IDEAS client is an American multinational technology company that provides business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services. It is headquartered in India/United States.

The outcomes

This was a partnership between the IDEAS team and the people development Academy at the client. The program objective was to identify real-life projects which the participants applied Lateral Thinking to. Many follow-up sessions were conducted and the project presentations were recorded for senior leadership to review. Data and metrics were provided as supporting evidence for the application of the ideas and the measurable gains achieved. The post training implementation was so popular that often there were three follow up sessions of 90 minutes as the implementation and results were too good to be missed. The Academy team presents certificates of attendance to participants only after a successful submission of these Lateral Thinking projects.

The value created was substantial and has been document but for internal use only due to an NDA between IDEAS and the client and their end customers.

Award Winning

The Academy has won five awards from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) for 2019-2020, including four Excellence in Practice Awards and a BEST Award. The ATD Excellence in Practice Awards are presented to organizations that have demonstrated clear and measurable results of achieving organizational goals, meet a demonstrated need, have appropriate design values, and are clearly aligned with other performance improvement initiatives. These practices have long-term, sustained results.

Background on the client

The client provides information technology, information security, consulting, ITO and BPO services. These include business & technology consulting, systems integration, application development & maintenance, IT infrastructure services, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Engineering, analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing, customer relationship management, supply chain management, engineering & manufacturing solutions, enterprise resource planning, research and development outsourcing, and testing solutions.

Like many other IT services firms, it follows a global delivery model based on offshore software R&D and offshore outsourcing. The company has a number of offshore development centres outside the United States and near-shore centres in the U.S., Europe and South America.

The company is organized into several verticals and horizontal units. The vertical units focus on specific industries such as Banking & Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Retail. The horizontals focus on specific technologies or process areas such as Analytics, mobile computing, BPO and Testing. Both horizontal and vertical units have business consultants, who together form the organization-wide IT Consulting team. It is among the largest recruiters of MBAs in the industry; they are involved in business development and business analysis for IT services projects.

Need for Lateral thinking

The founder CEO saw a tremendous need for change and rapid innovation. He himself had attended Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking sessions. The Academy team in India was given the mandate to train as many delivery managers on the tools but with a condition to demonstrate ROI. Dr Edward de Bono's tools of Six Thinking Hats and Lateral Thinking were identified as major interventions for this firm in 2017 and on a continuing basis.

The global CLO insisted that metrics be associated in determining program efficacy and longevity of these tools in this firm. Several workshops have been run and each one leads to tangible deliverables.

1. The company was one of the first clients globally to use the de Bono digital platform as participants attended from multiple locations

2. Acton oriented results

3. Projects that impact TAT/ Delivery, Client satisfaction etc

4. Over 500 projects have been completed by individual participants who have returned some 8-12 weeks post training to share their success stories of application and savings

5. The company has documented these case studies for internal use and showcasing the practical implication of the tools

6. The Academy has been able to make a business case for sustained training on these tools and have created several advocates in terms of past participants who insist that others join these workshops

Some of the interesting projects that we have been working on:

Motivation and employee engagement

How to make virtual training relevant and fun

How to keep the team engaged when working from home

How to reduce talent attrition

Productivity

How to reduce time to on board a start up vendor

How to reduce process turnaround to meet client needs

How to reduce overtime and improve process efficiency

Quality

How to improve quality in a life sciences project

How to improve TAT-SLA insurance

How to improve SLA predictions at project level

How to improve PFO accuracy process to 98%

Financial

How to increase profits and reduce COD

How to reduce cost of delivery reduction - anthem

How to increase accounts payable footprint

How to reduce transport costs

Improvement

New ideas needed fo data listing

New ideas to build reusable repository

Ways to encourage a growth mindset