda Hallsal at Dynex Semiconductor Ltd. discovered RefineM through a Google search. Soon after Hallsal contacted him, Shrivastava was out of the country, coaching European professionals to better manage their operations.

Last year, he worked in Kabul, Afghanistan, training U.S. Agency for International Development personnel through a federal government contractor.

“It was a very unique training for about 50 project managers,” he says of the work last July to prepare USAID staff for project management professional certification exams.

In addition, RefineM has worked with local clients such as Classy Llama Studios, Ozarks Technical Community College and Tracker Boats, in addition to national clients like the American Academy of Family Physicians.

And the list is growing. “Our latest client is Massachusetts,” Shrivastava says of his agreement with the state’s operational services division.

Shrivastava declined to disclose annual revenues, but he sees growth for his seven-employee company as technology rapidly develops and employers strive to keep pace.

“I like helping people. I love this profession,” he says. “To succeed in your career, you either do the job that you love or love the job that you do.”