An early stage MNC startup with presence in three continents, an implementation and support services provider for a leading ERP product.
The company had expertise in providing ERP implementation and customisation services to global manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and financial sector companies for over five years across different geographies. A very customer centric company in their approach with ambitious Management team.
The company had started off providing independent consulting services to customers and had gradually grown organically to build the operations across Americas, Europe and India.
The company had grown organically through incremental ramp-up and growth of accounts based on the services being provided to specific customers. Thus, the growth was on need basis in isolated areas than with proper planning and strategy behind the growth or regional focus.
The company was heavily focused on senior leadership and customer facing teams in US and very young teams grown organically sitting out of India and European offices. Naturally, the delivery and quality processes had a maturity imbalance due to the lack of strategy, design and well-integrated organization structure. Customer prioritization and criticality drove delivery commitments. This impacted the planning and quality effort behind the delivery operations. Thus focus on quality was not identified as the driving factor behind delivery commitments.
This led to higher amounts of re-work, frustration for the customers leading to lack of trust and deteriorating relationships.
Rest of the World offices lacked local leadership. Remote management became difficult and it was ineffective to groom the remote teams. This led to obvious communication gaps between teams and also with the customers.
Absence of structured processes overall made the operations adhoc and ineffective with a lot of efforts spent in rework and wasted resource commitments.
Since fire fighting was the order of the day, focus on documentation was compromised to keep up to the timeline commitments.
Based on the earlier work delivered and cost leverage being provided to the customers, the company was able to secure new business but delivering with quality and on time was a challenge. This in turn led to stressful engagements with the customers and internally with the employees across the different geographies.
Planning, structured process flows, organization structures, accountability definitions were missing elements hurting the growth plans of the organization.
Company structuring.
As a first step the company needed a proper definition and structure. Proper roles and responsibilities definition and assigning accountability to each role was accomplished. This was based on working principles of RACI model. Detailed who does what and where does the buck stop for each process and deliverable was identified across different levels and different teams across the organisation. Standardised templates to document, communicate, track and monitor these were maintained. This brought in a lot of transparency and ability to identify who held the reins to commitments to the customer.
HR was advised on building proper career path, salary bands mapped to each band and role and overall transparency on appraisals process was achieved to boost the internal confidence of all employees. It was important to remove the influence of personal influences on evaluations of individual contributions to the Organisation. This led to enhanced positive feeling and uplifting zeal of employees leading to higher productivity. Performance was guaranteed to be rewarded.
Next focus was on streamlining delivery processes to ensure there is enough rigour in documenting what’s obvious and not obvious to bring in traceability. An unwritten rule was institutionalized. “If it’s not written, it was never said…”
This brought a lot of clarity between the teams on their commitments, accountability and traceability. This directly reflected on the quality of engagements with the customers and internal teams alike.
As a part of the documentation focus, standardizing documents was next focus and deliverable. Coding standards, documentation standards, naming conventions, approval standardisation was set across the organisation. This led to less people dependence on knowledge and understanding and moved all knowledge to standardized documents.
Standardized documentation, coding and naming conventions and mandatory documentation between the project teams and the customers were identified and agreed upon. This brought in the cultural change on the process of engagements with the customers.
Proper hiring mix was planned and budgeted for offices other than in the US. This helped get experienced lateral hires who could help accelerate the growth & maturity of Organisation.
Detailed training plans were developed with HR and training department to increase the skills of the employees across the board. Every employee underwent predetermined training hours every year leading to their planned development cycles and growth. Overall the organisation was getting ready to move up in the value chains with the customers and market their services on better quality and prices. This was done across the globe to enhance the skills levels across the Organisation.
One team and common goals for organisation and teams!
Structured frameworks were used to align all members of specific customer project teams to chase common goals and deliverables. Individual responsibilities and accountabilities were defined and assigned. This left nothing to imagination and gave structure and ownership to the teams.
Organizational goals were defined and cascaded using the People strategists’ principles and models to individuals at the ground level.
Challenges faced :
Frameworks used :
