PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL ROLE

Client: A Software Development Outsourcing Company based in Kathmandu. At the time of this consulting intervention, it employed approximately 90 developers. Their core customer base are entrepreneurs across the Americas, West Europe, and Japan, who need cutting-edge application delivery at an affordable cost.

The client leadership is seeking an organizational development overhaul to meet its aspirations of becoming a product company, alongside its already service-based outsourcing model. Additionally, it also wants its workforce in building capabilities to strengthen its delivery and people management.

An outsourcing company is essentially a people’s industry at the core – this context is all the more relevant for an IT outsourcing company wherein the overall delivery and profit are directly linked to ‘People’s Supply Chain’ – in numbers and talent.

Similar to our other consulting practice, this also is NOT A HUMAN RESOURCE SPECIFIC SITUATION, and CAN NOT be explored with a singular perspective of an ACADEMIC TEXT BOOK LEANING BEST PRACTICES.

Like most industries, a consulting partner cannot afford to use a generic management formula for organizational development. The consulting partner has to understand the nuances of IT outsourcing enablers, key drivers, operating models, agile practices, technology landscape, tech stacks, enterprise go-to-market strategy, engineering value chain, and geographical advantage Nepal brings in.

First AvocaDO prides in bringing a cross-domain expertise. Led by the founding consultant himself – who has over a decade of experience in working with top-global enterprise software solutions providers, the intervention focused on three aspects:

• Realigning values to vision so as to establish a culture of enterprise practices with an entrepreneurial mindset
• Establishing performance metric that interlocks agile practices, tech stack, and engineering divisions
• Strengthening the role of Engineering Managers so as to scaffold various project-led divisions into a singular business outcome.

An important aspect of this consulting work – establishing a monitoring mechanism for activities that are essentially creative and nontransactional.

How do we establish performance metrics and monitoring mechanisms for coding and agile practices at the individual level, such that it binds business objectives and cascades down to the individual level ?
First AvocaDO was able to deploy a performance management system designed especially for Engineering and Knowledge-based services. It tracks productivity, and outcome and is aligned to business aspirations.

 

 

An interesting aspect of the performance system was designing it to empower junior engineers to take up roles of Team Leaders, and encourage single stack developers to become full stack developers. While this has a direct bearing on project cost, it also integrates the strategic objectives of making continuous learning and outcome-based initiative. The client’s continuous learning initiatives are valued at 5 lakhs per month. Hence it was imperative to drive the outcome of the learning investment structurally. ** Similarly, there were many other considerations made to align domain centered business outcomes.

** This is a valuation-based estimation of effort and time.

Roles, compliances, and processes were established via various change campaigns. All staff was handheld into the new normal via various coaching sessions.