Chief Strategy Officer / India
The approved choice was more precise than the headline
- Planning and strategy
- 34 years
- Career begins July 1992
- Strategy colleagues
- 8
- Through two leads
- Annual function budget
- ₹4.6 crore
- Investment approvals remain separate
Decisions & consequences
01Retiring eight modules while retaining three commitments
I reviewed a forty-eight-module portfolio with product and customer teams after repeated requests to free development capacity. Eleven modules showed no recent activity in the defined review period. An early proposal treated all eleven as candidates for immediate withdrawal. I asked the team to examine the obligations behind them before the strategy paper described the group as redundant. The absence of activity was useful evidence, but it did not tell us whether the company had finished the work it had promised.
Three modules still supported explicit customer commitments. We retained them within their agreed support arrangements and separated them from the eight for which a retirement route could be developed. Product, delivery and commercial colleagues checked the proposed transition with the relevant customer owners. The approved plan allowed eighteen months and ₹1.1 crore for migration and support work. That was an investment in ending an obligation properly, not an amount deducted from a speculative future saving.
Some colleagues wanted the portfolio announcement to show the larger reduction. I preferred a smaller decision that matched what we could execute. The board approved the bounded transition on management's recommendation; product and delivery leaders owned the implementation. I did not claim to have personally withdrawn every module or that the plan instantly released an equivalent number of engineers. Capacity would become available only as the underlying work and obligations changed.
The immediate outcome was a funded retirement programme for eight modules and an explicit support position for three. The case changed how I ask for portfolio evidence. Usage, commercial activity and contractual responsibility should be presented together, with any gap investigated before the retirement count becomes the story. I would apply that discipline earlier in a new product's life, so the business understands the likely support tail before it decides that another module is inexpensive to add.
Choosing an engine licence without inventing a saving
A new simulation programme required an engine capability beyond our existing product base. The internal-build proposal estimated ₹9.6 crore over twenty-four months. A licensed alternative proposed ₹2.4 crore over three years, with ₹3.1 crore of integration work. The initial comparison made the licence look plainly cheaper. I asked the team to preserve the differences in timing, ownership, renewal and permitted use before we described the choice as an efficiency result.
Technical colleagues assessed the integration assumptions and the capability available under the licence. Legal colleagues examined the terms, and finance compared the cash commitments on an explicit basis. The board selected the licensed route following management's recommendation. Its ₹5.5 crore initial programme commitment was useful to know, but subtracting it from ₹9.6 crore would not establish a like-for-like saving. An internal asset and a time-bounded right to use another party's technology leave different future choices.
I supported the licence because the programme needed a bounded route to capability and could accept the documented dependencies. We retained the renewal question and the limits on use in the strategy record. Product leadership owned integration, and the decision did not imply that the engine was suitable for every future application. A different product direction or commercial term could require a fresh assessment rather than automatic extension of the original reasoning.
The result was an approved route with a clearer account of what the business was buying and what it would still need to decide. We did not announce a delivery improvement before the integration work had demonstrated one. My lesson was that strategy can recommend an option confidently while refusing an attractive but unsupported benefit claim. The comparison becomes more useful when it explains why an unequal pair of alternatives still offers a meaningful choice, and which differences the company is deliberately accepting.
Starting where instructors could support the learning
Our expansion discussion covered maintenance training in water utilities, food plants and warehouses. Research colleagues spoke with twenty-four teams: nine in the first group, eight in the second and seven in the third. The discussions suggested useful problems in all three settings. I asked a second question about the proposed pilot: who could provide the instructors and equipment context needed to make the exercise useful? Only two water-utility teams, seven food-plant teams and three warehouse teams could support that format at the time.
I recommended a twelve-month food-plant pilot with a ₹4.8 crore funding envelope and three proposed client sites. The site's participation discussions were not contracts or a forecast of market share. The choice gave the product and learning teams a more workable setting in which to examine the proposition. The other markets remained possible later directions; they were not labelled unattractive merely because our initial format was difficult to organise there.
The board approved the pilot envelope, with management responsible for securing the arrangements and reporting what the work showed. Product head Joseph Nelvarki and the delivery team defined the practical learning questions. My role was to explain why the selected setting offered a better first experiment, including the limitations of the small interview sample. We did not turn seven positive availability responses into evidence that the company could serve the whole food sector.
The outcome was a bounded strategic commitment with named dependencies, rather than simultaneous expansion into three markets. I would now include the availability of the people required to use the product in the research brief from the start. A need can be commercially interesting while the proposed way of learning about it is not yet feasible. The strategy should distinguish those statements, so a postponed market remains a reasoned option rather than a casualty of an overstated pilot result.
Launching with six capable partners instead of thirty names
Thirty organisations had expressed interest in a regional partner programme. The proposed launch material described them as an emerging network, but their readiness differed substantially. Eight had both appropriate demonstration facilities and trained instructors. Ten had facilities without the required instructors, seven had instructors without the facilities, and five had neither in the form the programme needed. I asked that the approval paper retain those categories rather than use the total as a proxy for delivery capacity.
We offered the initial programme to the eight organisations with both capabilities. Six accepted and two declined the proposed commercial and operating arrangement. A ₹42 lakh preparation allocation covered onboarding, demonstration alignment and the agreed readiness work for the six participants. The remaining organisations stayed in a development list with their particular preparation needs. They were not counted as live participants or represented as having accepted terms they had only discussed.
The commercial team worried that a six-partner launch would appear less ambitious. I argued that the useful ambition was to make the first customer experience work and learn what further expansion required. Delivery colleagues helped define what a partner could demonstrate and what had to remain with Zevrali or the client. The software's use in training did not make the partner an authority to certify workplace competence or approve equipment operation.
The result was a launch plan whose network count matched the accepted, prepared participants. We did not claim revenue from expressions of interest or assume that preparation would make every partner commercially successful. The case taught me to keep the sequence of a relationship visible: interest, capability, agreement and operation are different facts. Strategy becomes more credible when the organisation can explain the work between them, even when that produces a smaller opening number than the original presentation promised.