You’re listening to QATalks, a podcast for IT executives leading digital transformation within their organizations. In this show, we hear from leaders leveraging the latest technologies like AI, IoT & machine learning, as they navigate the changing tech landscape to position their organizations for the future. Let’s get into the show. 

Travis: Welcome back to another episode of QA Talks and I'm super excited this week because we have Rahul Avasthy from Abbott and we have Cigniti speaker. Welcome to the show you two.  

Rahul: Thank you Travis. It's an honor to be here.  

Cigniti speaker: Thank you, Travis, glad to be here.  

Travis: I want to start with you Rahul, would you mind briefly giving us a quick background of what you do and what you're up to and then we'll dive into some of the practices of DesignOps and Design Systems that we're going to go into today.   

Rahul: Thank you for the opportunity. I lead digital transformation and experience at Abbott. It is one of the fortune's top 50 most admired companies. I am personally interested with my team on irreversible process transformation by helping reduce Oracle-i design and development waste and my team does a lot of breakthroughs, digital Innovations and specifically in the era of experience. There's a lot of work that our team does in terms of DesignOps, experience design, design systems, technology, business model design, so that there could be a lot of success from a customer point of view. We are very obsessed with the customer-centered experiences. I personally take a lot of pride in problem solving and I think with the team and a fantastic industry peers I'm connected with, there's a lot of opportunity we drove on in design thinking and service design, so that we can develop growth and experience as in strategy and also scale that for the enterprise. In the past, I have had cybersecurity and media background. I started my career with MTV - the music television and then I led a couple of agencies, few of the Asia's largest where I was heading accounts for PepsiCo and Unilever. With some of the fabulous brands, I could get time to work with them and few of the brands from the telecom side as well. It's been an interesting journey from media agency to healthcare, but I think the fundamentals of digital is what I'm still enjoying.   

Travis: I am also a former media person and really resonate with the fact that you came from that life too. So, appreciate that.  

Travis: I can also resonate with that as well as I am Delaware born and know a lot about the Philly area. Great to hear! Appreciate you both for that background and I think I want to get this episode started with you Rahul. You strongly evangelize the practice of DesignOps and you've shared in your background that you believe that design systems have a true potential to transform on how organizations conceptualize, think, create, design, build, test and launch digital assets consistently at scale. So, my first question is, what are some of the things that organizations should keep in mind while creating an efficient design system?  

Rahul: Thank you Travis. I think that's a good question and maybe that's the interest of a large audience as well because the design system is a really hot topic. A lot of people are talking, discussing, experimenting, and proceeding learning a lot as well. So, let me share a few of my personal experiences.  

From my perspective, I think the design system, the way I look at, is an investment in the future of experience, especially how those experiences which are built get scaled within a complex enterprise. It is also the future of the team or a brand or a product and the ability of an enterprise on how they can move nimbly in a rapidly evolving market. I believe design systems help you succeed in the long run. It does help you save a ton of time and waste. Now this time and waste which is saved is not only from a design or designer perspective. You also save that waste in terms from the dev side of it, from a QA side of it. And you do that over time across projects, across multiple teams. Also, I think it simplifies the way enterprises and startups can build new digital assets, how you build that momentum which further helps you build your minimum viable or even viable products. So, the design system does act like the core. And I think it's okay to say that a design system is like a brand recipe for success because I've seen, and I'm pressing the wall with it every day, with my team is, it's always changing, growing and it becomes smarter as everyone works together and tries to continually kind of build it.  

And take it in a positive light, a lot of people talk about style guides and design systems, a lot of people still get confused about that but I will say style guide is a respected way which has evolved and matured over previous generations and does help as an artifact of a design process. But as you asked, what are these some things that all should keep in mind. I will say the design system is a culture change because it's living itself, it's a funded product which has a defined experience strategy for the organization. It helps framework your execution roadmaps, gives you backlog, helps you service design and experience ecosystem at scale for a brand, even for a large enterprise. So, yeah, there's a lot of good key points in terms from a design system.  

If I have to drill down and one key thing that you would have to remember, would be something called a single source of truth. Because, by nature, a design system helps make decisions faster. And as I said earlier, it helps you reduce waste in the entire delivery track. It also helps the designers to spend more time in developing workflows and promotes exploring a lot of concepts, doing a lot of testing in the same amount of time with the same resources. And it also helps articulating as well as implementing consistency across all the modules within the entire enterprise. And that's why I say the single source of truth. That criteria would be another key point that all should remember.  

The last point I would say is, you know, it's all about scale. So, design systems do help you build scalable frameworks of repeatable, reusable components, which you have heard about this topic called system thinking, right? So, which combined as a system thinking, they really help you provide that kind of source of truth, and it does help you across a spectrum from your brand to UX/UI to visual design to your code.  

So, from establishing your brand guidelines, to moving your usability standards, to typography tone, copy, voice, iconography colors, to your code level, where you build native components, do CSS, a lot of things are there. So that's again a key part is, you know part from a single source of truth apart from it being a bland recipe from success and apart from being an investment in the future. It does also help you scale all of that. So, this knowledge is completely transferable, it is always evolving and there's a lot, right? I can keep talking about the design system over and over but what I think is an interesting culture change and I see a lot of organizations adopting it. We ourselves are deep into design systems and it is a very amazing learning curve for all of us.  

Travis: Well, thanks so much for that response. My next question is, how can an enterprise leverage DesignOps to make its digital transformation efforts customer-centric?  

Rahul: There are lot of details in that. Basically, there's a lot of confusion about what DesignOps is. And I have DesignOps in my profile, a lot of people confuse that by DevOps, which is okay. Let me try to simplify this. So DesignOps lot of people see it as a buzz word, it's not. So DesignOps is an approach to design, and this approach is definitely inspired by the culture of devops. So, at a fundamental level, DesignOps is not about introducing new models or process in the enterprise. As you asked, it’s about digital transformation efforts, I always say, transformation has to be irreversible. It's like a caterpillar, turns into a butterfly and cannot go back.  

If you are working on a project or a process change, which after that change is done, you're going back to the previous ways of working, it is not a transformation. It is just a shiny tool implementation or something else. DesignOps is not about introducing those new models, or the process in the enterprise just for the sake of it. But it's more about orchestrating design thinking, lean ways of working the user centered design models or UCV models. And with other best practices of Industries with the modern technology, because these modern technologies which we have access to right now for design by using a lot of machine learning and AI, a lot of automation which could be done, they did not exist before. So, with use of this modern technology, a lot of value could be created and also delivered.  

Also, I would say that DesignOps enterprise is more than a belief system, which does take the strength from the foundation or what designops enterprise is all about. It is also important in the entire transformation process is how do you empower the enterprise or an organization with the right culture, right process and not just that, but with the ecosystem to support the design driven process, and the data-driven decision-making. And these two combined together gives you that agility and speed so that you can conceptualize and deliver great products. And these are super, super critical.  

You know, there's a lot of talks about outcomes and outputs. I was reading a nice article within Harvard business review that said very nicely that outcomes are the benefit your customers receive from what you make and it starts with truly understanding what your customer need, their challenges not yours, their issues, their priorities by having the empathy walking in their shoes, in their neighborhoods business and culture. While outputs are more like revenue and profit which enables us to find the outcomes. But without outcomes, there is no need for output.  

The same way, I would say DesignOps enables those outcomes, which really helped us to find and kind of enable the precise outputs which would be needed for a project or for our program around that. And this is very important and doing this Travis, I think this helps ensuring the iterative cycle and it also focuses more on the quality of customer experience than just delivering things on time and on a budget, I mean, of course don't get me wrong, those are important.  

But again, the quality of the customer experience is the key. And how is that all done? A lot of time I have seen in DesignOps, there's a lot of work that you work across, which is called hypothesis driven design, which is, how can you use that to be measured as an input for design and decision-making process. And I think all these things put together again, I would reiterate, your culture process ecosystem, the team working together, which helps you both design driven process and data-driven decision making. I think these helps in that key transformation process which everyone looks at.  

So, again, it is about the irreversible change, it is about understanding, what it can do. It is also about understanding what it cannot do. You know, I would end that with a nice saying about strategy. Out of time, it's already well said that the root of the problem is the failure to distinguish between operational effectiveness and the strategy, things you're not supposed to do, and I think DesignOps really helps you make that distinction and help you enable both strategy and also how can you do your operational effectiveness.  

Travis: Those insights are extremely helpful because from what it sounds like, and I love that analogy by the way, if you're really doing transformation that you are doing something that's irreversible, and a caterpillar cannot be turned back into a caterpillar after its evolved in transforming into a butterfly. And I think that analogy is something with me. And I think we'll sit well with a lot of other executives as they think about what to look for and what not to look for.  

Rahul: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you wouldn't believe the amount of cold emails and the articles I read and things around that, that everything is about digital transformation. I think that's why the word has become a buzzword because it's a good SEO keyword. But I think it's been abused to be used as everything is digital transformation. You know going to from technology changes, a digital transformation doing this one particular thing is a digital transformation, that is where it fails. Even if there is a possibility that you could see that this butterfly could become a caterpillar tomorrow, that's again, a different kind of project and not something where you transform are reversible, it has to be irreversible, period.  

Travis: Cigniti speaker, you have anything to add on this topic before we move on to the next one.  

Cigniti speaker: I agree with Rahul. The whole design aspect is so important even in the context of some of the quality engineering activities that we do as an organization. So, lot of talk around the shift left, basically, doing a lot of quality related activities, early on in the life cycle. So that way you are building quality into the product, as opposed to, you know, getting the quality after testing it later on. In that context, teams also take an extreme amount of diligence needed in reviewing the designs from a testing point of view as well. So, to make sure that they are a complete, correct, consistent, and most importantly, the systems that are being built, we are actually including the aspect of testability, right within the design stage.  

Travis: So, it's about making sure you build right from the beginning and that you don't incur errors later.  

Cigniti speaker: It's better to prevent than actually do the cure.  

Travis: Perfect, thanks so much for that Cigniti speaker! So Rahul, my next question here is as we think about how enterprises measure some of this, what are some of the key metrics or KPIs that enterprises should use to evaluate the progress on the customer centric design front of their digital journeys? 

Rahul: I love KPI and ROI questions, I think without that, it is just all theory. And it's very complex to figure out what KPI could work. Because for example, a KPI for a company, which is a product based, which is very much revenue focused ,every time you sell something, is different versus a product where you want to increase the adoption, because it creates a network effect, they can have different KPIs. But let me give you a formula that I personally use. It is how can you define KPI especially across DesignOps or Design system, and, you could use this framework in different places of course, that will depend upon the projects, and the programs and initiatives involved.  

So, look at this, in five point.  

Number one is, what are the things which you can do, which you can increase, or call a liberation. So, what can you or where can you impact that momentum, increase, or where can you accelerate things? Number one is clearly speed to the market. So, for example, if you have to create an MVP or previously to the market or creating any MVP was X, now, what is it. How much time it takes for onboarding new resources because as you scale up Travis, you know, I've seen that more and more people join. And as more and more people joined. things become more and more complex. So, if your knowledge transfer, if you want boarding speed doesn't catch up, you are not able to scale that momentum. So, it is DesignOps and design system freestyle.  

How you can increase the reusability, how you can increase SEO, how you can increase accessibility, people who have, who are living with disabilities, everything that you're doing, is it also giving incremental value to them. Also, how can you increase the knowledge sharing and there's some technical one within, you know, the Design Systems and DesignOps, for example, we want to increase the use of CSS classes. So, there is less code, but more use of classes and it's kind of a technical but that's how you can assess that, you know, what you're doing is correct. So, the first one is what you can do to increase the momentum.  

Second one is what you can do to reduce, or where can you have the reduction. And a lot of things, which will come in. The reduction is, how do you measure waste. How do you measure how you have reduced your delivery timelines? How you measure that? How have you reduced your brand exceptions? Lot of times just because something is done, and people were not aware about certain bland exceptions and things have to go live, there has to be exceptions created. But if you are following a consistent guideline with your, the correct DesignOps process, you would reduce the amount of those exceptions which will not percolate overall.  

How can you reduce your technical size CSS file size, or use of the components which are not used at all? How can you reduce knowledge silos? How can you reduce the time to create something? How can you reduce the cost for iterated process? Maybe how could you reduce shadow IT because I can speak a lot on that. How can you reduce the time to first prototype? You know, it is very important, you need to build something, the team can get together, but how long it takes for the first prototype or rapid prototype to hit your leadership inbox and where they can really play with it, click on it and then see how it would look and feel and how it would work and more than how to look and feel how those designs would work for the end user.  

So how do you reduce possibly discrepancy. So, there's a lot of things that you can help reduce, and that could be a part of a KPI, but you should not pick all of them. You have to be very, very razor-sharp and razor focus on what you need to do. For example, if you're doing a design system, increase in adoption of components and reusable should be your number one KPI, right? But if it's a different kind of projects, it could be totally different. So, what you can improve, what you can reduce.  

The third one is where can you bring convergence. So, you need to create the right governance. You need to create the right frameworks. You need to have the shared ownership. I would say you need your design and dev to work together with something we call design dev handoffs, you need to have a common vocabulary. If a certain page or a feature Atomic component is being referred to something, it is not referred to something else by the developer side of it. So how can designers, developer, and QA, all converge and have a common vocabulary? How you can increase the use of a common tool chain, which has integrated API’s, which can do a lot of other things as well. So, what you can increase, what you can reduce, where you can converge, but also important is last two are where you can diverge, and where you can iterate.  

So, where you can diverge, is, you need to have a personalization. Not everything should be built on for all kind of experience. How can you diverse making experiences for different kind of niche segmentation, and all that, you're doing how it can help to do that. How can you do many-to-many with that kind of personalization. How can you diverse the responsiveness. How can you create experiences from an Apple Watch to an Apple TV or to an Android TV? How can you create a tiered structure? So, even in the governance, where you converse, but windy governance, you need to diverse to give that room a lot of experimentation. For example, bigger process could be like a solid ship but you need to create a lot of speed boats out of your ship to go and do some work and come back, and then you decide which one you want to dock and which one you want to ignore it as junk.  

And, the last one is what you can iterate. Yeah. How can you iterate your always updated documentation, you're connected workflows, your process Improvement? How can you update your design dev handoffs? So some of them could be mutually exclusive but a lot of them are exclusive of each other and if you can focus on what you can increase, what you can reduce, where can you converge, where can you diverge? And what you can iterate. I think these five pillars will give you enough KPIs or key Matrix at least for you to think about whatever you're doing on your customer centric design process or when you're crafting end-to-end digital journeys on what they are. And I think those are very key moments possibly which are important. Sorry for a long answer. Usually a KPI should be a crisp, clear, short answer. But I just want to give you more nuggets between what can come between these five keepers.  

Travis: I love it. So, we've got increase, decrease converge, diverge and iterate. Thanks so much for that. And Cigniti speaker, do you have anything to add?  

Cigniti speaker: No, I think Rahul covered it all. Nothing this time.  

Travis: Perfect! My next question for you, Rahul is, how does the atomic design methodology apply in the development of IT systems and what are some of the tangible benefits of adopting this?  

Rahul: Oh, that's fantastic question. Thank you for asking that because Atomic design is so core to the future of systems and clinking of those system thinking. So Atomic design methodology was actually based upon Brad Frost for work in 2016 and it's like a mental model which allows designers and developers to completely rethink and reimagine how they can assemble the user interfaces in their Design Systems. And you can break down Atomic design into five key things.  

Number one is an atom. It's like the most basic functioning component, which you cannot break it down so that it stops becoming meaningful. For example, a button right, is an atom, of course, you can say a button is text plus a box, plus a color, but then all those three things are meaningless till the time, you combine them. So, it's a small first breakdown of an element after which it will stop being meaningful. So, button is an atom, or maybe a search icon is an atom or text input field is an atom, or a level, so, if you have a text input field called email and on top of it, it says email as a text label, so that's an atom. So, this is the core block and think of it like a Lego block. So, these atoms are the tiniest element of that Lego block. So you start with Atoms and then you come with molecules, this is where it's like chemistry class but it's really interesting and how Brad Foss transported. So, it's like atoms and atoms coming together. So, these are kind of simple group of components that come together as a function. So now they start becoming utility and they come together as a function. For example, a search bar or a header. So, a search bar has an input function, has a search icon saves. This is search and when you click on it, something happens, so that entire thing becomes a molecule. And then you have organisms, which is Atoms plus molecules plus atoms plus molecules and N number of combinations. So now where you are seeing your Lego blocks are making a fireman or your Lego blocks are making a hospital, right. Or it's kind of making an aircraft. At least it is making an aircraft cockpit. So, this is more complex elements that are coming together as a group of molecules or atoms. For example, a footer or header bar of an allegation is all coming together as an organism. People also call it components. So, before what happened was, people started at design or people started at wireframes but what this Atomic design does is the step number four and five are then wireframes and pages. So, it starts basically kind of ends where the previous mental framework started that. Alright, we need to work on a design option.  

Let's start putting some low-quality wireframes. So what it does is, it tries to standardize the most building basic blocks and by the use of system thinking, if those things are structured well, anything you build on top of it will still follow the same family. For example, if you look at any Google site, look above their product, it could be a Gmail, it could be a Google Keep, which is the note taking tool or it could be a calendar or even Chrome browser on the Google search itself. You know it's from Google family because it's all coming from the same building blocks. There's a certain way Google treats its buttons, its navigations, its colors, the way colors interact, it animates, and that's a beauty of that. And then it is followed by your wireframes or templates, which is Page level design, which helps you figure out a structure so, like a homepage or think of a cockpit of a Lego block without any color. It is just kind of a skeleton that at least, you know, you're making an F-16 or a passenger plane. And then you come with Pages, which is then you put the real color, real content, pictures, the right fonts, so things really come into life. So Atomic design is, fantastic and to your question, how does it really apply in the development of IT systems. I would say, Number one, it really helps foster the collaboration. A lot of time what would happen was the designer would build their things in silos and then when developers have to come in code, they have to figure out, well, we have a new search element, or we have a new navigation. Now, again, basically the design outcome would work the same, but it's just the way it is treated was so different because it was somebody's stylistic choice. What this does is it focuses on how the Design works and also helps you cater to some stylistic choices and how the design looks. So, you have flexibility not taking out the creativity but it's really helping reduce both the design and their ways because a lot of time you don't need a new search experience when it's already created and well tested just by a previous project. So, a lot of these things comes together so that is one it really helps foster the collaboration within the IT system. 

I think second one is I say this a lot is called moments that matter. So, when you're looking at any customer journey, you will love this Travis and maybe Cigniti speaker, is no company have and this is my personal saying, no one has enough resources or capital or funding at that moment to just build everything perfectly. Every company has a real nugget of knowledge that needs to focus on moments that matter. For example, Uber right, one of the moments that matter in Uber is that particular moment when you are in a different country, maybe in a different city, you are previously were taking a new taxi and then the payment method was different, maybe you're in a different country, they have a different currency, you are figuring out the chain. You may not even need to read know how to treat the currency or you don't know how the Tipping culture possibly is, and you're trying to figure out a lot of questions every time taking a taxi. The moment that matters is, when somebody is exiting a cab, what happens in that precise moment in the overall customer journey. And I think Uber fixed that completely because your trip ends, you open the door and just walk out, and everything could be figured out later.  

Just by creating many such moments that matter, it completely changes the way your design works. And if your elements are not built atomic, it is very difficult to have the right resource and in budget every time to put all the energy on designing carefully, designing the moment that matter, because if you miss that opportunity for something else, you really miss the opportunity to differentiate your product and really making a mark. So, having the right lego blocks, helps you create everything and investing resources in the moments that matter. And I think that's a complete Game Changer in terms of how Culture shift is happening within IT. And I think how millennials are now building products with the golden generation as well.  

Travis: Creating moments that matter, that's so important. So overall thanks so much, you know, for that, that context, you know, on the family and the atomic design in laying out these five steps of, you know, the atom, the molecules, the organisms, the wireframes or template, you got that. I think that framework is going to be so helpful.  

Rahul: Actually they do, these are very much designed jargons but yeah, I think that's where everybody is working together in the industries across designing Dev and that's where the new cultures like the holding are how we can simplify things for everyone. So, it doesn't become silos of knowledge, but kind of a group hug every time you work with project.  

Travis: Yeah, totally makes sense. Cigniti speaker, I want to shift over to you for a few questions here. What are the things that I found interesting in your background is that you've helped many enterprise level organizations with quality engineering? So, I'd love if you could tell us, you know how quality engineering help them deliver a high standard of customer experience? 

Cigniti speaker: Absolutely. So, if you look at it, the enterprises want to separate, you know, testing and development to get objectivity and to remove that conflict of interest. And more importantly, the testing and quality engineering itself is a topic on its own with its own methods, processes, tools. Which means that certain amount of core expertise is needed for somebody to do a great job at testing. And think of it like this, if you're asking developers to do their own testing, it's like asking a fox to watch them their house. And you don't want to do that. And so, what we're seeing is that a lot of organizations for these reasons are separating it out the software testing and the development component of the work. Especially in the context of the digital enterprises, the kind of applications that are being built, especially mobile, IoT, analytics. AI/ML based applications, blockchain and all these concepts. Some of the things the way that we use to test no more are applicable. So, what it requires is that you should be able to do both, shift Left and shift right. Meaning that having the ability to basically review the documents from a testing standpoint and ability to find those defects without a single line of code being written is extremely important. And also, that with most of these digital Technologies, the release velocity is really exponential, and the organizations are releasing multiple versions and in a short span of time. What it also means is that you need a strategy for doing the testing and production which was a complete no, no. I would say a few years before, but now that is extremely critical because of the necessity to be able to release code into production and being able to monitor how the latest code changes into the production are performing on the production systems. So, in this context, what we have done as a company is also that we actually have built some IP and also processes, especially in the context of measuring the customer experience. And we actually have built a tool called sentiment analyzer, that actually tracks all the data that is especially used by the consumer tech apps and we have the ability to gather data from multiple social media platforms and basically analyze the data to check what makes sense and use that to use all of the user feedback to be able to deliver a much better version. You know, in the future, those are some of the things that we're doing as an organization, Travis.  

Travis: Thank you so much for that.  

Rahul: I'm just thinking that's a lot of things. And yeah, I was just curious. How do you do differently than the other organization Cigniti speaker?  

Cigniti speaker: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say one thing is that, As a company the way that we differentiate is that, from the inception of the company we just did not want to be another services company that can bring some great talent pool but also a company that has got some intrinsic value because we have built the IP and the IP is our core differentiator. And also that if you really look at it as a company that we actually, right now many of the leaders in their industry verticals, for example, take Airlines or take Retail or take Healthcare or Transportation, two or three of these top 10 companies are depending on Cigniti to drive their overall testing transformation. So, we being a leader in this testing, industry are able to help companies that are leaders in their own space. So that is actually has really becoming the core value proposition for us.  

Travis: Speaking of Health Care Cigniti speaker, over the years, I know you worked with a lot of healthcare organizations to navigate their digital transformations. But could you highlight maybe one or two that stand out for you briefly?  

Cigniti speaker: So as a company that as we speak right now, we are working with several pharma companies and we also work with a lot of medical devices companies, especially in the context of diabetes and cardiovascular and those fields. We're also working with the provider space and the entire spectrum. And actually, we are amazed by the amount of technology that is being used, especially in the medical devices space, especially those of wearable medical devices and where you are really fusing multiple technologies to offer better healthcare like IoT and cloud and data analytics, I mean, if you look at a medical device, it's basically all these medical devices companies are leveraging, the power of these technologies. And where we come into picture is that we actually are responsible and taking the responsibility of doing the end-to-end testing for these medical devices all the way from the software that is being embedded into the device and the device itself and also any communication that happens between the device and the data where it is being stored in the Public Cloud. So, we sort of are helping a lot of companies in putting together, the overall comprehensive, test strategy for something like this because we are talking about medical devices which means we are talking about human lives. So, it is very important that that actually a comprehensive test strategy is needed. Especially since we are involved both in class 1 and Class 2 medical devices and also especially in the context of healthcare the performance and security are also paramount along with protecting the information privacy of the patients. So those are some of the aspects that we are helping world class leading enterprises, Travis.  

Travis: So you know, helping some of the top leaders across airlines, retail, healthcare, in addition to, you know, making sure that they can perform proper security and protection, protocols to protect the privacy of patients, and make sure that they can Infuse all of their systems, whether it be IoT, the cloud, data analytics processes, and that you're providing that assurance all around everything that you provide for them. The last question for you Cigniti speaker, I know you kind of touched on this a few times earlier, but what specifically is unique about the way Cigniti helps organizations analyze and improve their customer experience?  

Cigniti speaker: Absolutely. I mean especially in the context of digital technology, there is a lot more focus on the end-user experience and making that whole experience much better and also seamless. So, what we're doing is that as a company that we have developed intellectual property in multiple areas, we actually have a universal test automation framework that sort of spans across multiple technologies or tools and has the ability to work with multiple different tools in the enterprise ecosystem and also has as a very intuitive dashboard that has the ability of doing some predictive capabilities as well.  

And we also have developed an IP that actually is related to the quality engineering playbook. Meaning that the different teams within the enterprises are sort of using this playbook as a reference to be able to do testing in a way that it is standardized across the enterprise. Also, that we have developed some cool tools in the context of test data management, test environment management. And, we also have a developed framework to be able to check the non-functional aspects of the applications early in the life cycle itself.  

Those are some of the things that we bring to the table and if the strategy that we put together is very comprehensive with user experience in mind from day one as opposed to trying to test it at the fag end of the life cycle. And I think these are the matters that sort of helping us to assure enterprises that the user experience aspect is being thought out very early in the life cycle. And, that we are doing testing in a continuous manner that aspects out of validated along the life cycle.  

Travis: So, it's a lot of developed IP areas in addition to helping them figure out things before. I love it. So, this has been such a great conversation, Cigniti speaker, and Rahul. Is there anything that you'd want to add, you know, or wrap up with, you know, before we close out?  

Rahul: I would just say, Cigniti speaker thank you for evangelizing UX as well. I mean it's really good to see how technology and testing focused companies also evolving and getting user experience at the core. It always has been but the codes change. Now everybody's talking about it. I think this is a very, very welcome change. So, thank you for that. And I think one last time to get that would be, that in the past decade of you would have heard the term called Full-stack developer. And everybody's talking about that and both of you will relate a lot to it. I would say in this decade we would see a lot of phrase and a new word or full-stack designer, which will come because of DesignOps and Design Systems. And especially because of DesignOps because it typically involves DevOps engineers and full-stack developer here, same philosophy, core traits and they strive for greater agility and flexibility. And that is hinting a trend towards greater generalization of the skill set of technical professional. I would say, in the case of full stack designer, that person would grow into a cross-disciplinary professional. Maybe he, or she would be able to handle across interaction design, visual design, UI development, even prototyping. So, I think full-stack designers. Let's see how this kind of evolves, but basically, the fundamentals will remain the same. The boundary between design, Dev and QA will reduce and blur and eventually will become like a common thread. So, it will be interesting to see how soon that happens, but it is absolutely certain that that is already happening.  

Cigniti speaker: Thank you Rahul for sparing your valuable time to be part of this initiative. And this is an initiative that put together to help the broader QA Community. I think, you know, you said a lot of people can benefit from it, thank you very much for that.  

Rahul: Thank you for your invitation and I appreciate the opportunity Cigniti speaker. Travis, you have been a fantastic host and again it was really good to see Cigniti speaker hear all the good stuff that the organization is doing and where you're involved with us. Well, once again to both of you a warm thanks, and I wish you a good spring ahead.  

Travis: Thank you both so much, really appreciate and enjoyed having you both on QA talks today! 

Quality assurance is vital to the success of an organization’s digital transformation. Lack of control can quickly derail a company’s technological presence, costing thousands. At Cigniti, our resolution is to build a better world with better quality software. Renowned for the global quality thought leadership in the industry, we draw expertise from over a decade of test engineering experience across verticals. To learn how we do it, visit cigniti.com. 

You have been listening to QA Talks. To ensure that you never miss any episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening, until next time. 

You are listening to QA talks, a podcast for quality assurance executives implementing digital transformation in their organizations. In this show, we focus on the unique pitfalls inherent in quality assurance and quality engineering and how these executives are navigating them to position their organization for the future. Let's get into the show. 

Logan: Welcome back to QA talks. I'm your host for today's episode, Logan Lyles with Sweet Fish Media. I'm joined by two experienced podcast guests today. The first is Ritesh Jain. He is the COO and global head of Digital Technology, Delivery, at HSBC, as well as Nanda Padmaraju. He is the senior VP at Cigniti Technologies. 

A little bit more about Ritesh. He believes in exploiting the best technology practices for innovation and business transformation. Being a technology expert and enthusiast, Ritesh is a proven technology leader and DNI advocate with global experience in digital technology, business transformation, and operations. He has led milestone changes in industries including financial services, FinTech, shipping, telecom, and government, and led the future of payments for Visa and delivered Apple Pay in Europe. Through the course of professional life, Ritesh was involved in building and leading the digital CoE at Maersk while leading recovery from the biggest ransomware incident in the industry. He is currently engaged in enabling functions to build the Bank of the Future with one of the largest banks in the world. Ritesh comes from an entrepreneurial background with experience in building and mentoring successful businesses. He provides technical expertise and advice to parliamentary digital service in the UK and is an advisor for payment regulation as well as other governments.  

Nanda is our co-speaker for this episode of the podcast. He heads the UK & EU business units for Cigniti. Nanda brings in 22 years of experience in consulting, advising, and helping global enterprises across domains in their quality assurance and quality engineering transformation. Ritesh, welcome to the show, sir. 

Ritesh: Thank you for having me, Logan. 

Logan: Absolutely. Nanda, Welcome back. Always a pleasure to speak with you. How are you doing today, sir? 

Nanda: I'm doing good, Logan. Thank you. And thanks for having me on this podcast. 

Logan: Absolutely excited to learn from both of your combined years of experience. Today, Ritesh, the first question I've got for today's episode is to you. Anyone listening to this knows that the world is so different today than it was even five or six weeks ago. It's changed beyond really anyone's comprehension. I know mine. For you specifically, what changes do you see coming in the way enterprise organizations function and operate based on everything that has changed here in recent history? 

Ritesh: So these are the unprecedented times of what we have seen in the last few weeks, specifically, six weeks or so. The way we operate has changed significantly or completely. The world is quiet at the moment. The office buildings are quite. Everybody is locked in their houses and we are working virtually. And what we have seen the capability of the organizations and the people to perform in a virtual world, which we wouldn't have anticipated in past. We never thought that we could work in this way. We have always seen the organization’s capacity between 20 to 30 percent. Working from home is basically naive to businesses or the financial services. But what we are experiencing at this point of time, it's gone 100 percent capacity or 90 percent capacity working from home. Now, when we'll come out of this, the way we operate, the way we work, the way we do things is going to change significantly. However, when we talk about the banking industry, we will see a significant change. We need to think about the more digital, going more digital and data driven. We should invest more into the cloud. We will talk about the variable cost structure for operations. We need to think about the end-to-end digital sales maturity as well as we need to look into the automation, reduce our legacy I.T. and that's what the focus going to be after COVID-19. 

Logan: That makes a lot of sense Ritesh. You mentioned investment in the cloud. What are some of the other areas that you think banks and financial institutions, a lot of your peers, should be investing in now so that they can emerge or remain as leaders in this post COVID 19 era, as we put it. 

Ritesh: So earlier when we were talking and whether it's 2019, 2017 or even an early 2020, what we have seen there was a joke about it. What is going to change after COVID 19? And basically it's digital transformation. So the digital transformation has moved from an item on the COO's to do list to an all out imperative after the COVID pandemic shook the world. But even so, the implication might be broader than may seem to imagine. So it is definitely not an option anymore. And when we are thinking about the cloud, cloud was not an option. If you would like to scale your capability, if you would like to provide better services at scale and at rapid pace to our customers and to meet the ever changing demand and to meet their customer behaviors, we need a platform and services to meet those customer demands. So it is definitely not an option.  

Logan: I love what you said there about digital transformation, Ritesh going from a to do list on that executives list to an all out imperative. Nanda, you work with a lot of I.T. leaders. Can you speak to this shift in mentality that you're seeing in some Cigniti customers or other industry leaders that you're talking to, Nanda? 

Nanda: Sure, Logan. I would like to take the example of a banking customer that we have in the UK. They have divided the entire IT operations into two parts. One, as we all know, ‘run the bank’ and two, ‘change the bank’. In the current COVID-19 situation, run the bank related IT continues as per the plan. This is what helps keep the lights on. And as social distancing becomes the new normal and hundreds of countries around the world are in a lockdown scenario, Digital is the only channel that works in this current environment. So this puts a lot of pressure on legacy banks to cope with the load and hence more frequent performance testing cycles, regression testing for all the patches, core fixes and so on, and hence quality engineering or software testing in the pecking order only went up a few notches for that part of the IT operations. Now coming to the change the bank. So this part of the IT has slowed a bit because the priorities have changed for the banks. However all major projects are still running but to a revised timescale. The priority of the quality engineering on change the bank remains unchanged. And with the social media attention today no enterprise in any industry can afford to drop the priority for quality engineering. One bad release of an application has a propensity to bring down an enterprise. So this is one of the main reasons why, as Ritesh rightly put in, IT quality is now a boardroom priority for all enterprises across sectors. So this COVID situation has only accelerated and notched up the importance of quality engineering in the pecking order for many enterprises, including banks. 

Logan: That makes a lot of sense, Nanda. Ritesh, back over to you. You know, the inevitability of digital transformation has been talked about for quite some time. You know, as the pandemic accelerates transformation to new operating models, what do you think digital maturity will look like across organizations? Once we're on the other side of this, even, you know, a year, two years or further down the road. 

Ritesh: Thanks, Logan. And that's really a very interesting question. And that's what I'm talking about quite regularly. And people are talking about regularly. I generally phrase it like you never let a crisis go to waste. And COVID 19, whether you look into it as a threat or an opportunity. And I would say it's neither a threat or not an opportunity by itself. It's a threat and an opportunity is the way to look forward. And it fits perfectly with the conversation that we are having about the digital transformation. So we as an organization or banking as an industry or throughout the industries, we need to consider this as a threat and an opportunity. We are witnessing the creation of the next normal and it is going to be more evident post pandemic. We are going to see a digital or virtual world. We are going to find out the new unicorns, which are just around the corners, what we have experienced after 2008. 2008 was just a financial crisis. Now, this is more closer to us as humanity because it is impacting the lives of people. So what we are going to see as a significant revolution into the financial services, banking, supply chain, delivery, communications, e-commerce, and supporting infrastructure and systems and these sectors going despite the crisis. And the next thing which we are looking forward is the virtualization of the companies and these sectors. 

Logan: You make a really good point there, Ritesh, about you know, other points in history that we've seen major changes. I was just hearing something the other day about all of the companies that didn't exist pre-2008 in that financial crisis. And now we're going through something that's impacting world economies, organizations, and as you put it, individuals, families, and us on a very human level. Nanda, can you speak a little bit to what you're seeing leaders do right now as they manage their teams, as they seek to keep them motivated, as they seek to still get the best out of them while being empathetic to the situation and the realities that they're dealing with as individuals, contributors, as well as leaders of teams. 

Nanda: Sure Logan. Cigniti was one of the first IT companies to embrace and enable work from home for all our employees. And we saw this coming. And our ICT teams and delivery teams worked tirelessly in planning and executing to ensure that as minimal impact to all our client deliverables. And as we make this switch from work from office locations to working from home, and there are a few things that we have done, hopefully rightly - Open communication channels with all stakeholders, both internal and external, including our clients was the key. And the second one is implementing highest levels of security protocols, along with sensitizing the employees, ensure that we comply with all client-related requirements and keeping the employees engaged, whether it is a daily stand up meetings for the project related stuff, or the regular virtual catch-ups for fun-related activities? I think it was extremely important to keep the team bonding together during these challenging times. And there are various activities that have been initiated by HR on a regular basis to keep these virtual teams bonded together and continue to be motivated to deliver to the clients at this important hour. And finally, we went to all our customers and proactively asked them on how we can help, whether it is performance testing of their IT infrastructure to ensure they cope with the work from home workloads of security-related compliance testing, because all these legacy and large enterprise I.T. systems were never designed, as again Ritesh put in his opening remarks, for this kind of work from home environment. So we have customers where there are thousands of employees. Say if a particular customer where we have 17000 employees and today all of them are logging in remotely, right at 9:00 UK time and immediately they sense the IT performance drops down a few notches which is significant for them. So these are the things that we're trying to help our customers proactively, saying that have you done this capacity planning, have you also ensured that your security compliances are as expected and as required  both by the law of the land and your own IT ISMS systems of your organization? And finally, what we are saying is that, going back to what Ritesh said, every challenge is both an opportunity and a challenge at the same time. So this is one of the best times if you want to initiate change. We have the least path of resistance.  

For example, a lot of enterprises have always delayed moving non-production workloads. I'm not talking about production workloads. Non-production workloads to cloud. So this is as good a time for you to use this downtime to start migrating all the non production workloads to the cloud, which render themselves very well for what remote management and also help address scalability and resilience. So once you do it for non-production workloads, then the production workloads can also be migrated. People will have the confidence you can do the migration. So large enterprises have moved and embraced AWS or GCP or Azure. But there are many, many enterprises that are still to adopt these technologies and we are very encouraging and participating and helping customers do these kind of migrations and ensure that their IT systems work as intended.  

Logan: Nanda you added a lot to the conversation there. You know, in talking about how you can help employees deal with the current situation, helping customers deal with the realities of this new normal, as well as taking advantage of some of the opportunities based on the challenges and the current realities presented. Ritesh, I want to give you a chance to kind of speak to that same question for leaders out there that are, one, trying to keep their teams motivated and engaged, as well as supported and also especially innovative teams. How do you recommend, leaders are keeping people engaged, supported, and also able to still do very innovative work in a remote environment. Anything you can speak to there in folks that you're speaking to in the industry or you've seen with your own teams? I would love to hear from you on that point, too. 

Ritesh: Thanks, Logan. Thanks, Nanda. You've a picked up the right thing about the customers and the IT. In this current pandemic, the most affected are the people. It is not only about that we are locked down into the houses. It's basically has impacted people mentally and which is significant. So there's a more onus onto the leadership to keep all people motivated than normal times. These are the times for the resilient leadership. These are the times for empathy like empathetic leadership. Now the leaders have more responsibility to bring people together, own the narrative, keep communicating with the people, prepare for the long view, and embrace the long view and aim for the speed over the elegance. And these are the things that we definitely need to look and do and the leaders need to practice. So leaders has more responsibility and onus than the normal times. They need to make sure they own the narrative, they keep communicating with the people, with the teams, with the stakeholders, as well as with the customers. And these are the times for the empathetic leadership and the resilient leadership on the narrative. And don't just look for the speed or the delivery. Think about the people and get them together. 

Logan: I love that Ritesh so much, because as you said it very rightly earlier, this is a time where we're facing economic financial challenges, but also we're facing very unique challenges as people no matter what our roles in leadership or what industry that we work in, this is something that's touching all of our lives. Ritesh, let's speak a little bit more to the business impact here as we continue the conversation. You know, at any time, business continuity and resilience are obviously extremely critical for any organization, but especially in times like these. So what are some recommendations that you offer to leaders for achieving those sorts of outcomes from digital and operational perspectives, especially in times like these?  

Ritesh: Thanks, Logan. As Nanda has mentioned earlier, generally in the banking industry once in a two ways - Run the bank as well as change the bank. So the complete focus is on run the bank specifically during this pandemic because the change of bank is all about producing the new services and amending the services. Now, the focus is on end of the part which is the business continuity, as well as keeping our customers intact, and keeping our customers at the center. So what banks have done is basically in UK and Europe during this pandemic and I'm uncovering from two perspective is the business continuity as well as the innovation in these difficult times. As soon as we have been hit by a pandemic, the banks have come together and as fallen the government regulation, they have increased the overdraft facility overnight. And they have made changes at a rapid pace. Similarly during these times, HSBC and Alibaba has come together to offer digital financing solution to Alibaba's merchant up to half a million without any collateral or financial documents. So HSBC is utilizing the power of technology and big data to lead trend in home market and empowering merchants during a difficult time. So, yes, these are difficult times, but at the same time, these are the times for the innovation. These are the times to move faster and think more rational and strategically for our customers.  

Logan: I love that you keep coming back, Ritesh, to the positives, to the opportunities in these challenging times. One of the things I love that you mentioned there is that it's always all about people, process, and technology. And when you put people first, then great things come out of that. Nanda, speaking of people, you know, both on our teams and our customers. You spoke a little bit earlier to, I think, something that touches on this. But I want to give you an opportunity to speak a little bit more about the measures that you and your team are taking to ensure business continuity and resilience for your clients as you're helping organizations of various sizes really mitigate the impact of the current situation. 

Nanda: Sure Logan. As you know, Cigniti has an active client list of about two 225 customers around the globe and serving these 225 customers seamlessly with the BCB or the business community plan being implemented across 2500 resources is no mean task. And all this happened in the matter of days when we foresaw these kinds of restrictions coming down from various governments. So we took a proactive step and said we need to be prepared, we need to implement this and sort out any deeding issues much before the official lockdowns have started. So from an early planning, envisioning, and implementing perspective, I think Cigniti was slightly ahead of the curve and that helped us significantly. And once customers saw it working and they also embraced it with open mind, primarily because of two reasons. One, the entire world is facing a similar situation. So I think the empathy factor that was talked about earlier, I think played in our favor because everybody around the world are experiencing the same challenges and they themselves working from home. So embracing the work from home culture whether it is remotely or from an offshore location or people working in an onshore capacity, but still remotely, I think was embraced much openly than a lot of people have envisaged in the past, and this is something that Ritesh also alluded in his conversation. We never saw this coming yet and having not prepared for this, many IT companies have fumbled to implement that in-time. Over a period of time, I think everybody got this sorted out both from a people perspective, IT infrastructure perspective, the security compliance perspective, and being able to meet the agreed timelines in terms of deliverables for the customer I think have been of utmost importance from an operational governance point of view for many IT companies, including Cigniti. And we are on, as you know, a passionate team of testing-only resources. So we have one common theme and take pride in identifying defects and ensuring that we take the custodian ownership of quality across release cycles for all customers. So that's one common theme that helps us stay united despite these kind of challenging environments to stay focused and continue the good work from all the employees.  

Logan: I love to hear kind of a little bit behind the curtain on what you and your team are doing to, you know, address things both as a team and for your customers, Nanda. Ritesh, as we round out the conversation today, you know, we've talked a lot about the remote work environments, the impact that that's having on I.T. infrastructure, speed, delivery, innovation, motivation, and teamwork amongst teams. The other thing I think we have to touch on before we close out the conversation, is security. The remote working scenario right now is presenting some serious security challenges to organizations worldwide across industries. In fact, there have been some reports of a rapid increase in cyber attacks. So for your colleagues out there, Ritesh, what are some advice that you're giving offline that you'd like to share with listeners here about how organizations can protect themselves from these sorts of dangers and lean more into the opportunities that the current situation prevents? So if you could speak to a little bit to some of the security advice that you're giving to some of your colleagues, we'd love to hear your input there. 

Ritesh: Thanks, Logan. I guess security is paramount. And as a representative of everything. It's basically when we are under lockdown, people are at home and working from home and that becomes more crucial. So what I would advise for the organization to step up their cyber hygiene standards, which is a basic which is looking into their digital hygiene habits and promoting this to the people as well. Make sure you have got a complex router password at your home Wi-Fi because people are working from home. We should put up firewalls along with our routers. These are the virtual firewalls so that'll protect us at home. Be extra vigilant on the verification when you're installing the software. Follow official updates, as well as train the employees on security and work from home best practices and make sure that they are aware of the risk that they can pose to the security of the organization and ensure employees are only using their corporate devices to access the company data and also make sure all the devices they use have the latest security patches installed and updated. Tweak your company's email production policies to ensure that no fishing or spam emails can make it to your employees because employees are at home and they are behind their own firewalls and security system. And keep reminding to the employees about spotting phishing emails and not to click on the suspicious links. Make sure employees are not sharing the confidential information to their private channels. So, yes, there is a quite a lot to consume during these times on cybersecurity as it is the utmost important. 

Logan: As you put it there, Ritesh. Definitely there is a lot to think about. And on that note, I really appreciate you're giving us, you know, a really great checklist for leaders as well as employees to think about when it comes to cybersecurity in the given environment right now. Nanda, anything else to add there on the security front as we wrap up the conversation today? 

Nanda: Being an IT services industry, Logan, we cannot just afford not to be compliant with the needs of the army, particularly when you're working with banks and financial services, the compliance levels are very high and similarly with healthcare and life sciences companies right. So all of that goes through an audit. And we need to ensure that all the auditors that we maintain for various clients are fully compliant. And now with work from home location, it's a different dimension altogether. So we have a multi-layered security compliance in place and our ICT team has gone on the top notch solutions to safeguard and ensure that we not only stay compliance but we take one step further and ensure that from an IT system's point of view, we leave no chance for anything that poses a risk for our customers. So that is on security. And at the same time, what we have also identified is we offer security testing services for a lot of our customers. So not only are we as an organization compliant, but we also help ensure that there are no vulnerabilities in this COVID situation for many customers, including some of the top notch financial institutions and some of the customers in the healthcare and life sciences and in Leisure & Travel & Hospitality industry as well. So this becomes even more important in these challenging times. And that's where we are trying to go down the path and see how we can help customers go through the cycles of extreme automation and drive efficiencies and make systems resilient enough and flag things much before they happen. So whether you are touching the boundaries of cybersecurity or network layer security or various other security level things that we have been working very hard to not only provide that as a service to our customers, but also to ensure that all our current customers and prospects are in compliant with all of the regulations. 

Logan: Nanda I really appreciate that. Getting some context into how you guys are serving and help protect several organizations that you work with right now at Cigniti, as well as Ritesh giving both I.T. leaders, as well as individuals some very tactical things on their security checklist to be thinking about. This has been a great conversation, gentlemen, from leadership to digital transformation and rounding out here at the last part of the conversation on security. Really appreciate both of you bringing a lot of perspective from your decades of experience to the current situation. As we mentioned, there are both challenges and opportunities. I just want to thank you both for spending time and sharing some of that perspective with listeners today. Ritesh, Nanda, thank you so much for joining me on the episode today. 

Ritesh: Thank you, Logan. 

Nanda: Thank you, Logan. It's a privilege to be a co-host along with Ritesh today. Thank you, Ritesh. 

Ritesh: Thank you, Nanda 

Quality assurance is vital to the success of an organization’s digital transformation. Lack of control can quickly derail a company’s technological presence, costing thousands. At Cigniti, our resolution is to build a better world with better quality software. Renowned for the global quality thought leadership in the industry, we draw expertise from over a decade of test engineering experience across verticals. To learn how we do it, visit cigniti.com.  

You have been listening to QA talks. To ensure that you never miss ay episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening, until next time.