CONTENTS Interview with Sovan Panda Analytics in HR Strategic Importance of HR
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Interview with Mr. Sovan Panda We are immensely humbled by the extremely insightful interview of Mr. Sovan Panda, CEO and Founder, Mangosteen Holdings, which will be published in our magazine. Mr. Panda has done his Bachelor of Technology from Manoharbhai Engineering College in Computer Science. He is an Executive Leadership Coach, an entrepreneur, a Keynote Speaker, a mentor, an advisor, an angel investor.
The insightful interaction started with Mr.Panda describing about his journey as a program manager at the Infosys-IBM collaboration project. He then educated us about the importance of organization structure and hierarchy. He further mentioned that the pillars for a successful organization are, “Goal Planning, Communication, Ideas, Focus and Leadership”. In addition to this, he described the challenges that an organization faces while mergers and acquisitions. He further enlightened us about how an organization needs to reinvent itself to keep up with the changing and emerging technological and cultural trends.
Interviewer- During the tenure of your role as a program manager, you played an integral part in taking care of Infosys-IBM Alliance Relationship in collaboration with IBM for ADM (Application Development & Maintenance) space to utilize Bluemix (IBM’s Cloud platform) for development and deployment of the next generation of cloud apps for global client base. Can you please share some insights and walk us through your journey and the challenges you have faced in due course of time. Interviewee- This was a very strategic collaboration, and we spent about 14+ months on building really Collaborative Strategic alliance model between Infosys and IBM and this was related to create an additional revenue stream through alliance partnerships and taking the partnership to the next level through structured alliance organization and to build an ecosystem to nurture and enhance relationship with Infosys and IBM clients by offering the next generation of cloud apps to solve their critical challenges faced
by RCL which is retail, CPG and logistics in manufacturing, financial services, High Tech, High Life (which is healthcare insurance and life sciences), energy communication services and utilities client in the space of analytics enabling faster buying decisions for the customer of Infosys and IBM clients.
Agricultural and industrial IoT, industrial automation, and enhancing help desk support through data, void and zonality, etc. So I was in charge of Bluemix power innovation lab invested with the responsibility of incubation of labs as well as training enablement and certification for Infosys architects and developers on Bluemix. I was responsible for delivering illustrations on products and services offered by Infosys in collaboration with IBM and the preparing RFPs with deal persuade teams, working with the principal technology architects and service offering heads of each vertical, conceptualizing ideas for current market requirements, developing assets and solutions, in coordination with Infosys and IBM architects. Conducting workshops at the client location to ensure the adoption of Bluemix architecting solutions enabled penetration in multiple accounts and generating substantial revenue. Today, it is very apparent and meaningful to create a cohesive, collaborative and strategic alliance in partnership model which enables the two organizations to generate higher revenues through building assets, solutions, cloud apps which will generate the product reasoning and generate services revenue which will generate products reselling and generate  services revenue and this creates a win-win scenario for both the organizations. And about the journey, it was not easy to communicate the vision to all the stakeholders from both organizations and it requires the stakeholder buying from the organization.
The role of a leader is to enable this and bridge the gap for the higher objective of a collaborative revenue model, keeping the client relationship stronger for both the organizations. Stakeholder management, organizational buying, creating the goals, planning, budgeting, getting the relevant stakeholder to join hands, and working on common objectives. The key challenges were the Training and Certification, creating solutions that are to adapt to the market and finally doing growth shows and signing contracts with the clients. If the proper process is followed with right planning right approach and the strategy, these challenges can be addressed. There is no doubt that strategic alliances and partnerships are the future for organizations today. So, while the challenges would be there, they need to be addressed, because most of the organizations that are coming up with collaborative and partnership models are so that they can generate higher revenue for both the partnering organizations and today’s organizations understand this. And so, this should definitely follow up their revenue model and there has to be a strategic alliance leader in the organization who will look at various organizations to find how to organize, partner together and come up with whatever it takes to make sure that the product, as well as service revenue, can be generated and a win-win scenario can be created. InterviewerConsidering the supportive initiatives from the government like Smarts cities project and raise in FDI limits for townships and settlements development projects to 100 percent, can you please throw some light on the future potential of the sector? Interviewee- So, the future potential is very bright with higher access to digital media, more automation, faster access to information, etc. Smarts cities' project is designed to dwell growth and bring more involvement and participation from the government.
Various Indian and multinational organizations and rapid growth form the economic drive for these cities. Now, what's more important for the people in these markets is to see how they can be more productive. Now that they are part of smart cities, they need to find answers for questions like how to use the available and accessible information for creating and coming up with more solutions which further enhances the quality of life to make the best use of their productive time to learn from the digital medium and create more collaborative offerings for increasing the income for every household  making use of IoT, automation, machine learning, RPA to create a cohesive growth for every individual and family in this city. So, if this is done well by the people who are residing in those smart cities along with their participation, this is going to be a phenomenal growth for those seeking the focus is given, and definitely this is going to create a huge economy for each of these smart cities because people are going to save a lot of time. Because of the intelligent management of the cities, they're going to save time on traffic and many other things. So, their productivity is going to be higher and higher, and how they utilize their productive time to create something. It's not just an involvement from the governments and the multinationals, but it is more involvement from the people from those cities to realize the potential and participate, which is going to make it even brighter. Interviewer- Organization structure and hierarchy is essential for any firm. Can you please throw some light about how this works in the context of a small- and large-scale organization? IntervieweeOrganization structure and hierarchy is essential for any firm. While the structure is necessary, the below points need to be kept in mind and judiciously followed for ensuring higher and faster growth of the firm. These smallor large-scale organizations
1. Goal Planning: Every member need to and must have clarity of organizational goals and align their goals with the organizational goals. Most of the attrition and poor employee engagement is due to the lack of transparency of what they are working on and how it impacts the entire organization. 2. Communication: communication is the key for every firm, and this needs to flow down top-down as well as bottom-up with enough transparency and must encourage involvement employee engagement innovative and creative ideas and implementation plans with enough clarity. 3. Allowing ideas to fail to build an inclusive organization with well collaborated and participative teams. The idea is to create a relationship with your employees first and make them feel part of the organization through active engagements and mentoring. 4. Focus on mentoring the employees: Focus on mentoring the employees just like mentoring the own family member. Leadership is all about creating more leaders, not just followers. 5. Large scale organizations tend to miss on the above points as they grow. They need to have lean structure enabling higher growth and build more agility in the execution. Now what happens in the smallscale organization. They must focus on keeping track of their goals and focus on execution and generate revenue. So, while the organization structure and hierarchy are essential, it must avoid redundancy and enable seamless communication open door policy and transparent organization. A structure is good if there is no redundancy involved in the organization. 6. The team is lean, not so massive in the middle and the top management without any benefits. If it this continuing. It is time to focus on more growth of the organization.
Interviewer- Product Labs, a technology company, specializes in creating world-class products using Open Source Technologies. As product differentiation is one of the most coveted marketing strategies that companies vouch for, how do Product Labs as a firm manage to deal with the challenges coming up with working on open source technologies? Interviewee- So, building structures, frameworks, and processes while working on open source technology is the key here. Product Labs must create standards and procedures to be followed while working on open source technologies. Fix the open source technologies which are more secure, stable, and have high adoption rate in market. It is essential to create APIs and wrappers as this can be the medium to communicate the result of opensource code so that in future if the underlying platform needs to be changed it becomes seamless. It's become seamless integration is very thing that's the key message here is superior. Anticipate and identify what can go wrong while dealing with open source technology and someone with the right mitigation, which is long term, and which will strategic advantage for product labs. So, all the challenges related to lower standardization security challenges and Lower adoption of open source ideas. Higher defects in the open-source code need to be addressed. Pick up the right one, build APIs, and see still how we can still leverage open source to your advantage. Interviewer- During mergers and acquisitions, a lot of changes occur within the company to adapt to agreed terms of the merger contract. During this period, it is observed that the replacement of senior management often creates friction in the working environment. Can you please share your thoughts on how management should motivate the employees to maintain a smooth transition? Interviewee- Whenever there is a merger or acquisition following things should be kept in mind. So, the first and foremost most thing here is why the merger and acquisition are happening.
The second most important is communication: Communicating the reasons for the merger and acquisition to every person involved or to who may get impacted, especially the senior management, Communicating why is it happening, and how is it going to affect them in the short, medium and long term, which is really important. Many times, the lack of communication becomes the challenge that employees start to have cross talks with each other. They get demotivated by keeping a lot of assumptions in mind that something might happen. There are employees who the senior management would think that I might get replaced while there may not be any plan for them getting replaced, and this creates a problem. And hence bringing in that transparency and communication are most important. The second thing is planning. It is a key here: how to create the least impact and smooth transition. So how do we plan so that the customer and employee impact is minimal? And how the transition can be smooth and seamless. So that planning is vital, so many times it just happens without having a plan. The third point is ensuring the senior management of that day will be taken care of and would be allowed to be sitting in the right role. So even that assurance, while you may be one of the persons who may get impacted, but you will be getting an opportunity to be sitting in a different role. There will be enough time to transition out. So, giving that assurance and clarity brings a lot of involvement. The whole point involves the senior management in providing the right time for transition which can create nurture to a healthy and smooth transition. Interviewer- The rapid pace of technological advancement has resulted in a widening skills gap among the workforce, especially in the IT industry, where the cost and complexity to reskill the workers for new technology is quite high. How can we deal with this challenge?
Interviewee- So, this is extremely important and relevant in today's time. The technology is changing faster than anybody could have ever imagined. But what's most important for every organization is to hire the people who have higher learning ability. That is the key. You know it is not vital to hire an employee, nor the technology person or employee who has higher adaptability to the changing technological landscape. That's basic for every IT organization’s employees. The second thing is going back to the basics, which are the foundation. Now every technology is based on the underlying foundation, which means the foundation remains the same. The basics are still the same. An employee who has an evident foundation in the IT industry or the technology who understands, let's take an example of Java where they understand objective-oriented programming C++ programming they can adapt to any new technology that comes up. Now it's essential for organisation either to hire people who have the right foundation or when they are hired to give them training on the right foundation or the right technology. So that adoption to newer technologies become easy. Having an R& D team within the organization that will keep identifying us to walk out of lines looking for technologies is changing because the customers are demanding it and an organization that does not understand the customer behavior or does not understand that customer is willing to invest in these different technologies. If that clarity is not there, the preparedness of the organization is very low. Now once an organization understands that they will have their R&D and E&R team, learning and development team. They will start giving training to their employees well in advance and create the right mix of employees in the organization, and this is achieved with the proper planning.
It becomes effortless for any small and large massive operation to take this kind of a challenge. Now employees with right learnability are there in the organization, and they also start adopting it much faster, and it becomes straightforward the organization and employees. Interviewer- Employees within the teams have a lot of differences in cultures, regions, etc. which creates gaps and ingroups with in the team. What would be the best approach to follow in this scenario?  IntervieweeStart cultural training so that employees understand a different culture Arrange team-building exercises for employees belonging to all cultures and regions. So many times, team building itself achieved within a particular culture within the dark. Cross-cultural team-building exercise does not happen in many organizations. Creating more employee engagements To create a cross-cultural team. While setting vp a team when they are working on a project, it’s a significant part to have a crosscultural team as part of the single team and make them work on the common goal a team which focuses on the Common Goal who spends some time together they eat together, and then they grow together, so differences disappear. The culture of diversity and inclusivity is very must in every organization as we know the concept of one dream one team and one goal is the way to go. So, in a nutshell culture, clarity, teamwork, and skill building is the way to go forward. Thank You
Information is the oil of the 20th century and analytics is the combustion engine. --Peter Sondergaard
ANALYTICS IN HR
-George Paul P, SCMS School Technology and Management
ANALYTICS IN HR "Hr used to be gut-based domain rather than data-based.
With
the
experience
conventional HR forms their own ideology, hence there are no set parameters. But in the era of data, how can HR be left out? So here comes a new chapter in HR, THE HR ANALYTICS. Bondarouk,
According 2016
“HR
to
Heuvel
Analytics
is
& the
There are many more uses of HR Analytics and with
systematic identification and quantification
the advent of software like Tableau which makes
of people drivers of business outcomes”
data representation much easier, HR Analytics is making its root firm.
So now the question arises what can be achieved by
Companies like Microsoft, HP, Google has already
applying
incorporated HR Analytics
HR
Analytics,
which
traditional
HR
practices can't?
Various challenges to HR Analytics-
There are various Metrics which can be calculated
1. Data overload- The more data organization has,
because of HR Analytics
more difficult it will be to draw some conclusions
out of it. So it is very important to define the time 1. Revenue per Employee- It is total revenue divided by the total number of employees. This will be a factor of organizational efficiency. 2. Involuntary
Turnover-
Total
period for which data must be stored to draw some useful results. 2. Quality of data- will be always matter of concern
number
of
as if the quality of data is not up to the mark then
employees left involuntarily by the total number
that will be reflected in results drawn and hence
of employees. This metric can helps to improve
the action is taken based upon it. So the quality of
recruitment strategy.
data is very important for HR analytics.
3. Voluntary Turnover- Total number of employees
3. The cost associated with- the HR Analytics tool
left voluntarily by the total number of employees.
costs a huge amount of money and return on
This metric helps to know if there any problem
investments are not clearly visible as it’s results
related to working conditions and any other
are spread across various departments and can’t
reason.
be calculated in monetary terms. According to
4. Time to Hire- Time between approaching a
the Data-Informed article, the platform costs can
candidate and the candidate's time to accept. The
range from “$400,000 to $1,5 million for a
company will try to minimize this.
company with 5,000 full-time employees”.
5. Time to fill- the number of days between advertising a job opening and hiring someone. 6. Absenteeism- Total number of days missed
4. Lack of HR analytics professionals- HR analytics is a new field hence very fewer professionals are available in the market and because of high
divided by the total number of working days. It
demand low supply, the expected salaries are in
can help to find the motivation and attitude of an
higher ranges which further increases the cost.
employee.
PepsiCo HR Analyst Job Description To manage and analyze workforce data to generate meaningful business insights. To play an important role in analyzing and providing data for strategic workforce planning and talent analytics. Gather and analyze data, using advanced statistical models and continuously learning about new ways to mine data and distill meaning out of the increasing amount of data available to mus. Data to help us understand our internal workforce, our potential external future workforce and know how we can best manage our PepsiCo employees to drive real business results and value. Build tools to bring our workforce insights to our HR leaders and a wide auidence to drive actions from workforce data and insights. Join our team to continue the HR analytics journey we are on and help us shape our future projects and analyzes. Qualification required by PepsiCo for HR analyst Bachelor's degree in business, finance, computer science, statistics, mathematics or related field of study or equivalent work experience 3 years of relevant experience is preferred, experience with data/statistical is a must Proficiency in at least one programming language for statistical analyis (preferably R or Python, but SPSS, SAS, STATA, Mathematica, MATLAB, etc, will be considered) is required Strong relationship building skills within internal/external partners and seniors staff Must be a detail-oriented and exhibiting creative problem-solving skills Excellent in Excel and PowerPoint and other presentation software. Experience with Tableau will be a plus So HR Analytics is an upcoming field that can yield positive results for an organization over a long period but its incorporation in firms is tough and costly and as of now only big players can afford it. But looking at HR analytics from a career perspective, the future is bright as this field as of now has low supply and high demand which is increasing as companies are realizing the potential of HR analytics. -Vipul Agrawal, DTU
STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF HR Strategic human resource has gained importance in managing critical resources. It is the practice of attracting, developing, rewarding, and retaining employees for the benefit of both individuals as well as employees and the organization as a whole. As a result, the goals of an organisation is reflected and supported by the goals of the human resource department. When strategically developing a plans for recruitment, compensation, training based on the aspirations of the organisation, it is ensuring a greater chance of organisations favourable outcome. If you see in a cricket match or a basketball game it’s not the 5 or 3 players who tend to win the match or game every time and if one of those five or three players is focused on being the most valuable player. That’s not how a basketball game would be won neither a cricket match. A team or a side wins when players and members support each other purposely and work for common goal. Human resources departments are charged with changings and analysis that need to occur with each member or player or department and assist them in strengthening any weaknesses. Strategic human resource management also is the process of using HR techniques as of training, recruiting, compensation, and employer employees relationship to create a stronger organization, concerns of single employee at a time.
STRATEGIC HR CONCERNED WITH THE FOLLOWING: Analysing the threats and opportunities pertaining to an external environment. Formulation and creation of strategies matching the organisations internal strengths and weaknesses with external environment threats and opportunities . Implementing of the strategies thus formulated. Evaluating and controlling the activities to ensure that the organisation’s objectives are duly and firmly achieved.
The human resource management is integrated fully into strategic planning, that the HR policies are coherent both across policy the areas and across the hierarchies and that the HR policies are accepted and used by line managers as part of their every day work and opines guest. Emphasizing on monitoring and evaluating the environmental opportunities and threats in the midst of corporations strengths and weaknesses. Adhering to it the success of an organisation depends on the people therein. This means how they are developed, motivated, trained, and retained in the organisation, and play an important role in the organisational success. Then this presupposes become an integral approach toward human resource functions and also overall of the business functions of an organisation. Thus, strategic HR also means a strategic look at HR functions and it’s functioning in line with the business functions of an organisation.
STRATEGIC HR CONCERNED WITH THE FOLLOWING: Analysing the threats and opportunities pertaining to an external environment. Formulation and creation of strategies matching the organisations internal strengths and weaknesses with external environment threats and opportunities . Implementing of the strategies thus formulated. Evaluating and controlling the activities to ensure that the organisation’s objectives are duly and firmly achieved. Allowing more effective allocation of time and resources in identifying of opportunities. Allowing fewer resources and lesser time to be devoted in correcting erroneous or havoc decisions. Creating a framework for internal communication among the personnel. Helping to integrate the behaviours of individuals into a totality of effort.
Providing a basis for the clarification of the individuals responsibilities. Giving encouragement for forward thinking. Providing a duly co-operative, integrated and enthusiastic approach in tackling problems and tapping opportunities. An encouraged and providing a favourable attitude towards change. Giving a fortunate degree of discipline and formality to the management of a business and it’s approaches.
The formulation of organisational strategies is of integrative with that the formulation of functional strategies. Herein, human resource strategies assume more importance because it provides human resources for other functionality areas also. Strategic Human Resource is that reciprocal interdependence between an organisation’s business strategy and the human resource strategy underlining the approaches proposed to the strategic management of human resources. It suggests that we must recognize that human resources are integrally affecting the overall strategy of an organisation. With this in mind, we tend to discussing and seeing the integrative role played by human resources in the strategic management of an organisation. Environmental scanning tends in helping an organisation in identifying its opportunities and threats prevalent to the external environment. Here, the importance of HRM proves of great help in scanning the existing (external) environment, and hence, identifying the specific opportunities and threats adhering to it for the organisation.
Besides this, HRM is also acts as a great help to make organisations competitive and make the best use of intellectual property available. This may be inclusive of incentive plans being used by the competitors and customer- I complaints also the labour laws, etc.
the the the the
HR also participates in strategy formulation process by supporting and supplying information regarding to the company’s internal strengths and weaknesses. Instances are available in mentioning that the unique HR capabilities of an organisation serving as a driving force in strategic options and strategy formulation. A well known and renowned accounting and consulting firm, Arthur Anderson represents one such reflection as an example. The Illinois training facility too develops unique HR capabilities for the firm and thus enables the firm in reacting quickly to the changing demands of the firm. Strategic HR planning hence provides a competent human resources to other functional areas also. In this way, it plays a crucial role in the successful execution and implementation of company’s and an organisation’s strategic business plan.
-Joseph Jyoti, IIM Amritsar