個案總覽

LeadSquared is a Bengaluru-headquartered Unicorn that provided end-to-end marketing, sales, and onboarding automation solutions on a SaaS (software as a service) platform. It aims to offer the best-in-class sales execution platform for high-velocity sales teams. In 2022, it had about 1200 employees largely in India. In addition to operations in Bangalore, it had operations in Noida, Hyderabad, and Mumbai in India, New Jersey in the US, and Johannesburg in South Africa (after acquiring another firm in the same space). More recently, it had established offices in Jakarta, Indonesia and Melbourne, Australia. LeadSquared has over 2000 customers across 40 countries. The case provides a context to examine the issues faced by a technology startup as it raises funds, attracts employees, and acquires clients. It ends with the stage where the organization aspires to expand, and the leadership is contemplating on the challenges it might face as it expands into new geographies.

Transport Solutions was a global travel services company with headquarters in the United Kingdom (UK). It had a matrix organization design with 5 lines of businesses (LOBs or verticals) supported by 5 different business units (BUs or horizontals). However, with the entry of smaller and Agile new players in the market around 2015, Transport Solutions started experiencing challenges. The organization followed a 'waterfall' model of software development with teams from different BUs contributing to the development in a systematic stage-by-stage process. This helped ensure high quality products and services. However, the downside was that the minimum time to market (cycle time from concept to reality) was 26 to 33 weeks depending on the complexity of the product. Everyone was busy doing the work as expeditiously as possible and there was no reason to believe that the cycle time could be reduced further. The case focuses on the transformation of Transport Solutions from a siloed organization to an Agile organization, and the assistance provided by TCS in facilitating the transition. It describes some challenges faced during the transition and the interventions by the management of Transport Solutions and TCS to address those challenges to successfully implement Agile.

Shashi Jaligama, Managing Director (MD) of GUS Education India (GEI) and his colleague, Nikhil Patwardhan, Senior Director, Client Services held a review meeting with the core team at the end of the workday on April 17, 2020. After the meeting, they looked back with pride on the high level of growth that had been achieved and the high-performance organizational culture they had instilled. However, they reminded themselves that they needed to adopt some initiatives to sustain the rate of growth as well as introduce systems and processes to support the next stage of growth while maintaining the organizational culture. They were concerned that the culture could get diluted with increase in the number of new employees, and their own inability to spare as much time in engaging with employees as they had done in the early stages. Both acknowledged that there were some signs of strain in customer and employee experiences, which needed to be addressed at the earliest. They also wondered if there was something more than culture that needed to be articulated to sustain the high performance as the organization scaled.