'Process overheads' aka the 'Productivity killers': A soul-searching experience in reaching the pinnacle (Industry Experience Report)

India grabs a fair share of the pie amongst the geographically spread software captive centers, taking advantage of mainly the cost factors and the acumen. One impediment which is seen commonly across these entities is the way life cycle processes are defined and deployed in alignment with the parent organization[1]. This becomes even more critical when it comes to regulatory world where software life cycle processes have focused attention by global regulations. This is also crucial for organizations which have been acquired which cannot change their way of working overnight. Many a times, the local organization would have defined a set of procedures or even a local Quality Management System (QMS) for themselves and will be asked to align with the global processes. This ambiguity in way of working is annoying for the teams and in effect, the redundancies in the life cycle processes kill their productivity. We the healthcare organization at Philips Innovation Campus Bangalore had faced similar issues in aligning between Bangalore Quality Management System processes and Business unit processes in other geographies. Many a times, perceptions of the team members also play a role in shaping these virtual impediments. In this paper, an attempt is made to bring out the actual and virtual issues faced by our teams here, how the perceptions and actual blocks of the teams have been analyzed, how the process redundancies have been identified and addressed and finally how the 'optimum' in way of working has been decoded catering to all required regulatory standards. An attempt has also been made to analyze the effect on productivity costs attributed by the above elements.