By: Vishnupriya Lele, Associate Principal, Process Excellence Team, LTIMindtree

Today, we live in an era of rapidly evolving business landscapes that are dynamic and complex. Digital transformations dominate the world, and the definitions of “experience” and “value” have evolved into new dimensions. Thus, maintaining a competitive advantage requires more facets than mere operational excellence.

Ignoring the shift and failing to adapt to changing customer expectations can have dire consequences. The failures of giant companies like Nokia and Yahoo are cautionary tales of missed opportunities, mismanagement, poor strategic decisions, and fierce competition. Nokia witnessed a staggering 90%¹ decline in six years. Similarly, Yahoo² gradually faded away through acquisitions of assets and businesses by different groups.

Staying afloat in an ever-changing environment requires focusing on innovation, client-centricity, and employee experience. Quality management principles help to enhance inherent capabilities effectively. They enable organizations to meet evolving customer expectations rapidly, cost-effectively, and sustainably than their rivals, and enhance the employee experience.

At LTIMindtree, we have designed a framework of essential tools and techniques that have evolved over last five years, cultivating culture centred on quality principles. This blog explores techniques about how organizations can approach and benefit from the principles of quality management in such a dynamic business environment.

Tools and techniques for optimum quality management are as follows.

1. Building pillars of culture and capability
   Quality isn’t just a word; it should become a deeply ingrained habit, a part of organization’s very DNA. The organizational culture sets a context for everything the organization does. LTIMindtree’s articulated quality policies and methods enable individuals to align their actions with the organization’s purpose and vision. They translate the vision into strategic business objectives that can be achieved as a team, irrespective of the spread in a hybrid mode. While compliance and risk management remain fundamental, it is also essential for the organization to show the appetite to predict and excel. Here are the tools that helped us build the pillars.
   • Skills, tools, mindsets – Instill organizational culture and develop the ability to comprehend and translate everyday tasks effortlessly with specifically designed role-based training
   • Real-time data analytics – Enable leadership and individuals to monitor the progress, infer, predict, and reset plan of action
   • Reinforced governance framework – Analyze the health of each project/portfolio or unit, early alerts for any anomaly through independent risk profiling by the stakeholders.

2. Partner with your client
   Another essential element of culture is “having client centricity at the core”. This entails focusing on delivering the “value” as perceived by the client and collaborating for growing the business. Here is a stepwise approach we benefit from:
   • Understand your client – Establish a standard mechanism to devise the value perceived by the client beyond the expected deliverables
   • Decipher client’s experience – Build a robust framework/tool to decompose, outline a plan of action, execute, and repeat to improve the overall client experience.
   • Share and grow together – Create an open forum to share experiences and success stories that offer insights for finding the path ahead in different situations

3. Facilitating quality capability 
   It is important to break down the organization’s business objectives for each team and team member so that everyone works towards achieving a shared goal in a collaborative mode. Our leadership carries out regular governance and provides directives that play a key role here and are backed up by the robust process framework.
   • Process maturity framework – Align and refine processes and tools to match current and pipelined opportunities in a self-organized manner
   • Collaborative consulting and assessments – Consult with quality professionals and implement a mechanism to self-assess interdependencies, analyze, and predict results and foster collaborative growth

4. Embrace innovations
   “Improving” is a default nature to every individual. It is vital to establish a framework that fosters creativity and innovation among all, encouraging collaborative efforts that go above and beyond.
   • Think system – A self-sustained thinking system emerges when business objectives are translated into a top-down strategy, and the teams identify the organization-wide performance improvement initiatives.
   • It’s also bottom-up – Each employee has the freedom and a stage to propose innovative ideas. To sight an example, LTIMindtree’s Beyond platforms offer project team members the chance to present and collaborate on ideas directly with clients.

   We have been immensely benefiting from our “continuous performance improvement” framework, where management, leadership, and executives collaborate to strategize, govern, and ultimately realize the advantages. This takes place at each stratum of the organization, starting from projects, engagement portfolios, verticals/horizontals.

5. Inclusion and recognition
   Client experience remains at the core; however, it is the continuous enhancement of the employee experience that ensures its longevity. Our organization’s culture emphasizes nurturing learning and creativity and celebrating the success of every individual and entity of the organization.
   • Hybrid yet inclusive – In a hybrid work environment, each employee is empowered, plays a crucial role, and actively contributes to project executions and enhancements. As per Forbes³, 35% of remote workers report increased productivity when working entirely from home.
   • Celebrate individuals – Going by the value of organization, UBUNTU that implies – I am because we are, every individual’s effort is recognized and celebrated. Dedicated platforms are established, and the internal social network channel not only ensures broad exposure but also facilitates the reuse of devised innovations and techniques.

Conclusion

The need for cultivating the culture is now getting wide attention. Recently, a marketing and sales product company, Hubspot, has released a “company culture code template” after realizing a stupendous growth.

While we have benefited remarkably, independent industrial studies reveal that organizations embracing these approaches consistently outperform their peers.

To quote a few leading examples –

• When the auto industry was struggling – Toyota⁵ pioneered the Just in Time (JIT), which has proven its potential in every industry.
• Netflix’s⁶ management team always focuses on the principles of total quality management tools for strategic decisions, proceeding to become the most popular OTT platform.
• Amazon’s⁷ adoption of lean management has set an example in the online retailing industry, through game-changing strategies for inventory management, and staying current about client expectations.
• The first version of the most widely deployed standard Capability Maturity Model (CMM)⁸ was introduced by the US government for defense.

At our organization, the commitment to quality is not confined to a particular team but encompasses every stakeholder including the leaders as well as clients. Businesses that have embraced quality principles have taken the lead in the constantly evolving industrial landscape. It is clear that organizations that prioritize these aspects are poised for success in the near future and beyond.

References:

1. Why did Nokia fail and what can you learn from it?, Tim Ferriss, Nassim Taleb, James Clear, Neil Patel, Renée Mauborgne, Duncan Wardle, Lynda Gratton, Medium, July 24, 2018: https://medium.com/multiplier-magazine/why-did-nokia-fail-81110d981787
2. Why did Yahoo Fail? The Rise and Fall of a Dot-Com Tech Giant, Ellis Stewart, EM 360, August 23, 2023: https://em360tech.com/tech-article/why-did-yahoo-fail#:~:text=of%20Internet%20culture.-,Why%20Yahoo%20Failed,for%20a%20mere%20%245%20billion.
3. Remote Work Statistics and Trends In 2023, Katherine Haan, Forbes, June 12, 2023: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/remote-work-statistics/
4. The HubSpot Culture Code: Creating a Company We Love, Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot, February 09, 2022: https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34234/the-hubspot-culture-code-creating-a-company-we-love.aspx
5. The Origins Of Just-In-Time, Nicole Radziwill, October 13, 2010: https://qualityandinnovation.com/2010/10/13/the-origins-of-just-in-time/#:~:text=In%201952%2C%20work%20on%20their,system%20for%20production%20and%20operations.
6. Netflix Organizational Change & Organizational Structure 2023, M M Kobiruzzaman, Newsmoor, February 9^th, 2021: https://newsmoor.com/netflix-organizational-change-organizational-management-change-examples/
7. Amazon Lean Management: The Six Sigma Case Study in 2023, Punam Sharma, Ask Henry, April 30, 2023: https://www.henryharvin.com/blog/amazon-lean-management/
8. Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity Framework, Watts S. Henry: https://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~rodham/cs428/cmm.pdf