Managing a Turnaround
Misys is the U.K.-based software group catering to the banking, financial-services and health-care industry, and is the second-largest software provider in the U.K. The company had fallen into a rough patch in the early part of the decade and a new CEO Mike Lawrie was hired to manage the turnaround. Says Cory Eaves, Executive Vice President (EVP), Chief Technology Officer (CTO)and Chief Information Officer (CIO), Misys, “When Mike joined, it was really a make or break situation for the company and he came up with three to five year turnaround strategy.” To quote from the company’s official corporate strategy statement that Mike crafted, “We are simplifying, integrating and enhancing our portfolio of current products and are streamlining our business so that we can improve our innovation, customer responsiveness and speed to market with new initiatives. We’ll engage customers more directly in our product-development plans seek new partnerships and collaborations and continuously innovate to capture market opportunities.”
The company had missed some very important product cycles and the centerpiece of the turnaround strategy was to revitalize the product engine. Each of the three businesses that Misys handled-banking, treasury and capital markets, and healthcare had undergone dramatic changes in business models and Misys’ products did not reflect the market realities. “In an earnest bid to restart the product engine, we decided to get new leaders on board, invest in a new set of processes, and go in for new sourcing models,” says Eaves.
Cory Eaves who wears the triple hats of being EVP, CTO, and CIO was steeped in experience in the area of commercial product development having played the CTO role in many other organizations. The company had been enlisting external help in product development but it was more in the form of staff augmentation and ad hoc contracts. Cory was convinced about having a strategic partnership with an OPD provider to get the company’s product engine revved up.
There were four principal sourcing models (with varying economic and strategic impacts) available: Have own development team onsite, have a captive development team offshore, have a strategic partnership with a product-development provider, and engage in staff augmentation when needed. It was not about choosing one over the other but the combination that yielded the maximum benefit. “Out of these four options we created a framework that helped us decide how the development of a particular product or a project should progress,” adds Eaves. This gave the company a very formal and structured way of looking at product development along with the resource model and staffing model that would be required.
Misys tied up with specialist OPD vendors like Symphony, HCL Technologies, and a few others for churning out different products. The providers were decided using a three-way filter comprising a) track record the provider had in developing commercial grade software products, b) the set of ongoing processes for onboarding, innovation, productivity, governance and training that the provider had, and c) the number of similar customers the provider had served in the past.
BankFusion, Misys’ new platform for financial services application is being co-developed with Symphony Services, which also handles a few other products. The company has ownership of a few modules through the various stages of the development lifecycle and Symphony teams work both onsite in the U.K. and offshore from India. This kind of a partnership is not necessarily about reducing the time taken to develop a product — it is more about expanding the skills and having the additional development capacity and headroom to advance the product along its intended roadmap. “It is simply that we have another team developing products with discipline because of which we will be able to deliver better products with more complete functionality that the market demands,” says Eaves.
Being able to track the progress and manage the pace of development is the other benefit. For example, a pilot customer release targeted for this quarter and the first generally available release of the product targeted for Q4 are both on track. Besides, the provider brings in a lot of best practices in innovation, design, and QA to the customer company. Through a system of cross training, these best practices are shared and imbibed by the customer.
One more area where a product-development partnership helps is to benchmark and evaluate one’s own product-development activity. Misys sends out new project specifications to its own captive team in Bangalore and also to Symphony teams. It’s insightful to learn and compare the development approaches and costs that the two teams work out. And of course, the best team wins.
