Strengthening Hexaware Delivery

COVID-19 has been an overwhelming experience for organizations, as they had to witness shift from the traditional work model and adapt to the new normal of Work From Home. The pandemic is transforming people’s approach towards work, mobility, and working models.

Though Hexaware did everything to enable a  safe, secure and highly productive environment for  consultants, our delivery leaders had a new challenge to face – how to manage work remotely while delivering optimal productivity and provide customers the confidence that transition to WFH is going to be a seamless experience for them.

Strategy to strengthen Hexaware delivery

While our customers were happy with the measures taken by Hexaware to ensure business continuity, Hexaware delivery leadership wanted to be proactive and explore new mechanisms to ensure no productivity loss for the customers.

We wanted full transparency on a daily basis to allow progress of collective actions.

At the same time, we wanted our approach to be voluntary and based on trust (no formulas to derive the status, etc.). The focus was on helping the workforce, not pushing them.

Continuing with the values of our open and caring culture to support each other, it was decided that the Vertical Delivery Heads (VDHs) would discuss the issues daily allowing all VDHs to support their colleagues.

We wanted to create an ability to anticipate problems collectively by connecting the dots and take actions before bigger problems arise.

Solution implemented

Hexaware used the challenges posed by the pandemic to test its resilience, agility, and robustness of delivery processes. This is how the solution would unfold:

We use SmartBase as our project management tool. To manage issues which could potentially impact our service levels and delivery, we quickly enhanced SmartBase to provide complete and instant visibility to the delivery leadership, who could then act on it.

The project manager updates the status of the project daily (or more frequently) in SmartBase against parameters like productivity, quality, cost, schedule, resources, technical challenges, Service Level Agreements and customer complaints. There is an atmosphere of openness, and project managers are encouraged to proactively highlight projects issues and risks using this feature in SmartBase. These reports from all our customer projects get rolled up as a dashboard for the leadership, who review all amber and red projects on a daily basis. The cadence of review ensures that potential blockers for a successful delivery are acted upon swiftly.

Summarizing

• This is now the single source of truth for the management to know the status of all their projects at the click of a button
• Customer is assured that the project is on track and there are no business disruptions due to the pandemic
• Project managers have the confidence that quick action would be initiated to address issues hampering delivery
• Trends are displayed for the last five days, enabling the management to track the progress of issues and follow-up for timely closure
• Greater business agility
• Zero customer escalations due to WFH