CIOIN

Manoj Shrivastava

VP-Group IT, Reliance ADA Group

This is the first time that an initiative of this nature has been successfully implemented to meet the internal requirements of the group.

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: Shrivastava created a Web-based portal of IT partners to enable just-in-time sourcing to cater to the peak demands. The portal provides access to progress on selection, feedback, provision to redress HR concerns of augmented resources.

The Reliance ADA Group is mainly into services domain covering telecom, utilities, entertainment and financial services. The success of the service industry depends on the development of new,  automated processes and products to meet the requirements of a continually expanding market.

The business expects an improved time-to-market to get the first mover advantage. "This results in peak demands on resources. These requirements are temporary and typically come in times of expansion or launch of new product and services. During these times, group companies augment their teams by IT professionals from other IT companies," says Manoj Shrivastava, VP-group IT, Reliance ADA Group.

Each resource augmentation requirement used to be initiated and approved separately by individual group companies. Each group company had a separate process for resource augmentation and for each such requirement, a new legal contract was executed with the providing company. There was no feedback mechanism on the quality and review of the augmented resources because the process was not institutionalized.

Shrivastava created a Web-based portal of IT partners to enable just-in-time sourcing to cater to the peak but temporary demands. The portal provides access to progress on selection, feedback, provision to redress HR concerns of augmented resources and extension of contract to all stakeholders involved.

But, since each group company is an independent entity and many of them are publicly listed, each company has a different commercial and legal process. The challenge was to arrive at a common agreement, which was simple and manageable for all stakeholders. Shrivastava enabled this by seeking buy-in from all stakeholders.

"To the empanelled IT partner, the initiative provides a single view of IT resource requirements of the entire group and helps align its business development team to increase its productivity," he says.

The initiative reduced the cycle time for sourcing from 20 working days to five working days. Furthermore, there has been a 15 percent reduction in resource rates due to better negotiation resulting from the centralized process.