Keane Insight

Satyam raises quality bar with CMMI

Satyam recently got assessed at CMMI Level 5. This will help it seal more outsourcing deals, says Akhtar Pasha

When there are so many parameters, a mechanism is required to improve quality, reduce defects and win customer confidence, says C R Nagaraj

Indian software companies that want to sew up outsourcing deals with global companies need at least one globally recognised certificate. The Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) is become the norm here. Driven by customer demand, Satyam Computer Services has joined the club of Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Polaris, i-flex and others who have already hopped onto the CMMI bandwagon.

Driving factor for CMMI-level 5

SITARA Technologies, an India-based lead assessment firm, recently finished assessing Satyam for Level 5 of CMMI. The decision to move to CMMI was driven by several factors. It is difficult to improve productivity, manage schedule overruns, minimise defects and bugs while assessing risk management in a fixed-bid project mode. C R Nagaraj, senior vice president-Quality at Satyam Computer Services says, “When you have so many parameters, you need a mechanism to improve quality, reduce defects and win customer confidence. Hence we need to continuously increase the quality bar.” This factor led Satyam to go in for CMMI at two of its critical strategic business units—Automotive and the Microsoft Solutions Group. Satyam’s automotive division is developing a customised application for Fortune 100 companies such as Ford Motors, Caterpillar and TRW Automotive.

CMMI will help Satyam seal outsourcing deals

According to figures from research firm Standish Group, requirement engineering and validation are two key areas that form the root cause of failure in as many as 60 percent of software projects. It is in this area that Satyam stands to gain the maximum from its CMMI certification that’s expected to help the company save 50 to 60 percent of expenditure on reworking projects. The other advantage is that it can help them in calculating effective RoI (return on investment). All these will result in improving the net quality of Satyam’s products or projects. “That’s not all. What is important for us is to sustain the present quality levels and further improve upon them based on metrics analysis. CMMI allows us to add various tools for software testing, such as Pugh metrics and failure mode, effects & criticality analysis (FMECA) and the like at various stages of the development of application software,” says Nagaraj. FMECA helps the company figure out where its software is likely to fail.

Secondly, there are other improvement models that Satyam has developed internally, such as ORBIT5 and ISTRIVE that help it excel in improving performance of delivery management and in building customer confidence levels. ORBIT5 is an organisation and business transformation process that increases performance levels while ISTRIVE is Satyam’s Six-Sigma-based methodology for measuring the performance of service offerings and processes on various parameters with the objective of improving performance.

The CMMI initiative will directly affect Satyam’s bottom line. Nagaraj says, “It [CMMI] will help us in getting more business as these models and their evaluation methods confirm our commitment to quality of deliverables.” According to market sources, Satyam has a couple of deals that are likely to fall into place in the coming months.

Continuous representation (CMMI) for other business units Satyam has been exploring and expanding all possible areas and it is gearing up to meet customer requirements across industry domains—banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), healthcare, insurance, retail, manufacturing, telecom and infrastructure.

Giga Research suggests that quality will be a big point of differentiation as it will improve relationship management, and establish account management at a higher level to thereby secure relationships with clients. Furthermore, in the past pilot projects were small—in the range of $50,000 to $300,000. Today, companies are increasing their first-time project size as they grow more comfortable with the outsourcing process and software services vendors. Satyam’s initiative to raise the quality bar with CMMI is sending signals that underscore the fact that Fortune 500 companies equate process maturity with quality and are unwilling to deal with offshore firms that can’t guarantee quality.

akhtar@expresscomputeronline.com