HCL Infosystems Offers IT Products, Services, Solutions, And Essay. (70 Characters)

Briefly introduce your chosen organisation in terms of name, the industry it operates within, products and services, clients, major competitors and competing for products/services, major processes.Students are required to provide an effective time management plan that will lead to successful submission of your assignment 1 (Report), and the completion of the required activities that included in this assignment.

Develop a work breakdown structure (WBS) for your project with date, and summary of project activities. Use a table with columns for activity number, start date, finish date, activity name, activity description, planned action, status, and any other notes. The purpose of WBS is to identify each task in your project and include an estimated duration.

After work breakdown structure (WBS) has been designed, students need to present the project details that are mentioned in the WBS using one of the following Task-Sequencing Approaches:
Network Scheduling
PERT Chart
Gantt Chart

Develop a fact-finding for planning and analysis in order to determine improvements in organisational processes. This fact-finding plan should include: interviews, documentation review, observation, questionnaires, and research.Review and draw the organisation chart for your chosen organisation. Then, list the individuals (working at various levels of organisational structure) and their roles for those who you would like to interview. Prepare a list of objectives for each of the interviews you will conduct. 

Provide an “AS IS” process diagram by using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) or Unified Modelling Language (UML) notation. The “AS IS” diagram should explain the process flow of your chosen organisation. Then, explain which process flow in this diagram that you want to improve.

Assume you have completed the planning and analysis phases of your project for your chosen organisation. Write a report to the top management (CEO). This report at a minimum should include the objectives, background, processes undertaken, scope, and recommendations to the top management (CEO).This task includes providing a cover letter and title page in your report and writing up your report with clarity and professionalism.

Primary, Support, and Management Processes of HCL Infosystems

HCL Infosystems is a multinational IT organization and a premier in IT from India. The enterprise provides a range of IT products and services including IT infrastructure, technology advisory, analytics, IOT, Cloud, data centre, network security, open source solutions, and workplace solutions. The company has its operations in over 23 countries and serve a huge number of customers from various industries including BFSI, Telecom, Education, and so on (UNSD, 2009). It has over 60,000 employees working for it across the globe and within India; it has 500 points of presence. Government organizations contribute a large amount of the revenues for the company. Being a system integrator, HCL has IT organizations that serve both as competition in a few segments and as possible partners in large scale projects. Some of its direct competitors are CMS Infosystems Ltd, HP Computers, and Wipro Ltd (HCL Infosystems Ltd, 2017).

The company operates with some key processes that include primary processes that are most essential, support processes, and management processes. Primary processes for HCL include development of solution, product or solutions delivery, system installation, and after sales service. These processes directly generate value for the company customer and bring revenue for the company. Support processes are those processes that do not add value directly but provide support to primary processes. Some of the support processes of HCL include Human Resource management, IT management, infrastructure management, purchase planning, and marketing. Management processes include finance, regulation, legal procedures, monitoring, and control (Deloitte, 2014).

In order to explore if the organization can be improved upon its processes or systems, analysis of its systems would be required for which the system of the company would have to be observed and those associated with the company have to be spoken to such that appropriate data can be gathered to take decisions on improvement of systems.

Interviews: In order to understand how HCL systems work, different internal and external group of individuals would be interviewed including key customers, suppliers, internal employees from each department. The first step would be identification of the stakeholders of the company who would include all those involved in the business and would be affected by any proposed project for improvement of business system of the organization. Once they are identified, their profiles would be studied and interview questions would be prepared accordingly (BIS, 2010). An interview slot would be fixed with each upon taking consent on an agreed date and venue for collecting information about system.  Some general questions that may be asked in these interviews include:

• How long have you been working with the organization?
• What are the key responsibilities that you have in the company?
• Are there other people performing similar work as you do in the company?
• What is the most challenging task on your job?
• Can you identify ay opportunity for improvement in the system?(McMunn, 2010)

Interviews for System Analysis

Besides there, there would be specific questions to ask each of the key personnel that would be formulated based on the objectives of system analysis. Once interview would be over, the data collected would be consolidated and the responses from the interviews would be analyzed to identify and understand business functions, business area interfaces, work products, data flow, and challenges (SJU, 2015).

Documentation Review: The Company routinely generates a large amount of documents and some of them can be very useful in understanding the business systems and processes of the organization and thus, these documents would be reviewed as a part of system analysis. These documents would include business requirements document, system architecture, functional requirement document, scope diagram, company code of conduct, user stories, use cases, project vision document, and system requirement document (Bright Hub Media, 2015).

Observation: observing people while working can be a great way to assess a system as it would allow employees work as they work normally without any interruption made by the researcher. Thus, the data would be collected in a natural setting. This can be very useful as it would provide a real picture of how system works in an organization (CDW, 2009).

Questionnaire: A questionnaire would be prepared containing open ended questions for each type of major stakeholder who would be interviewed for system analysis. This questionnaire would be developed based on the objectives of interviewing each respondent and would be used by the student as a supportive document so that he can collect all the required data as planned without losing on any part (CGI, 2013).

Research: Before taking inputs on the system analysis, the researcher would first conduct a secondary research using available sources to make sense of the company system. This would need exploration of company website, industry reports, financial statements of the company, latest news about the company, and special media coverage’s reflecting upon their systems and IT processes. From these resources, the researcher would get information about company history, international; presence, company products, services, new updates, and so on (Roper & , 1999).

Some key people from the organization would be interviewed with each interview having some objectives to fulfil including ( Changefirst Limited, 2009):

IT Manager:

• To explore various IT systems that are used in the company
• To identify business processes managed using IT systems
• Identify problems and concerns of existing processes used in the company
• Understanding the business goals of the IT department
• Understand the current state of business systems
• To explore how data is used and managed in the organization(FME, 2014)

HR Manager

• To understand how the company monitors and manages performance of its employees
• To policies and strategies used by company for managing its human resources
• To explore communication systems used by the company
• To understand how employee data is maintained by the company
• To understand how employees are provided access to IT resources
• Explore the human resource management systems used in the company
• To understand how employees are engaged in the system for retention
• To understand the training and development processed used in the organization
• To identify business systems used in the organization such as ERP, CRM, etc(Gomez-Mejia, 1990).

Marketing Manager

• Understand how company takes customer focused decisions
• Understand how customers journey is managed by the company
• Identify what IT resources are used for marketing and why
• Understanding the process of development of marketing strategy
• Identify methods used by the company to monitor and control marketing systems(Gomez-Mejia, 1990)

• Identifying top customers of the organization
• Understand key complaints that are received from customers
• Understand how satisfied are customers with the company products, services, system and processes
• Understanding the Customer Relationship Management system used by the company

• Identifying processes that are the part of production system
• Identify IT systems that are used in production activities
• Understand the performance of production systems
• Explore if there is a gap for improvement of the current production system of the company(Caltrans, 2007)

Objectives of the project are to automate some of the time consuming processes used in the company and integrated various different systems into a single enterprise system that creates a unified place for accessing all kinds of information that could be important for taking decisions (HCL Infosystems Ltd, 2017).

Documentation Review for System Analysis

The company has automated several processes such as order management, bidding, compensation management, employee appraise, etc. in the company yet many processes are still managed manually such as performance reporting, project progress reporting, employee management, and so on. Moreover, the systems that are automated or digitalized are scattered (Lacaster University, 2006). Though company is making use of SAP system for managing its accounting functions but does not include the comprehensive solution and the organization makes use of a variety of applications, most of them developed internally such as office automation systems. These applications are not integrated and thus, a huge workforce is required to work on them and exchange of report using unsophisticated systems like emails are depended upon to share information across different departments (Anon., n.d.).

Various business processes were identified in the company that included:

Marketing: Marketing was mostly the manual process in the company managed by the staff in a traditional manner except for the use of digital marketing whose performance could be monitored digitally.

Customer Acquisition: The company mostly dealt with B2B customers including large corporate that were given IT systems and consulting services for which the company approached the decision makers directly through their sales force. The end customers were only appraised via dealers who were the direct customers for the company (KING COUNTY , 2012). For managing these dealers, the company provided them partnership benefits. The process of customer acquisition is mostly manual as there is no unified CRM system. Though, the data of customers is maintained in the database and can be accessed anytime, the leads were not sufficiently captured except through the excel based reporting some by sales staff making the customer acquisition people dependent (V.N., 2013).

Product Development: The Company had its own hardware and software products that were priced and developed internally and also acquired other products from other companies for big system integration projects. For the development of the software products, the company has a system of consumer needs research in which staff is involved in conducting surveys and analysis business systems of organizations to identify scope for development of an IT system and upon studying its fleabite with respect to market demand and development, products are developed and marketed by the company. This process is also manual and people dependent (UK AID, 2015).

Considering the case of manual processes and a scattered system, the project proposes a development of a unified system wide application that could be used for managing all business processes through single platform as well as would allow automation of several business processes such as lead management, customer relationship management, and research. This project would have following activities in its scope (University of Exeter, 2015):

• Interview of internal stakeholders for understanding how systems work and identifying processes that are not automated but can be automated to bring business benefit to the organization(Team FME, 2014)
• Prepare a requirement document containing details of all the processes to be automated and the systems that have to be integrated seamlessly
• Identification of vendors who could provide such a solution for the company
• Come up with the design for development of the seamless business process management system to propose the management
• Creating a project development plan for business process management automation(Oracle Corporation , 2005)

Observation for System Analysis

Based on the research done till now on the company and the plan created for gathering information for further development, certain recommendations may be made for the project such as:

• All stakeholders who are interviewed must be told the reason behind the interview so that they can express their concerns related to the system and suggest improvement
• Before taking the interviews, the research must do a ground work by reading available information and documents about the company so that more refined and specific questions could be asked in the interview
• Besides the internal staff, the company may also involve external stakeholders such as customers, suppliers, and dealers to understand how supply chain of the company works and if there is a scope for improvement in any area.

References

Changefirst Limited, 2009. Change and project management , s.l.: ChangeFirst.

Anon., 2012. Analysis of various Software Process Models. International Journal of Engineering Research and Applications (IJERA), 2(3), pp. 2015-2021.

Anon., n.d. Guidance note on Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), s.l.: s.n.

BIS, 2010. How to organise, plan and control Projects, s.l.: BIS.

Bright Hub Media, 2015. Constructing Powerful Scope Statements. [Online]
Available at: https://www.brighthubpm.com/project-planning/57950-example-and-evaluation-of-project-scope-statements/

Caltrans, 2007. Project Communication Handbook. s.l.:Caltrans.

CDC, 2006. CDC Unified Process Practices Guide: Projecct Charter, s.l.: CDC.

CDW, 2009. Customer Relationship Management: Improving customer interactions with this powerful technology, s.l.: CDW.

CGI, 2013. Developing a Framework to Improve Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, s.l.: CGI.

Deloitte, 2014. Building a culture of continuous improvement in an age of disruption, s.l.: Deloitte Development LLC.

FME, 2014. Project Human Resources Management, s.l.: FME.

Gomez-Mejia, L. R., 1990. Increasing Productivity: Performance Appraisal and Reward Systems. Personnel Review, 19(2), pp. 21-26.

HCL Infosystems Ltd, 2017. Technology Lifecycle Partnership. [Online]
Available at: https://www.hclinfosystems.in/
[Accessed 4 April 2017].

JMA, 2008. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) , Philadelphia | New York | Vancouver : JM Associates.

KING COUNTY , 2012. ACCOUNTABLE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION (ABT) PROGRAM FINAL OVERSIGHT REPORT, s.l.: KING COUNTY AUDITOR’S OFFICE.

Lacaster University, 2006. Case Study of Successful Complex IT Projects, s.l.: THE BRITISH COMPUTER SOCIETY .

McMunn, D., 2010. How to interview business people to document a business process, s.l.: ComFrame Software.

NHS, 2013. NHS Standards of Procurement, s.l.: Department of Health.

NIST, 2014. Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, s.l.: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Oracle Corporation , 2005. Ensuring Customer Loyalty: Designing Next-Generation Loyalty Programs , s.l.: Oracle.

Prosci, 2007. Impact of effective change management on project success , s.l.: Prosci.

Roper, M. & L. M., 1999. ANALYSING BUSINESS SYSTEMS, s.l.: INTERNATIONAL RECORDS MANAGEMENT TRUST .

SJU, 2015. Document Management System (DMS)/ Business Management System (BMS) Project, s.l.: SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU) .

Team FME, 2014. Human Resource Management: Project Skill, s.l.: FME.

UK AID, 2015. Country Selection Process: Criteria for Feasibility Analysis, s.l.: RISE.

UNeGov.net, 2014. Business Process Reengineering, s.l.: UNeGov.net.

University of Exeter, 2015. C5: Post Project Appraisal and Evaluation. [Online]
Available at: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/finance/cpp/appraisal/appraisalandevaluation/

UNSD, 2009. PROGRAM TO IMPROVE QUALITY IN CORPORATE MANAGEMENT: Increasing Governance on IBGE, s.l.: IBGE.

V.N., S., 2013. An organizational study at HCL Infosystems Ltd, s.l.: Manomaniam SUndaranar University.