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The good results shown by most of the progressive IT firms in the second quarter demonstrated what I have always maintainedthat it takes more than one surprising drop in the dollar to keep an industry down for long. While most of us struggled in the first quarter to make the tactical shifts to keep the numbers in place, our partnerships with customers as well as our ability to use all available productivity levers have enabled growth in both profits and revenues to continue.

In both IT and BPO, the search for productivity now needs to move from tactical responses to a more strategic and proactive approach. How else can the industry keep its trust with a sixty billion dollar exports destiny?

McKinseys Kindler, Krishnakanthan, and Tinaikar writing in their quarterly issue have presented an interested model of applying "lean manufacturing" principles to the systems development life cycle. As the authors mention, there are enough process, technology, and metrics approaches that have been taken to introduce productivity in the traditional model.

For many years the Toyota Production System has been the exemplar for managing production with the highest possible levels of productivity and credited with making the company the worlds largest car manufacturer in this year. What has always fascinated me about TPS is its focus on "elimination of waste" where the definition of waste goes far beyond inventory reduction and questions the need for layers of management as well as excessive reliance on quality control. In the software development and maintenance context, the McKinsey authors have identified multiple inhabitants of "wasteland" beyond the traditional utilization of manpower and generation of bugs to accepting ambiguous requests from customers, underutilizing team potential by inadequate cross-training, and concentration of quality responsibility to a designated group.

The suggestions made in the paper include taking concepts of load balancing and flow manufacturing to software "factories" or development centers, and will probably see many more industrial engineers and manufacturing specialists employed on software floors. Are people from my alma mater NITIE taking note? In a related paper, Ralph Rodriguez of Aberdeen Research has presented a best-in-class PACE hypothesis, where pressures, actions, capabilities, and enablers have been defined for improving time-to-market of existing customer processes as well as operational costs, which could well be the holy grail for all business process outsourcing, as they address both the revenue and cost drivers for the organization doing the outsourcing. With the immense expertise in multi-process outsourcing that the more mature BPO firms listed in the Aberdeen report have demonstrated, the ability to provide business process optimization before the outsourcing actually commences may well hold the key to winning the war on productivity.

All this will also call for a high level of maturity in the middle management of delivery units, and a much better partnership between the sales and pre-sales teams in overseas locations and the marketing and project teams offshore. Very often it is this unwillingness to communicate early that results in unrealistic commitments to customers. Simple productivity improvement tools like expert finders, self help portals, and work flow optimization within and beyond the firms physical boundaries will also eliminate enormous waste that goes into setting up of projects and delivering them on time. As the industry explores further disaggregation of the system development life cycle with the setting up of offsite and near shore delivery centers in different parts of the world, the need to collaborate and ensure elimination of all wasteful processes or activities will bring the productivity imperative into even sharper focus!

The author is deputy chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies and an Executive Council member of NASSCOM for 2007-09.
He can be reached at ganesh@cybermedia.co.in

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