Ramifications of Scale in the 'High Growth' IT services industry -- Part Two

In my previous blog I talked about the impact high growth rates have on various critical success factors in the IT services industry such as Customer Satisfaction, Delivery Excellence, Operational Effectiveness and Talent Management. To alleviate the challenges posed by high growth on these parameters I am suggesting a few simple steps that need to be taken by the management of the IT Services companies.

1.   Alleviating the Impact of  High Growth On Customer Satisfaction

• Having a ‘Strategic Account Manager/Client Partner’ who will be the single point of contact/Customer Owner from the company for all the major customers for addressing their issues and concerns
• Adequate enablement and empowerment of the client facing team so as to enable them to address customer concerns effectively and continuously provide substantial value adds to the customers
• Identifying a second layer of ‘Relationship Managers’ who can serve the purpose of supporting the ‘Strategic Account Manager/Client Partner’ whenever and wherever necessary

2.   Alleviating the Impact of High Growth on Delivery Excellence

• Develop and harness ‘Large Program Management Framework’ at company level that will incubate, grow and manage large accounts
• Build an  optimized and scalable organization structure which leads to better employee connect and governance
• Institute a proper KM framework and have a core team that constantly updates the KM database and provides a good portal accessible to all employees
• Unique organization structures  will be needed to meet the needs of the larger portfolios and accounts

3.   Alleviating the Impact of High Growth on Operations effectiveness

• Six Sigma projects and Lean Initiatives need be run to facilitate incremental improvements at project/program/account level which will roll up to substantial savings at the company level
• Frequent Audits and Assessments can be conducted to ensure that the process adherence and compliance issues are addressed
• Benchmarking exercises can be conducted with competitor firms to ensure that the operational excellence parameters achieved by the company surpass the norms of the industry
• Non linear measures like IPs and Solutions and innovative pricing models may need to be adopted to bring exponential increases in productivity metrics

4.   Impact of High Growth on Talent Management

• Explore non conventional areas for recruitment such as:
•  Non Engineers to be recruited and enabled in Software development
• Hiring program managers and project managers from Non IT industries who have the experience of handling large projects and adapting them to IT services company
• Plan and set up infrastructure for training and certifying people in large numbers. To meet the inadequacy of training staff , the company must encourage the senior technical/domain experts to participate in mentoring and training activities.
• Empower the managers at second and third level from the SBU Head to take decisions and execute plans that normally would be executed by the SBU head ( More delegation of responsibilities is needed as the organization grows rapidly)
• Providing a clear career road map and instituting a good reward and C&B system that encourages the star performers and promotes meritocracy based system