Page 14 - SPiCE Magazine (September 2019)

14 The SPiCE Magazine • From the Operations Floor: Excellence @ 40
Keeping Score:
Are we getting there?
By Prabhakar Bisen, Chief Operating Officer
“If you’re not keeping score,
you’re just practicing. ”
I saw this quote in the boardroom of a large US-based
Healthcare firm, several years ago. I was awestruck
by the simplicity of this deep meaning quote. I noted
it down and looked for its origin. This was one of the
famous quotes of Vince Lombardi, the well-acclaimed,
former Head Coach of American Football Team Green
Bay Packers. While Vince Lombardi had meant this for
his team, chiding them to be more competitive, this has
an equal, if not a stronger, relevance for our business.
In that context, I wished to share with you some recent
initiatives in Operations on how we have established
keeping score and how we have applied it as a matter
of practice.
Technology Penetration and Absorption
While we have several and more tools developed to
ease, enhance or completely automate the delivery
of our services to the clients, the broad-based usage
of the tools and the outcomes that were delivered
eventually weren’t measured consistently. The
‘Tech Tool Penetration’ and ‘Productivity Impact’
measurement was a question. As a solution, the
TechOps team developed an intuitive, yet detailed,
mechanism to capture these two parameters. Today,
we see results across the organization. We know
which tool has how much utilization and what its
impact is among geographies and account levels.
It’s been an enormous and arduous exercise, but the
results have been rewarding. We are using these
measurements to drive our technology strategy of
Standardization, Industrialization and Platformization.
Service Level Performance and
Related Penalties
Service Level Agreements are foundational to our
delivery of services to the clients. The least clients
expect from us is 100% adherence to these service
levels, but we all understand that for a variety of
reasons, 100% adherence may not be practical nor
The SPiCE Magazine • From the Operations Floor: Excellence @ 40 15
realistic. Our performance last year stayed short on
this expectation. However, it was kind-of taken for
granted as client SLA wasn’t consistently tracked as a
key metric across the organization. It also resulted in
service penalties, albeit minor, being paid periodically.
SLAs needed a strong focus as we wished to build a
stronger Voice of the Customer. Over the last eight to
nine months, the Quality team, in strong collaboration
with Delivery teams, worked on an effective and pro-
active SLA tracking mechanism. As a result, we saw
significant improvement in our SLA adherence globally
with our penalties going down by more than half over
this period.
Segment Reviews
In the beginning of this year, we initiated two
Business Segment reviews, one each for Journals
and Books. It was really underwhelming in the
beginning to see how the teams for the same
clients across two different geographies lacked
benchmarks on production performance and tools.
The issue wasn’t that one geo was generally superior
to the other on all metrics. Some teams in the same
geography were doing exceptionally well in some
areas but lacking in others and vice-versa. Over the
last four months, as the Delivery and TechOps lead-
ership started to baseline performance at process
and task levels, subsequently working on bridging
the performance gaps, we now have a very different
viewpoint in these reviews. It’s a work in progress and
is evolving as we meet every month. We are starting a
similar review for Business Services.
Our aspiration is to establish baselines for global
performance and technology adoption for each
segment and have every geo / program performing
to those standards.
So, in essence, as we aspire to be the most exciting
and successful Content Technology and Solutions
firm in the world, it’s incumbent upon each one of us
to keep score in everything we do. That would surely
take our game and successes to the next level.
Remember though, that we are keeping score not
for the sake of keeping score alone. So, I close with
another quote from Vince Lombardi,
“If it doesn’t matter who
wins or loses, then why
keep score? ”