Symantec IT Showcase: Best Practices to Leverage Remote IT Teams

Introduction:CIO Sheila Jordan

Best Practices to Leverage Remote IT Teams

Following the insourcing of our IT organization, we began building significant headcount strength in our offshore centers, and now more than 40 percent of our global IT workforce is located outside of our Mountain View, CA headquarters. A distributed organization like ours requires a leadership framework that allows us to optimize across IT.

As we embarked on this effort, we aimed much higher than simple cost optimization. Our goal was to ensure business stability and drive IT transformation to grow the business while at the same time reduce cost. We needed a responsive, agile, and complementary organizational model to support multiple acquisitions, transform business systems, and build our hybrid cloud strategy. We also had to ensure that our “away” teams were connected, educated and motivated to deliver excellence, keeping in mind that we did not have the ability to increase management resources.

Here are the success insights from this transformation that allowed us to reach and continue to improve our model:

The first step to ensure success started with my seat at the CIO table. Being part of the IT leadership team enabled an open communication channel between IT leadership and remote geographies. My participation on the leadership team was complemented with direct and open dialog around challenges experienced in these regions. At my first leadership offsite in January this year, we openly addressed cultural and time zone challenges that we had to overcome by building a participatory culture.

Organizational Design: Many of our teams are built to be geographically agnostic. As an example, our offshore team based in India manages and supports our entire ERP environment. This team works with business groups around the planet, manages global regulatory patching, and enhances our ERP platforms independent of headquarters. Similarly, our databases, network, service desk, quality assurance and other critical business systems are managed remotely. One thing that became very clear is that it does not make sense to have one employee working alone in any location. Our strategy is to build centers of excellence defined in one region, and this approach has worked well.

Cultural Congruence: Bi-directional travel provides knowledge, connection with the business/IT community, and understanding of cultural diversity. For example, when IT Vice Presidents Mark Sherwood and Joey Fazio (based at our headquarters) visited India this spring, not only did they inspire the team by spending quality time with them, but they also enjoyed a first-hand experience of rituals in India through skits that delved into clothing, food, celebrations, music and geography. These fun cultural interactions helped the team create common understanding and appreciation of cultural norms, and were shared with all IT employees through our CIO’s weekly blog communication to help extend the connections. Another big step in building congruence is simultaneous celebrations. To mark the success of our integration project, all of our major sites brought in food, balloons and raised a toast simultaneously—through the use of our collaboration technologies, of course—with the team worldwide during a recent IT All Hands meeting.

Interconnected Virtual Site Leadership: This program tracks and enhances the overall employee experience at all of our major global locations. Engaging with business groups, the virtual site leadership team communicates progress of major IT initiatives and service improvements across locations, and helps site leaders understand any new business challenges encountered globally. This creates an interactive, two-way proactive conversation that helps our IT organization ensure their work is resonating with employees. It also provides valuable insights to local technical and operational nuances that we otherwise might not be aware of, such as variations in the network experience.

 Our IT Hackathon events not only foster the innovation culture we have a Symantec but also enable cross-geography camaraderie. For example, our distinguished architect at headquarters partnered with our extended architects in Pune, India to create a cross-geography innovation team. This team of three inspired 400 employees in various IT functions to submit more than 125 ideas. Our approach created a “perfect code storm” for our engineers to creatively model these ideas into working proofs-of-concept. These programs help to foster innovation by igniting minds and allowing for continuous innovation.

Quality of Work: Our teams away from headquarters contribute at high levels of the IT value chain. They implement global corporate networks, CRM solutions on Salesforce.com, e-Commerce portals, Oracle ERP solutions, collaboration platforms, and business intelligence solutions. Exposure to these platforms and participation in global projects is enhanced with training, knowledge sharing, travel and collaboration. This investment ensures that we provide challenging and career-enhancing opportunities for team members, keeping them motivated to grow and deliver excellence. 

Stakeholder Connection: Our ERP support team based in Pune conducts regular business workshops with our finance teams in Ireland, Singapore, the Americas and India to identify business process improvement opportunities. This model is also leveraged for sales operations and product licensing groups. Our approach improves overall business processes and enhances the business’ experience of working with the global IT teams.

In summary, bringing the right leadership to “away” locations and building a globally-oriented and geographically agnostic organization with solid cultural ties creates a winning culture of innovation, and delivers high quality outcomes to advance our business.