Transcend – Program Management

Avantika Verma was one of the three members working for a staff augmentation engagement
for the client, Metamorph Life. It was on maintaining one of their life insurance products. They were
working on change requests coming from the business users along with the technical team from the
client. The Three of them were able to bring a good level of relationship with the customers and started
gaining commendable knowledge about domain.

The team interacted with multiple third-party vendors in the middleware space. Avantika came
to know that the client was thinking of a consolidation of these players. Avantika reported this to the
client partner, John. He helped Avantika to connect with the Insurance Domain and middleware experts
from TCS Insurance Business Unit. Together, they worked on a business case and presented to
customer. The efforts yielded into a new engagement of support services to the middleware
applications. After six months, TCS could sign in another contract for the enhancement services to the
middleware applications. All these developments exposed the team to the different levels of the
customers’ business and the client’s respect for the contextual knowledge gained by TCS increased.
John also took up the initiative of improving the team’s domain knowledge with the collaboration from
the Insurance domain experts.

At various informal discussions with the business users, Avantika was aware of client’s
difficulties in bringing up new Insurance products. She was consciously making it a point to discuss such
scenarios with the domain experts whenever she got an opportunity. It was becoming clear to her that
the IT systems as well as the alignment of some of the user departments got a major role to play to
improve this situation. She took this idea to John. John mentioned that Metamorph had already created
a small team to think about this situation and make recommendations.

John stitched together a TCS team to address the pain of Metamorph. It had experts from
Infrastructure, domain and B&TS. Team proposed a solution code named as “Meta-Star”. The highlights
of the proposal were

• Business process realignment

• Automation

• Infrastructure consolidation

• Redefining service desk with Artificial Intelligence

TCS proposed to deliver this solution using an agile approach.

What followed was multiple series of deliberations, rounds of presentations and discussions. At the end
of 14th month, Metamorph decided to implement Meta-Star, by keeping TCS as a major partner to the
engagement. An outcome-based contract was signed with TCS.

TCS – Internal LEADERSHIP, BUSINESS SKILLS and CULTURE 1