Measuring Organizational & Employee Performance

The Problem

A listed Telecom software IT major providing software services & products to global customers needed a comprehensive information system for continuous monitoring of it’s SBUs performance against internal (Budgets) and external benchmarks as part of a system for measuring performance of SBU Heads, conduct of periodic performance reviews and aligning employee performance to  employee long term goals

Key Challenges

Being a  “high-profile Sensex” stock following a highly successful  IPO and big post IPO gains – it’s analyst calls were attended by large number of Top brokerages and analysts – placing sudden and unexpected information needs on the Finance  / MIS team

• Limited automation –with data on sales pipeline / AR process, Projects, Effort spent & Billed, Consolidation tracked manually / semi-manually
• Standalone, in-house developed tools creating “islands”
• Diverse businesses with their nuances – needed to be captured
• Some recently launched overseas offices / branches posed unique challenges wrt sharing of data

Dimension-wise Efforts, Revenues & Costs MIS 

Using simple office tools like email and excel, and a manual codification scheme of charge codes”- the allotment and tracking of resource consumption worked due to a culture of accountability and compliance practiced and enforced by the Leadership Team

Different revenue streams within Products business – like License revenue, revenues from paid customizations, AMCs were tracked by Product Line & Individual Customer using the charge codes scheme. Likewise actual effort spent in these activities via the timesheet system – enabled costing & profitability analysis.

Order Backlog, Project-wise revenues per person, Project-wise Billable Utilization, cost-per-person-month in each SBU were computed using existing standalone tools.

These metrics, tracked since three years prior to the IPO, enabled build a strong data-driven performance culture among SBU Heads, Product Managers and Sales Teams

Base data for feeding the Costing system

The data so collected formed the source input for feeding the Project / Product costing system to prepare Product-wise / Project-wise / SBU-wise P&Ls

Key Benefits Derived

Prior to the establishment of explicit Profitability targets for SBU Heads – the MIS relating to revenues, efforts and Orders won served as the initial performance measurement system for SBU Heads and Product Managers.

This also served as a source of validated / trusted operational data for feeding the various P&L statements that were subsequently generated in the years to come

Further – the robust data proved to be a very valuable source of information in the preparation of prospectus for the company’s IPO and answering queries from the company’s Merchant Bankers – creating a confidence in the numbers put forth by the company, strengthening the company’s case for a high valuation.