BRIDGING THE EAGLE'S EYE AND WORM'S VIEW - Collabera

BRIDGING THE EAGLE’S EYE 

AND WORM’S VIEW 

Mosesraj R 

Practice Head-Quality 

Collabera Solutions, Bangalore 

AND 

Smitha Thumbikkat 

Senior Lead, Quality 

Collabera Solutions, Bangalore

Abstract 

Acquiring clients is the biggest challenge for most mid-tier organizations. Retaining 

“clients for life” through consistent delivery is imperative in this competitive 

environment. However business goals pursued by management are not directly 

linked to delivery goals focussed on continually improving engineering performance. 

CMMi V1.3 helps align operational delivery goals with business goals of the 

organization. The OPI Council (comprising of Senior Management, Marketing and 

Quality heads) at Collabera took this challenge of aligning the business strategy 

empirically to performance goals like engineering, quality and on time delivery. 

Analysis of revenue growth, repeat business and proposal wins showed a significant 

correlation between Customer Satisfaction Ratings (CSAT) and these factors. Deeper 

analysis showed an interesting correlation between CSAT and engineering maturity: 

e.g. less than 2% defect slippage to customer and on time delivery, significantly 

improved the CSAT ratings; Greater than 5% defect slippage and greater than 3% 

schedule variance led to a poor CSAT rating. 

These relationships, along with industry benchmarks, were leveraged to set goals for 

the organization. These goals were communicated to the projects and improvement 

initiatives were launched on this basis. With over 80% of projects showing 

significant improvements vis-à-vis goals, recent CSAT has shown a positive shift. 

Introduction 

“Where there is no vision people perish” goes the famous saying. Vision and goals 

guide an organisation on the path to excellence. These provide the goal post for 

individuals and teams in the organization to get a sense of accomplishment. 

Organizations drive improvement programs and projects to inculcate a new 

behaviour for achieving these goals. 

According to an article published in the Wall Street Journal “Where Process- 

Improvement Initiatives Go Wrong” (Jan 25, 2010), nearly 60% of all improvement 

projects failed to yield desired results. Though there could be multiple reasons, one 

clear reason is the way change is imbibed across an organization. A complete 

understanding of the end objective through a well-structured goal that cascades 

down will help imbibe the new culture and guarantee success. 

Bridging the eagle’s eye and worms view

Mature organizations follow a balanced approach in 

setting their goals and are not confined to the 

profit/revenue syndrome. They set goals that 

impact financials, customers, people and operations 

to endure and compete in the long run. Though one 

would expect the goals to be imbibed naturally by 

everyone to the benefit of the organization, a 

survey by Franklin Covey shows just the opposite to 

be true (refer to figure 1). There is a need for goals 

to be communicated so that the workforce is aware, 

clearly articulated so that they can be understood 

and cascaded as meaningful targets to all levels so 

that there is a sense of purpose and achievement 

for every individual who contributes to the growth of 

the organization. 

This paper explores the practice adopted in 

Collabera and attempts to answer the questions below 

• How goals are connected from the 

practitioner level right up to the senior 

management in a seamless and 

meaningful way 

• How organisational initiatives are aligned 

to achieve specific goals 

• How the benefits translate thereof 

A Reality Check – Management View Vs 

Operational View 

A hypothetical, yet commonly confronted 

scenario in real life 

A highly enthusiastic project manager along with her team wanted to optimise the 

design and code of a long running maintenance project through refactoring 

mechanisms. Their objective was to help the team improve maintainability and 

support the client with faster resolution times for the project. In the initial stages, a 

management review wanted the team to focus only on delivery. They believed this 

would get them sustained revenue and also get some additional business. The 

team’s justification on the need and benefits thereof couldn’t help the cause as the 

management couldn’t connect their initiatives to overall goals. As a result, the 

initiative stalled and a new initiative to improve client relationship was brought in 

place. 

The above scenario led to the following results: 

• The right initiative being killed as it lacked alignment 

• Conflicting goals led to a fall in team motivation 


The sad truth is that improvements and decisions are based on perception rather than facts. 

Figure 2 represents priorities across various levels in an organisation. In this era of 

spiralling competition, differing views and lack of alignment only contributes to the 

downfall of an organization. The issue of goal alignment is further exemplified in 

mid-tier IT organisations. These organizations have smaller immature client bases 

that lead to varying expectations and seemingly different priorities. Also these 

companies lack sufficient data to correlate the business goals to lower level 

processes. In many of these organizations, processes are often seen as constraints 

making process improvement more challenging. Thus the expectations like building 

trust in the client’s minds and delivery of best of breed high quality solutions remains 

a dilemma. However, the strategy of building “Clients for Life” and sustaining a long 

term value based relationship is only possible with high engineering maturity. 

The subsequent sections explore the approach adopted at Collabera to progressively 

translate the “Clients for life” vision to the entire organization. 

OPI Council 

Collabera formed a council comprising of senior 

business leaders in the organization to 

translate the business goals to operational 

targets and drive initiatives to achieve them. 

The team’s charter is given in figure 3. This 

team comprises of the head of delivery and key 

representatives from delivery groups, heads of 

technology, quality and marketing. This 

combination helps bring together views on 

industry perspectives, client expectations, 

emerging best practices and delivery 

challenges. This team considers the business 

strategies of the organization, derives and 

manages the delivery goals that would in turn 

help achieve the business goals of the 

organization. Also this team drives initiatives, 

meets monthly to review progress of initiatives 

and quarterly to review the overall performance 

and strategize new initiatives. A central 

SharePoint repository is maintained to manage 

the assets of the council. 

Charter of OPI Council 

Set performance goals of the organization 

Periodically review the organization level 

performance 

Compare organization performance with 

competition and industry benchmarks 

Identify the organization wide change 

initiatives to improve performance 

Sponsor and monitor the progress of the 

improvement initiatives 

The approach adopted by the OPI council is 

summarized in figure 4. The rest of the case 

study explains how these steps align with CMMI 

expectations and elaborates each step with 

examples. 


CMMI and Goal alignment 

SEI’s model of CMMi ® helps improve engineering maturity and predictability in 

delivery. Though this model has been in existence for more than a decade, the 

latest version (CMMI® v1.3) strengthens the link between business strategy and 

operational performance. 

The changes in the latest 

version are given in 

figure 5. The latest 

version introduces a 

specific goal that 

addresses the following: 

• Identifies the correlation 

between business 

performance indicators 

and process performance 

• Understands 

an 

organization’s ability to 

achieve business goals 

• Identifies improvements to 

achieve these business 

goals 

Collabera adopted the CMMi 

model and aligned its practices with the new specific goal introduced as part of the latest 

version. Subsequent sections will elaborate how the intent of the practice was achieved. 

Business Performance Analysis 

Collabera’s vision is "Building client value for life". Collabera believes in being a client 

centric organization with long terms relationships and a competitive work force. This 

is summarized in our 

mission statement: 

"We deliver highly 

responsive and asset based 

business solutions that 

bridge our client's 

execution gaps through a 

culture of collaboration 

and shared commitments. 

Doing so, we create a 

dynamic environment of 

growth, advancement and 

learning for our employees 

and significant return for our stakeholders while accelerating the value delivered to our clients." This 

is translated into a three year rolling business plan with yearly targets on dimensions 

like financials, customers, people and operations. Every year Collabera 

management conducts a sales meet and delivery offsite to crystalize the strategies 


and targets for the subsequent year. The 

OPI council took these inputs and analysed Highlights of Opportunity Conversion 

Analysis 

the business performance. With the theme Proposal conversion is about 22% in 

“Clients for life” the team wanted to number terms. 

Conversion is higher in existing clients 

understand the following: 

Win% is accounts with high CSAT is twice 

1. Does CSAT influence business better than new accounts 

parameters like revenue growth and 

opportunity conversion 

2. What delivery indicators influence CSAT 

A positive response to the first question would prove that the organization is on the 

right path towards achieving its vision. This would make CSAT an effective indicator 

for better business performance which in-turn could be influenced by best in class 

engineering solutions and consistent delivery. A positive response to the second 

question would lead us to indicators 

that could be controlled for better 

CSAT. To test these hypotheses 

past data was consolidated and 

analysed. 

CSAT influence on revenue 

growth: The first parameter 

analysed was the sequential Q-o-Q 

growth of revenue along with the 

reasons for growth. Revenue 

growth in current accounts was 

correlated with CSAT performance. 

Following are the key findings 

• Steady revenue growth was 

driven by greater than 85% repeat business across all quarters. Spurt in Q3 

was due to the acquisition of a new client 

• Collabera retained the client base fairly over the period of analysis 

• All accounts that contributed to high business growth invariably have good 

performance on CSAT 

CSAT influence on opportunity conversion: Opportunity conversion is a critical 

measure for growth. Analysis showed that existing accounts have better conversion 

and accounts with higher CSAT 

have quite a high conversion 

percentage. Both these key 

business goals showed a high 

sensitivity to CSAT. 

CSAT Influencers: With CSAT 

showing a high influence on 

business indicators like revenue 

and opportunity conversion, the 

focus shifted to the identification 

of lead indicators that could 


influence CSAT empirically. This would help set quantitative goals on influencing lead 

indicators. The framework for CSAT at Collabera for various attributes measured is 

shown in the inset figure 9. It is a survey based measure with scores on multiple 

dimensions. The survey is done at periodic intervals to understand customer 

perception. OPI council decided to identify the factors that influence overall 

satisfaction that would help proceed in further analysis. 

CSAT Analysis: The two cycles prior to mid-2010 were analysed. As shown in 

figure 9, CSAT questionnaire had aspects like requirements, solution, quality, on 

time, issue resolution and so on. Analysis was primarily to understand which of these 

factors impacts overall satisfaction the most. A simple bar chart with multiple 

variable inputs was used as the technique for analysis using minitab. Of the 20+ 

parameters analysed, overall satisfaction showed high 

responsiveness to four parameters – requirements, technical 

solution, on time delivery and quality. Refer to the bar 

charts above for details – figure 10. The three key factors 

that impact CSAT are summarized in the inset figure 11. 

With the key factors identified, the team proceeded to 

ascertain if the project 

performance indicators 

like quality and on time 

delivery correlates with 

CSAT rating. Projects in 

different strata of 

performance levels 

showed demarcation in 

CSAT rating. Best in class 

and worst performance 

had no overlaps while the 

mid layer had overlaps. 

See the correlation of 

CSAT vs. on time delivery 

and quality in figure 12. 

Hence, the immediate 

Key CSAT Impacting lead 

parameters 

Quality of delivery 

On time delivery 

Engineering Maturity 


target of the organization was 

to move all projects to perform 

at “good” level, while the vision 

is to achieve ‘best in class’ 

performance levels for both on 

time and quality. Considering 

the engineering maturity 

dimension, the focus was on 

identifying one metric that 

could serve an indicator. 

Publication from SEI on defect 

detection distribution across 

maturity levels gave a view of 

such an indicator (see figure 

13). At level 5 maturity, pre-system test defect detection would be 85%. The OPI 

Council took this as a single indicator for engineering maturity. 

This would mean that the SIT and production defects would be quite low. We 

noticed from our analysis that high SIT defects led to high post-delivery defects (see 

figure 14). This validated the goal chosen for increasing engineering maturity. Thus 

the goals of the organization were 

• BUSINESS GOAL - Improve CSAT to high 

satisfaction levels of 4&5 on a scale of 5 

• ENGINEERING MATURITY - Pre-SIT defect 

detection levels greater than 85% 

• QUALITY - Achieve escaped defects to be less 

than 2% of the overall lifecycle defects 

• ON TIME DELIVERY - 100% on time 

Management members in the OPI 

Council conducted multiple road shows 

to communicate these goals to each of 

the teams. Measurement plans in 

projects were upgraded to cascade these goals to next level engineering targets. 

These steps ensured that the organization was seamlessly focussed on achieving the 

goals. 

Translating the organisation goals into engineering targets 

CRUX (an in-house process improvement methodology developed in Collabera) was 

the key vehicle in transforming 

organisation level goals to the 

next level. The crux of CRUX is 

its client centric performance 

driven approach, selection of a 

homogenous entity for driving 

improvements, clarity in 

ownership at the delivery group 

levels and a set of tools 


prescribed for each phase. 

As these initiatives are driven at a client account level, the cycle time is typically 

short. As seen in the representation in 

Figure 15, the first and second stages of 

the CRUX-‘Critical area to improve’ and 

‘Recognise Lead indicators’ were the 

catalysts in setting up project goals and 

driving them down to the engineering 

targets. The first step aligns organisation 

goals like high engineering maturity, 

quality and on-time delivery to client 

account and identifies the critical areas 

for improvement. The second step 

identifies sub processes that could 

become lead indicators for predicting the 

goals of step 1. The detailed steps on how 

this drill down happens are shown in 

figure 16. 

The first cut analysis showed that more 

than 85% defect detection by unit test 

phase leads to less than 2% defects post 

delivery. Thus, the team focused on 

reducing SIT defects and went on with 

the identification of lead indicators and 

associated performance models. The process starts with identification of contributing 

processes that impact project goals. Then the process performance model (PPM) that 

would enable predicting the lag indicators is identified. This PPM could be available at 

the organisational level or at the project level depending on the lag indicator 

selected. Once this is identified, the associated lead indicators with the appropriate 

targets are finalised. 

Now, what does this mean to the project 

An engineer in the project, now understands and realises that structuring his code in 

such a way, by keeping the cyclomatic complexity to certain limits, reduces the 

amount of defects in the SIT phase, ultimately leading to the desired escape defect 

density which is an organisational goal. 

These predictions have been well integrated into the organisational processes. Head 

of units perform SPECTRUM reviews on a periodic/milestone basis. Based on current 

performance, models are used to predict outcomes and the probability of achieving 

the project goals are reviewed. This ensures that there is adequate management 

oversight based on facts. 

Driving organizational performance improvement initiatives 

Now that the goals have been identified, at an organisational level, the OPI council 

focussed at improving key processes across the projects in the organization. Inputs 

from senior management, CSAT and performance analysis are considered as inputs 

and analysed. This analysis helps identify potential areas of improvement for which 


improvement initiative programs are 

identified. Framework elements (refer 

figure 17) that lead to identification of 

improvement initiatives are outlined below: 

o Capability Analysis: This is a direct 

comparison of goal vs. actual. Goals 

o 

o 

Framework for identifying initiatives 

Capability Analysis 

Regression & causal analysis 

Enable futuristic plans 

Adopting successful industry practices 

of the organization are compared with the performance baseline. A gap 

between the two would trigger appropriate improvement initiatives. Example: 

it was found that a lower percentage of defects were identified in phases 

prior to unit test than the goals of the organization. Initiative groups were 

identified to improve code reviews and unit tests across the organization. This 

initiative led to significant improvements in defects being found prior to the 

system test phase helping the organization achieve 2011 targets for pre-SIT 

defects 

Causal and Regression analysis: Code quality parameters such as 

cyclomatic complexity and branch statements made a strong correlation with 

SIT defects density. This was identified in the development cluster. 

Recognizing the fact that this is a lead indicator to the technical debt in the 

application, improving structural code quality is being driven across the 

organization. Based on this, objective standards for cyclomatic complexity 

and % branch 

statements are set 

and monitored across 

projects. Causal 

analysis across 

organization pointed 

to UI/cross browser 

defects formed a 

significant 

contribution to defect 

rates in SIT. This is 

being run as an ongoing 

initiative 

Futuristic: To build a 

resilient organization, 

initiatives are being 

identified to build organizational capabilities for future work. As per the goal 

of increasing the geographical footprint, Mobility and SharePoint 2010 were 

taken as key focus areas. Initiatives were taken around these technologies to 

build processes and methods to handle these projects. SharePoint 2010 

methodology has been piloted in the recent projects that helped achieve 

>90% defect pre-SIT and on time delivery. Dotnet4.0 has been launched by 

Microsoft. A team is working on a framework that would enable reuse and 

improve productivity across the organization. 


o Adopting industry practices: Scanning of industry trends by the quality 

team helps study new trends in engineering practices in the industry. As a 

result of this, the Orthogonal Defect Classification (ODC) technique was used 

to select the right set of test cases. Most of the work in improving code 

quality was also inspired by industry research on technical debt. 

For each of these initiatives, ROI, resources, deliverables, risks and timelines are 

identified. All these are managed and tracked to initiative charters. A sample 

snapshot of the overall picture of goals set to their links to key initiatives is given 

in figure 18. 

Verifying Results 

These initiatives have led to a cultural shift in the way delivery is being managed and 

overseen across the organization. Results have been very compelling so far. 

• Across the organization, over 80% of projects have met engineering targets 

(sub process level goals) though they were quite stringent. 

• Since the launch of these initiatives, 100% of projects have gone on time 

• Pre-SIT goal of 2011 has been 100% achieved across projects. 

• Four improvement initiatives were closed with significant results, each of 

them improving 

baselines. Four other 

initiatives are in 

progress. 

• Interim CSAT figures 

show early indicators of 

CSAT improvement 

across key parameters 

of timelines, quality and 

overall satisfaction (See 

figure 19). 

Summary and Benefits 

Following are some of the key 

benefits we achieved as a 

result of the whole exercise. 

1. Visibility of progress towards organisational goals is objective, well 

implemented and seamlessly understood 

2. Because of the business goals connect, there is an obvious motivation across 

all levels with a sense of purpose 

3. The significant change brought about is that the person on the ground knows 

how they impact organisation goals. During a recent CMMI Level 5 

assessment, that Collabera underwent, this point came out as a strong 

contributor for high maturity behaviour. 

4. This has also helped build a performance culture in the organisation 


With the success of this approach, this concept is being extended to other 

business goals as well. An initiative is being driven to consolidate all business 

indicators that would help build performance models across business dimensions. 

The benefits of adopting this approach would be immense! 

Author Profiles 

Mosesraj R 

Head of Quality at Collabera Solutions Private Limited 

Comes with over 14 years of experience 

Previously was associated with Infosys Technologies as Principal – Quality programs 

and with MRF Tyres as production officer. He has done his B.Tech in Mechanical 

Engineering from Government College of Engineering, Salem and M.S in software 

systems from BITS, Pilani. He was a key agent in shifting gears to high maturity 

journey in Collabera. Manages the quality team in Collabera and is the key thinker 

for change management initiatives 

Smitha Thumbikkat 

Senior Lead at Collabera Solutions Private Limited 

- 9 Years of Experience 

She was previously associated with Sobha Renaissance Information Technology as 

Quality Manager. She currently anchors strategic change management initiatives in 

Collabera. She is a B.Tech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Government 

College of Engineering under University of Calicut. She anchors the CSAT initiative 

and her key strengths include program management, managing improvement work 

groups, software quality and managing organizational change. 

Appendix 

• CRUX: In house methodology at Collabera to drive performance 

improvement. 

o C- Critical Area To Improve 

o R - Recognise Leading Factors 

o U - ensUre Stability 

o X - eXcellence 

• CSAT – Customer Satisfaction 

• OPI – Organisation Performance Improvement 

• PPM – Process Performance Model 

• SIT – System and Integration Testing 

• ODC – orthogonal Defect classification 

• ROI – Return On Investment 

• SPECTRUM : A comprehensive approach of account/project performance 

reviews by management 

References 


• CRUX - Collabera methodology for High Maturity.pdf – presented as part of 

WoPSEM conference 2010 

• Management 9 th edition by Robbins 

• Why Six Sigma projects often fail - article on WSJ in January 2010 by Satya 

Chakravorty. 


www.collabera.com

BRIDGING THE EAGLE'S EYE AND WORM'S VIEW - Collabera

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