Where the question comes from
I'm an independent director and chair of the audit committee of a publicly listed company (BSE, India). Most of what an audit committee does reduces to one question put to management: how do you know that number is right? Asking it carefully, over years, teaches you that the answer is rarely "the system produced it." Usually a person produced it, and the system helped.
And what I do about it
Before that, and alongside it, I spent fifteen years building software and the teams that run it — logistics operations moved from paper to digital, payments infrastructure, protocol work, and five years as Head of Strategy at an electric vehicle manufacturer.
That combination is unusual and it's the whole point. Most people who can tell you your numbers won't survive scrutiny cannot then go and fix the systems producing them, and most people who can build the systems have never had to sit on the other side of the table and ask where a figure came from. I can read a set of financial statements and also build the pipeline that produces them, which means the finding doesn't have to end at a document.
What I actually do
I trace numbers from where the work happens through to where it gets reported — through the case systems, spreadsheets, timesheets and accounting packages that were each built for something else — and I write down what I find. Where the data holds up, I say so plainly; a clean finding is worth having in writing. Where it doesn't, I describe what would actually break under scrutiny, as distinct from what is merely untidy.
Then, usually, I build the fix. That is the part most assessments leave out — a finding nobody can act on is a document, not a result. Where I'd have an interest in a recommendation I say so before we start rather than after, and the work that follows is quoted separately once you can see what you're buying. More on the assessment itself.
Where there is something to build, I have an opinion about the order: process, then workflows, then a data structure the organization can actually be asked a question of — and intelligence layered on top of that foundation rather than in place of it. An organization that can't reproduce its own reported numbers isn't helped by getting the same unreliable answer faster.
Earlier
I studied Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras. I built the team that started the Centre for Innovation there and was its first student head; deep-tech companies including Ather Energy, Neomotion, Planys and HyperVerge came out of that group. I've built unmanned aerial vehicles and autonomous robots, and I led India's first team into the International Aerial Robotics Competition.
I've also spent several thousand hours on yoga and meditation over about fifteen years. I mention it because it is the source of the only professional skill I'd claim as unusual: the ability to look at a situation without needing it to be a particular way. In assessment work that matters more than technique — most wrong conclusions come from wanting a finding rather than from missing evidence.
Contact
Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether there's anything here worth doing. Bring the most recent report you sent outside your organization and we'll go through where its numbers came from.
Book a 30-minute call WhatsApp me ravi@helloravi.com
Or a paragraph by email on what you're trying to prove and to whom is enough to start.