Outsourcing: Tata Communications Interview (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott

Building Competency

Tony: How has the relationship with your parent Tata Communications helped you beyond brand recognition?

Shirdhar: Given that we have trust at Tata Communications, they would always support our trying to position ourselves higher up the chain.  But I can’t constantly make fresh demands on our parent company saying, I need 50 or 100 or 200 people for this particular opportunity to manage a new third-party customer.  So, we identified a core set of people who would help us to make the transition – they were there from our parent organization – and also a new set of people who came in and have been trained over a period of time as a middle management layer.  We are heavily focused on training this layer. So if you are able to manage these customers with a good middle management layer, then at the bottom of the pyramid you can deliver if you have pretty bright young people who are really motivated to get on to a technical skills job.

Mind you, we had only engineers, bright engineers who came from not necessarily the premier engineering institutes, but from middle-level institutes.  We put them into what we called graduate engineer training. With our brand name we can attract that kind of talent – the best from the middle-level institutes. That recruiting and training program helps us to build momentum on an ongoing basis. Our middle management layer is something that we must constantly keep nourishing, changing, and retaining, and we hope that the bottom layer we are developing will become the middle layer in three to four years’ time.

Tony: So you are taking some very proactive steps to build this layer in the management. What have you have to do in the shorter term? Is there often a gap between the skills of the handful senior managers who have a global approach and global perspective and capability and those who are coming up the ranks? If so, has that led to turnover and experience shortages that you have had to deal with?

Shirdhar: Yes and no. The reason I say that is, yes, we have had challenges in meeting immediate demands, but if you look at how customers behave when they are going through outsourcing, you see they take some amount of time. You need about three to six months to test out what are basic-level process, with about twenty to twenty-five people to do the pilot. That can be managed. So while we are going through this process, we are already thinking about building the next teams. That gives us about a six-month window to start planning for a skill base. But having said that, there are certain cases where we may not be able to meet the timeline, and the advantage, as I said, is Tata Communications being my parent ship. They have always been able to bail me out with a few resources that we have been able to get for critical periods, and they also give my groups access to other telecom companies in India. In this way, we have been able to fill those gaps. So the Tata Group has also played a significant part in helping us overcome these gaps and in building the larger skill base.

David: I would add to that if you think about what the portfolio is, in particular TCTS’s natural synergy with the core business, from an IT standpoint we have an edge in the areas of knowledge and understanding our customers. So getting comfortable at the beginning, starting with small projects, is how we are also able to manage the people issues, as well as building comfort on the relationship side with customers around growing a broader relationship on a value-based approach. So we are not like a lot of folks doing BPO or offerings that are trying to be full service; we are very focused. We think it’s right to be focused because you can then spend a lot more time investing in a particular area. We have done that; Shridhar has a lot of activities around trying to develop core IP within the offerings that we have. So I think a narrower focus is why we have been able to overcome some of the other challenges that other companies with a broader BPO focus face.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Tata Communications Interview
1 2 3 4 5 6 7