Tathagat Varma discusses Yahoo's R&D center in Bangalore and its efforts to achieve excellence. The center has grown to over 2000 employees working on product development, research, and engineering. Varma describes Yahoo's strategic approach focusing on culture, execution, and innovation to deliver world-class performance. Results so far are positive but sustainability remains a challenge given the center's large size and matrix structure. The road ahead involves renewing goals, evaluating underperforming areas, and maintaining strategic alignment across groups.

1. Tathagat Varma, PMP, PRINCE2, CSM, Sr. Member IEEE
Head Strategic PMO and Business Operations
Yahoo! R&D India, Bangalore, India

2.  Context
 Our needs
 Our approach
 Results so far
 The road ahead…

3.  Largest R&D setup for Yahoo! outside
Sunnyvale
 Established expertize in
◦ End-to-end Product Development,
◦ Research,
◦ Customer-centric Innovation, and
◦ Service Engineering

4. Year : 2008 onward
High HC Growth : 1400 to
2000+
Strategic Objective : World-class
Impact Product & Services Hub
Year : 2005 - 2008
HC Growth : 600 to Modus Operandi:
1400 Products Ownership,
Innovation, New Product
Objective : Efficiency, Development, OPD
Impact delivered
Year : 2002 – 2005 Engineering Capability,
Business HC Growth : 0 to 600 Modus Operandi:
Impact Projects ownership,
Objective : Cost, Delivery Leadership,
Training, Learn products Sustenance, QA
and technologies
Modus Operandi:
Shared projects, staffing
Cost augmentation
Impact
Low
Yahoo! Presentation, Confidential 4 10/10/2011

5.  Create higher value for Yahoo!
◦ Delivery is “necessary, but not sufficient”
 Align goals and results to organization
◦ “Brick-layer vs. Cathedral-builder”
 Holistic and scalable improvement
◦ “Optimize whole vs. parts”
 Create a winning culture
◦ “Sustain through process where required and
cultural transformation where needed”

6.  Just 2% lean programs deliver anticipated
results! (and even lesser are sustained!)
 6% organizational culture change and
transformation projects reported ‘complete
success’, and 33% reported ‘somewhat
successful’
 30% Success rate of Change Management
Initiatives
 40% of 6σ initiatives yield the desire results

7.  Lack of strategic intent
◦ misalignment with corporate goals and direction
 Poor systems thinking
◦ ignoring people and culture issues over process efficiency
goals, optimizing parts but ignoring the whole
 Weak execution
◦ execution challenges in a matrix organization, prioritizing
horizontal strategic programs vs. vertical delivery goals
 Inconsistent measurement systems
◦ failing to track the real progress on a periodic basis through a
combination of hard data and insights

8.  Self-improvement is for “self”
 Define “excellence” to meet our needs
 Align with top-down and sideways goals
 Create ‘interlock’ between components
 Execute as a center-wide horizontal effort
 Balanced Scorecard for holistic measurement
 Quarterly rollup and review of results

9.  Consistently delivering world-class performance by
applying systems thinking approach to achieve
◦ a winning culture that promotes continuous learning,
personal growth and inter-group collaboration, and makes us
“Proud to be a Yahoo!”
◦ an execution system that supports operating as one product
team to achieve agility, faster innovation, meaningful risk-
taking and consistent delivery of world-class products with
“wow” user experience
◦ an operational model that makes best usage of company
resources to provide a wow experience to employees and
leaders

10. Execution Innovation
Culture Operations
Excellence

11.  Culture: refers to the sum total of people we hire, how they
excel, values we live by, teamwork and how do we create a
culture of excellence
 Execution: reflects systems thinking in how we operate to
achieve world-class excellence in whatever we do or deliver,
whether internal or external
 Innovation: relates to how we challenge status quo and
‘predictability’ and apply customer-centric thinking to build
tomorrow’s winning products
 Operations: create a great workplace as a theatre for world-
place performance!

13.  Two quarters of results (third due in Oct)
 Q1: objective assessment of where are we
 Q2: what is sustaining/smelling
 Q3: make the call on start/stop/sustain

14.  Spawn new horizontals to focus on critical areas
 Adjust goals where the bar is currently set low
 Evaluate consistent low result areas
 Study causal/collateral correlation with other
engagement metrics

15.  Leadership plays key role in setting the agenda
 However, program team must work through issues
 Agency theory is always at work!
 Strategic PMO must build credibility through periodic
multi-level communication and sharing status and
results
 When there is no top-down mandate, establishing
beachhead and sharing stories works better
 Interlock is required to ensure there are no disjointed
efforts that don’t support or reinforce each other

16.  Multiple reporting lines, conflicting priorities,
competing projects and moving parts in a large
matrixed organization – frequent realignment is a must
 Achieving scalability and sustainability are significant
challenges in a large company setup
 Program team needs to be funded full-time
 Tools is a subsidiary issue!

17.  It’s still about people and culture: even the best of systems can only
be effective to the extent that they recognize the local work culture
and people attitudes. A long-term excellence program must be based
on realistic assessment of individual motivations and team capabilities.
 Creating an ‘interlock’ is most critical for systems thinking: isolated
and uncoordinated business excellence approaches might only sub-
optimize a local problem and will generally only move the constraint
out to another part of the organization. It is critical to identify and
sustain a holistic framework
 Execution is the force multiplier: Having the right strategy is critical,
but perhaps even more critical is the right execution – maintaining
tight focus and ensuing that all action items are tracked to closure and
appropriate measurements are made consistently and reported timely.

18.  Strategic Alignment of Horizontal and Vertical PMO Goals – Tathagat Varma, Project
Management National Conference, Bangalore, India Sep 2010,
http://managewell.net/?page_id=2
 Balridge Criteria for Performance Excellence 2011-2012,
http://www.nist.gov/baldrige/publications/business_nonprofit_criteria.cfm
 EFQM Excellence Model, http://www.omnex.com/sustainability/backup/efqm.html
 Why Change Programs fail – George Smart,
http://www.strategicdevelopment.com/articles_details.php?articles_id=2
 Why Lean Programs Fail – Jeff Liker and Mike Rother, 02-Feb-2011, Lean Enterprise
Institute newsletter, http://www.lean.org/newsletters/02_02_11_newsletter.html
 Excellence through Culture, Talent and Change – Tjitra & Associates,
http://www.slideshare.net/horatjitra/excellence-through-culture-talent-and-change
 Why Change Programs don’t Produce Change – Michael Beer, Russell Eisenstat and Bert
Spector, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1990,

19.  The Change Management Lifecycle: How to involve your people to ensure success at
every stage, An ESI International whitepaper, 2008,
http://www.onlinetes.com/fileuploads/file/OrgChangeWhP_final2.pdf
 Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts fail – John Kotter, Harvard Business
Review, Jan 2007
 Avoid the 70% Failure Rate of Change Management Initiatives – Claire Schooley,
http://blogs.forrester.com/claire_schooley/11-08-31-
avoid_the_70_failure_rate_of_change_management_initiatives
 Where Process Improvement projects go wrong – Satya Chakravorty, 25-Jan-2010, Wall
Street Journal,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703298004574457471313938130.ht
ml?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
 How to make cultural change and corporate transformation projects work, effortlessly -
Christo, 28-Nov-2010, http://spandah.com/blog/?p=63

20. Twitter: @tathagatvarma
Blog: http://managewell.net
Email: tathagat@yahoo-inc.com
Presentations: http://www.slideshare.net/managewell