HiVE - Driving Velocity and Resilience in Business to Achieve Impact at Scale

The world of business is evolving at a pace never seen before. Enterprises globally struggle to compete as they rebound and recover from market and supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic and geopolitical conflicts. Survival now hinges on technological advancements, evolving customer preferences, a changing regulatory environment, and radically altered market demands.

Every company today is looking for a differentiator that will help it succeed. Fast-evolving technologies and digitalization are altering business fundamentals — how companies operate and connect with customers, shareholders, employees, and stakeholders. Astute leaders are driving their companies to embrace and adapt to these technologies, driven by the unprecedented realization that this will determine their flexibility, scalability, and agility in meeting customer needs. Legacy infrastructure and archaic applications are being replaced or supported by newer, more-efficient digital-first tech solutions that can fuel organizational growth and agility. 

Yet, companies cannot do all these things at the same time — there is no one-size-fits-all solution for business and IT transformation. A robust strategy and baseline roadmap are necessary to get going on this path. Further, the roadmap needs re-baselining and periodic validation, and there is a need for constant re-prioritization of objectives and defining the immediate future state.

From speed to velocity

Many enterprises today are at different stages of their digital transformation journey —some are undertaking holistic transformation projects to overhaul the way their businesses operate. Yet others are adopting newer technologies and processes to make their businesses efficient and effective. Whatever the approach, speed is a critical consideration for organizations. However, speed can be counterproductive without an enterprise-wide, comprehensive, long-term strategy to align to. Businesses evolving rapidly without being aligned to long-term organizational priorities risk compromising their growth potential. At Zensar, we believe that organizations need to focus on implementing effective technology solutions that spark velocity across the enterprise — marrying both the speed of implementation and direction of growth, to navigate seamlessly toward success in an uncertain business landscape.

Achieving enterprise velocity

Companies are choosing to focus on one or more of the following strategic areas to achieve their future state:

• Rethink/strategize 
• Future-proof technology and architecture with cloud-composability and engineering-driven resilience 
• Modernize 
• Reinvigorate products and applications for an ecosystems-based API economy  
• Stand out 
• Focus on creating exceptional human experiences across personas with design thinking 
• Grow 
• Expand business opportunities with democratized engineering, DevSecOps, and cloud industrialization

A proven framework such as CRUX (Figure 1) greatly helps order priorities and focus areas. CRUX helps organizations build resilience by re-engineering IT processes for building domain-driven, experience-led composable operations that align all stakeholders in rapidly delivering value to the end customer.

Figure 1: CRUX framework for defining the future state

A fundamental pillar of this framework is our High-velocity Enterprise TM (HiVE) approach to delivery.

HiVE — delivering high impact at scale 

High-velocity Enterprise TM (HiVE) design forms contemporary ways of working and is a market-leading prescriptive framework for agile deliveries. It is a proven framework that enables us to achieve industry-leading KPI values for lead time, change fail, reliability, and deployment frequency. HiVE helps align teams into four categories: Feature Squads, Platform Squads, Enabling Squads, and Niche Squads.  

A product-engineering, design-thinking-first approach for growth 

The HiVE framework aligns teams into four squads:

• Foundation Platform Squads – Build platforms and lay a scalable and modular foundation 
• Feature Squads – Develop features leveraging the platform capabilities and scale existing applications
• Special Squads – For specialized scopes like re-architecting, large-scale migrations
• Enabling Squads – Leveraged across multiple squads and initiatives to derive benefits of scale

Each of these squads comprises multiple team members, and the composition of the teams changes as per requirements. Each team member is multi-skilled, with expertise across a spectrum of technologies and expertise in two or three distinct areas. Zensar’s comprehensive capability management expertise ensures a sustained delivery team that can scale on demand, is aligned to the client’s requirements, and helps with predictable costing and quality of resources. Following the learn-disrupt-grow philosophy, project and account managers proactively identify areas for upskilling/cross-skilling relevant to each engagement and plan resource training for near and mid-term requirements on the project.  

The foundation for the HiVE framework is laid through a holistic product-engineering-led approach. The team builds on a design thinking approach, analyzing the requirements, understanding the rationale behind the requirements, and then positioning the solution. This is supported by an innovative solutions repository, a deep understanding of the market scenario, competitors’ perspectives, and more to arrive at a holistic view of the framework. HiVE prescribes establishing communities of practices and specialized tribes and guilds for collaboration, mindshare, and knowledge harvesting to create value. Figure 2 outlines the structure of tribes and squads to bring agility to the enterprise.  

This covers campus to corporate that ensures fresh talent is productive from Day 1; re-skill to transform existing resources to ensure engagement and productivity; hire to train leveraging adjacencies in skills and ensuring quick ramp-up times.

A differentiated approach to business success 

The future belongs to forward-thinking companies that embrace a holistic yet differentiated approach to business success. Thriving in a competitive business environment needs the perfect balance between people, processes, and technology. The Zensar High-velocity Enterprise™ design helps companies achieve high velocity through unprecedented execution models, a unique product engineering approach, and expert teams.