in 2006 I was part of a team presenting proposal to new customer , after presentation and few questions customer asked whether we can committ that same resource will be handling his project for first 3 years ( which was the initial time frame of entire contract) , delivery manager answered very tactfully that Indian IT scene is very dynamic and growing at fast pace so people here move up in 3 years from one role to other hence it will not be possible to committ . That was the case few years back , conmpanies were offering promotions and hikes without giving much consideration to qualification , age or relevant experience . The main reason was growing size of teams and hence some one had to be given management job to handle others .
2007 onwards Infosys and other companies had grown upto one lakh and now it was not possible to keep the same rate of promotion going on so they used a new policy of mandatory certification every year to slow down promotions , recently they added another policy initiative called iRACE ( Infosys roles and career) which is bound to prolong the time in which an average employee is promoted , it may also deepen the hierarchy from previous grade system ( A to E) to new number system ( 1 to 8 ) with addition of some more roles like "Project lead" or "technical leads" which were not there initially.
Even though this is a standard practice with international service and product organization companies like SAP, Google , IBM to promote people after they have spent sufficient time in team and organization , at times it takes a decade to become a project manager . But this was more because of flatter structure followed by these organizations .
The kind of initiative proposed by Infosys may not go down well with employees specially in a situation where for almost 2 years they have been working without incerements and pormotions, some of the rival firms have taken a upside appoach with declaring new increments and promotions to compensate .
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Post Sales Service Strategy for Consumer Appliances Industry
This article gathers information and insight into current strategies and key objective in post sales area. I have divided the strategies followed by consumer manufactures into 4 parts
1) Customer Delight: With a focus on customer touch point and empowering customers for gaining better value and satisfaction from products and services. This will also contain strategy development for entire customer relation management practice.
2) Streamlining support processes: All the internal processes which provide support to customer service have been kept under support processes. With current economic environment and for better customer experience, it is extremely important to stream line support processes to gain maximum efficiency
3) Better Market coverage: Continuous product innovation also demands expansion of relevant services to the areas where products will be launched. Organizations are also determined to expand its service centers by various channels.
4) Common processes: These processes are common across all of the above three areas and used in all.
Customer Delight:
Organizations are continuously working for enhancing the customer experience in the areas of post sales support and services. One of the important outcomes being certification offered by Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) for providing superior technical support and services
Predictable service delivery: With the help of excellence in operation companies would be able to provide services which give predictability to client resulting minimum distortion in their daily life. This predictability ranges from assurance of data security to the timely delivery of products and parts.
Standard and global customer interaction processes: The Key factor for predictability in services will be developing standard process maps for global operations which will ensure similar customer experience world wide.
Customer Education: Organizations have been reaching out to customers and educating them to gain maximum value out of products. Some companies offer customer self repair processes to empower customers to fix their products at their own convenience. One leading organization recently launched Power To Change campaign that encourages personal computer users around the world to make behavioral changes in support of the environment.
Streamlining and Cost Optimization of support processes:
For Repair parts forecasts, pricing, product portfolio, introductions, rollovers, competitive response, and supply in an integrated way to enable risk management of business plans at a worldwide level.
Co creation of value with Outsourcing: Developing an operating model based on sourcing strategies which can provide quality product and services at optimum cost. This will require managing interface with international vendors and developing a process leadership in partners to bring them to the same level of efficiency where manufacturer functions.
Better Management of channel partners and service support centers: It remains a key goal for all global players to better manage these partners across the globe as they are face for end customer.
Developing and sustaining Eco friendly practices: Players have been working towards reducing the impact on environment from last 50 years now which include developing more eco friendly products as well as creating better recycling and product disposal Practices.
Market coverage:
At one side companies have to penetrate further for providing services to existing products on the other side it also keeps its focus towards developing service strategies for new products
More Service Options for existing products: Provide customer more convenience in terms of preferred location , mode of shopping/replacing/repairing products : Dial-A-
Developing service strategies for new products: Companies have to push themselves to become a leader in product innovation across the segments hence it becomes bed stone for success of any product to have a strong service network which can fulfill all requirements related to repair and parts replenishment for end customers.
Monday, February 1, 2010
War in the Air
Pune's Radio space is not very cluttered but real competitive for sure , upto early last year it was lead by Radio Mirchi which had created lots of creating and ear catching campaigns and continuously attracted audience by various online , on air and other events . One of the recent tool was to convince listeners that station plays maximum songs without too much interference of advertisements , Mirchi achived this by putting concept of back to back songs without any
break in between. This strategy forced other players like Radio one , Radio city followed the trend . Radio one went one step ahead and declared a war with committing 13 songs an hour which is maximum , it sounded next to impossible with average length of songs being 5 minutes , even if you play continuously for 60 minutes , one can listen only 12 of them but amazingly Radio one is very comfortable in playing 13 songs with its RJ's doing sufficient talking as well as
playing advertisements in between. The trick was to play smaller songs and avoid long once , stop the song much before its ending or cut some of the portion ( mostly music) . This went unnoticed and successfully because people listen to radio while conducting their routing activities so they never pay it full attention unless there is a favourite song being played.
Overall Radio one had beaten its competitors in their own game without compromising on anything and now it was One's turn to go offensive , A channel which was any way more versatile and played all kind of music including regular program for old songs as well as English ( It is the only one in Pune Playing English songs) ।
Radio one launched new plan of not repeating any song for entire day , with a library of lacs of songs this is cakewalk for any station but it is One which connected to the real purpose of Radio where listeners want to be surprised all the time , with new songs as well with old ones. Radio one could also identify the frustration which audience faced when stations kept playing a new number dozen times in a day.Its been close to a month and competitors are clue less on how to counter this move, the only option as of now seems to follow the leader..yet again :)
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Remove the barrier
In early days of business the focus was to create entry barriers for competitors , especially putting constraints at customer end . Ensuring that the product which customer has bought will provide him service only under one vendor and he will not be able to switch vendors. This way customers have to at times take decision to stick with one service provider and one of the classic example is mobile number portability .
In my 5 years of corporate career I have changed more then 5 places because of work , that means every time I have to change my mobile number or at times I if it was short duration like 2-3 months then I had to take a call to be on roaming and increase my phone bill . With mobile number portability my service provider who gave me first number is not holding my number in case I decide to change to new operator.
People talk about customer centric organisation , here I see a customer centric industry . Thanks to innovation in technology , regulations and of course willing ness of players now entire industry is thinking from customers point of view .
Another similar example will be one of the recent decision to enable customer accessing any DTH operator using same set top box , this will be called conditional access and will be executed by associating a small device with your Set top box.
It is definitely hard decision for service providers to let their customers go to some one else with such an ease but developing a seem less experience for customers will be beneficial for entire industry in terms of common standards and competitive environment . If one will loose customers then similar manner he will gain them from rival providers.
Overall entire industry will be very competitive with all service providers have to match the best offers given by competitors and The differentiation will be significant from each other to retain the customer base.
In my 5 years of corporate career I have changed more then 5 places because of work , that means every time I have to change my mobile number or at times I if it was short duration like 2-3 months then I had to take a call to be on roaming and increase my phone bill . With mobile number portability my service provider who gave me first number is not holding my number in case I decide to change to new operator.
People talk about customer centric organisation , here I see a customer centric industry . Thanks to innovation in technology , regulations and of course willing ness of players now entire industry is thinking from customers point of view .
Another similar example will be one of the recent decision to enable customer accessing any DTH operator using same set top box , this will be called conditional access and will be executed by associating a small device with your Set top box.
It is definitely hard decision for service providers to let their customers go to some one else with such an ease but developing a seem less experience for customers will be beneficial for entire industry in terms of common standards and competitive environment . If one will loose customers then similar manner he will gain them from rival providers.
Overall entire industry will be very competitive with all service providers have to match the best offers given by competitors and The differentiation will be significant from each other to retain the customer base.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Preparing for MBA Enterance !
Given the difficulty level and competition of these exams , you would need to think through why and how you would do it
Define : Definition of your goal is very important , what exactly you want to do in life , why would you like to get into an MBA after all its a place where they would not let you sleep more than 3-4 hours in a day , it will cost you fortune , you would continously staring at your laptop screen and reading numerous reports in record deadlines, there will be cutthroat competition among your pears , you will be almost cut from your family and social life.
Why would one want so many trouble ? and if you have already made your mind then you better have a definition ofyour goal, may be not as ambitious as becoming CEO of MNC in next 20 years but definitely as basic as what do you like to do in general.
1) Peopls People : Are you the one in team who knows most of the people around, communication is an opportunity for you , when you speak people just can not drift their focus , you can get along with every one. In addition to these points lots of clue can be taken from the job you have been doing , have you coordinated many events in college , are you involved in interacting with customer regularly from you team , do you handle communication with internal stakeholders , do you think and work with creativity
If these are some of the things describing you and your work then you must consider Marketing as your choice of specialisation for MBA.
2) The Money man : you have a dmat account from before any of your friends even understood what is dmat, you love to understand money matters , you have done your graduation in finance related subjects , your client is financial instituion and you enjoy understanding thier business processes. If these characterstics describe you to some extent then look for finance as an option of specialisation.
3) Always operational : If you have background of handling things at various levels in shop floors , graduation in mechanical , production , automotive engineering etc and you like to get involved in activities which run an organisation then operations management is the field for you
4) Tech lover : Now a days there are lots of option for doing MBA in systems management and information management , It makes sense for some one who has already spent signifant time in technology oriented
Develop : In all the B school assesments they try to find out candidates who have been groomed well in almost all the facets of thier personality , One may think then what are these people going to do , isn't it their job to provide you direction and develop your skills in multiple dimension of personality but please understand it is easy to start from a point up to where some work has already been done rather than starting from a blank page.
As part of develop phase you would have to develop your skills and personality with respect to the career field you are interested in ( As we talked about in Define stage) so start taking more interest in the areas of your work which are directly aligned with your career definitions. In addition to this work a little on personal aspect as well , good communication skill , positive thinking , good people skill , keeping a calm and composed head are some of the things which you should try to achieve for a successful career in any field.
Decide : After defining your career objective and doing some ground work to develop skills in those direction now is the time to decide which institutes you should choose . The institutes should have good reputation in your choice of area . It is time to do a thorough research both primary as well as secondary and find out which all institutes you would like to target , please keep your mind open and do look at some of the global (but feasible ) options .
After taking this decision you can start applying for admissions in respective colleges.
Demonstrate & Differentiate : Even though steps so far may not be easy but the toughest part is to crack the exam and selection process , this will need a structured approach . Once you are through with the written test , group discussion and interviews need to be taken care and this is where your ground work in step 1 and 2 will help . For beating your competition you will have to stand out in crowd, you should have differentaition points and deep knowledge in the education and work you have done so far.
It may sound difficult to differentiate oneself from thousands of other candidates who have done the same graduation ,worked in the same areas that of yours and even have same hobbies and passion that of yours . That is the reason you will have to focus in a narrow scope which can play as your strenth .
Define : Definition of your goal is very important , what exactly you want to do in life , why would you like to get into an MBA after all its a place where they would not let you sleep more than 3-4 hours in a day , it will cost you fortune , you would continously staring at your laptop screen and reading numerous reports in record deadlines, there will be cutthroat competition among your pears , you will be almost cut from your family and social life.
Why would one want so many trouble ? and if you have already made your mind then you better have a definition ofyour goal, may be not as ambitious as becoming CEO of MNC in next 20 years but definitely as basic as what do you like to do in general.
1) Peopls People : Are you the one in team who knows most of the people around, communication is an opportunity for you , when you speak people just can not drift their focus , you can get along with every one. In addition to these points lots of clue can be taken from the job you have been doing , have you coordinated many events in college , are you involved in interacting with customer regularly from you team , do you handle communication with internal stakeholders , do you think and work with creativity
If these are some of the things describing you and your work then you must consider Marketing as your choice of specialisation for MBA.
2) The Money man : you have a dmat account from before any of your friends even understood what is dmat, you love to understand money matters , you have done your graduation in finance related subjects , your client is financial instituion and you enjoy understanding thier business processes. If these characterstics describe you to some extent then look for finance as an option of specialisation.
3) Always operational : If you have background of handling things at various levels in shop floors , graduation in mechanical , production , automotive engineering etc and you like to get involved in activities which run an organisation then operations management is the field for you
4) Tech lover : Now a days there are lots of option for doing MBA in systems management and information management , It makes sense for some one who has already spent signifant time in technology oriented
Develop : In all the B school assesments they try to find out candidates who have been groomed well in almost all the facets of thier personality , One may think then what are these people going to do , isn't it their job to provide you direction and develop your skills in multiple dimension of personality but please understand it is easy to start from a point up to where some work has already been done rather than starting from a blank page.
As part of develop phase you would have to develop your skills and personality with respect to the career field you are interested in ( As we talked about in Define stage) so start taking more interest in the areas of your work which are directly aligned with your career definitions. In addition to this work a little on personal aspect as well , good communication skill , positive thinking , good people skill , keeping a calm and composed head are some of the things which you should try to achieve for a successful career in any field.
Decide : After defining your career objective and doing some ground work to develop skills in those direction now is the time to decide which institutes you should choose . The institutes should have good reputation in your choice of area . It is time to do a thorough research both primary as well as secondary and find out which all institutes you would like to target , please keep your mind open and do look at some of the global (but feasible ) options .
After taking this decision you can start applying for admissions in respective colleges.
Demonstrate & Differentiate : Even though steps so far may not be easy but the toughest part is to crack the exam and selection process , this will need a structured approach . Once you are through with the written test , group discussion and interviews need to be taken care and this is where your ground work in step 1 and 2 will help . For beating your competition you will have to stand out in crowd, you should have differentaition points and deep knowledge in the education and work you have done so far.
It may sound difficult to differentiate oneself from thousands of other candidates who have done the same graduation ,worked in the same areas that of yours and even have same hobbies and passion that of yours . That is the reason you will have to focus in a narrow scope which can play as your strenth .
Monday, December 14, 2009
Challenges of CMMi implementation
CMMi Challenges
What Vs How : CMMi prescribes the end result mentioning what need to be achieved but it does not talk about how to reach that goal which obviously makes it very much dependent on the philosophy and culture of organisation where itis been implemented . The hidden benefit here is that a company can work on a model and customize it specifically to organisational need hence spending resource and money which is just fit for its need rather than simply following some path which may have worked for another organization not similar in size and culture.
Restricted use of Measurement and Analtics : Where large organization may have TB of data available with them in almost all fields for small companies the focus is always too much on running and growing business then collecting data . It is very difficult to clearly define the metrices which business will need to monitor closely . Even if data is available at times it is not very clear how to make sense out of it
Availability of Process blueprints: Process documentation and a central repository of processes is key to management of any activity but in most of the cases process knowledge remains as a concept with various subject matter experts and not codified explicitly , this is common even in sufficiently big organizations. Even if the work of process documentation is initiated , most of the employees take it a liability in addition to thier work and it becomes a part time assignment.
Its not a panacea : Organizations may work under misconception that once CMMi model is implemented it is going to address all the quality related issues
which is not true because quality related issues have much broader scope to be solved by just one model like CMMi , It can certainly be a part of
organizational quality program but one can not rely on CMMi to fix all issues in quality.
What Vs How : CMMi prescribes the end result mentioning what need to be achieved but it does not talk about how to reach that goal which obviously makes it very much dependent on the philosophy and culture of organisation where itis been implemented . The hidden benefit here is that a company can work on a model and customize it specifically to organisational need hence spending resource and money which is just fit for its need rather than simply following some path which may have worked for another organization not similar in size and culture.
Restricted use of Measurement and Analtics : Where large organization may have TB of data available with them in almost all fields for small companies the focus is always too much on running and growing business then collecting data . It is very difficult to clearly define the metrices which business will need to monitor closely . Even if data is available at times it is not very clear how to make sense out of it
Availability of Process blueprints: Process documentation and a central repository of processes is key to management of any activity but in most of the cases process knowledge remains as a concept with various subject matter experts and not codified explicitly , this is common even in sufficiently big organizations. Even if the work of process documentation is initiated , most of the employees take it a liability in addition to thier work and it becomes a part time assignment.
Its not a panacea : Organizations may work under misconception that once CMMi model is implemented it is going to address all the quality related issues
which is not true because quality related issues have much broader scope to be solved by just one model like CMMi , It can certainly be a part of
organizational quality program but one can not rely on CMMi to fix all issues in quality.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Business of Businss Education
The factories of innovation ..some of the greatest B schools of India seems to be on path to new kind of innovation , developing the most expensive post graduation programs on the earth. ISB, SP Jain Institute of Management and research are leading the pack with introduction of new program which can cost you more than 2.5 Million INR to get an MBA degree ( well to be specific some of these may be only diplomas or certificates if not approved by AICTE) . At one side ISB is starting PGPMAX which will be more of a part time MBA course for executives and will be taught at Hyderabaad campus with some sessions in Kellogs and Wharton on the other side SP Jain has already launched a course in collaboration with Schulich university Canada which will be divided between Mumbai and Toranto campus.
There is no doubt that some of the included expenses are stay in foreign campuses , food etc but the point to ponder is whether these courses will be wble to provide you the relevant return on investment. If we include other living expenses for around 2 years , it will come across 3 Million INR, It is enough amount to secure a middle class common man's pension for lifetime so what is the kind of ROI one is looking from this kind of investment , well I do understand intellectual development and ability to apply structured methods for solving strategic , operational issues etc would be some of the great take away from this course but at the end it all boils down to what can you do with such skills i.e How much you can earn or what is the kind of job you are offered.
If we even consider some of the normal not so expensive courses , they have failed to provide a good ROI to more than 50% of the participants . All the media hype about million dollar salary in pink news paper is focused on some top 5- 10% of the class participants , rest go back with a decent increment in their salaries and mostly almost in the similar area of work ( as even in campus placements organizations give due weight to the background of candidate). even though top 20 institutes take fees in the range of 4 to 10 lacs , and the salary of students coming out of program varies between 4 to 11 lac with average being somewhere 6.5 to 7.
two of the Three generic strategies which even watchman of these B school knows is cost leadership and differentiation
Cost Leadership : Salary , roles depend on various factors from business condition to industry need so why can't B school implement a more innovative model which they have been teaching for long time , They can take a fixed component of fees which covers cost of course material , infrastructure etc and a variable component of the fees which depends on what kind of benefit is materialized to the student after course , to be specific let it be a percentage of annual pay package received by student , isn't something similar today's IT organizations doing by charging a variable component depending on how much money IT saved / earned for their clients .
I think We all have something to learn from TATA's here , a 2000$ car and a 20$ water purifier , that is what Indian market demands value for every penny spent , specially in education which is very crucial for indian middle class .
Differentiation : There are very few institutes in India which have created a differentiation , I would consider NITIE (SCM), ICFAI(FIN), FMS(Service), IRMA(Rural), IIFT (IB), XLRI, SCMHRD (HR) , MICA (MarCom) as some of the leaders , rest all are more of "Me too" kind . They should start differentiating in a way which adds value to students and also makes sure that it is filling a wide gap in the industry
There is no doubt that some of the included expenses are stay in foreign campuses , food etc but the point to ponder is whether these courses will be wble to provide you the relevant return on investment. If we include other living expenses for around 2 years , it will come across 3 Million INR, It is enough amount to secure a middle class common man's pension for lifetime so what is the kind of ROI one is looking from this kind of investment , well I do understand intellectual development and ability to apply structured methods for solving strategic , operational issues etc would be some of the great take away from this course but at the end it all boils down to what can you do with such skills i.e How much you can earn or what is the kind of job you are offered.
If we even consider some of the normal not so expensive courses , they have failed to provide a good ROI to more than 50% of the participants . All the media hype about million dollar salary in pink news paper is focused on some top 5- 10% of the class participants , rest go back with a decent increment in their salaries and mostly almost in the similar area of work ( as even in campus placements organizations give due weight to the background of candidate). even though top 20 institutes take fees in the range of 4 to 10 lacs , and the salary of students coming out of program varies between 4 to 11 lac with average being somewhere 6.5 to 7.
two of the Three generic strategies which even watchman of these B school knows is cost leadership and differentiation
Cost Leadership : Salary , roles depend on various factors from business condition to industry need so why can't B school implement a more innovative model which they have been teaching for long time , They can take a fixed component of fees which covers cost of course material , infrastructure etc and a variable component of the fees which depends on what kind of benefit is materialized to the student after course , to be specific let it be a percentage of annual pay package received by student , isn't something similar today's IT organizations doing by charging a variable component depending on how much money IT saved / earned for their clients .
I think We all have something to learn from TATA's here , a 2000$ car and a 20$ water purifier , that is what Indian market demands value for every penny spent , specially in education which is very crucial for indian middle class .
Differentiation : There are very few institutes in India which have created a differentiation , I would consider NITIE (SCM), ICFAI(FIN), FMS(Service), IRMA(Rural), IIFT (IB), XLRI, SCMHRD (HR) , MICA (MarCom) as some of the leaders , rest all are more of "Me too" kind . They should start differentiating in a way which adds value to students and also makes sure that it is filling a wide gap in the industry
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