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As the drastic shift in business models was occurring at Pitney Bowes (PBI) over last 4-5 years, one of the key requirements and strategic intent was to ensure that the velocity of their products and services was keeping pace with customer expectations within the fast-paced, dynamic e-Commerce industry serving retail & other time sensitive customer segments. This required PBI to operate at a much greater speed, have adequate agility and significantly improve customer experience related capabilities. To address these critical business needs, Rajiv was asked by the CIO and senior executives heading e-Commerce business to lead a cross-functional initiative in early 2017 with a mandate to change the operating model across IT, engineering/innovation and business operations that aligned with the strategic intent mentioned above. Rajiv began this operating model transformation journey with a strategic assessment of current state across people/process/technology dimensions facilitated by 50+ senior leadership interviews and workshops over 2-3 months. The assessment validated the understanding of gaps to achieve capabilities per the strategic intent and helped define a future state where all organizations/departments needed to operate based on a Product oriented model vs. functional siloes/reporting relationships. The leadership team also recognized the need to adopt appropriate methodologies and tools for enabling the underlying speed in developing/deploying/supporting the e-Commerce products and services to customers. They leveraged DevOps and associated CI/CD tools/capabilities to gain this velocity in addition to product oriented operating model to drive changes in behaviors and processes. New product features and functions were developed and rolled out to customers/internal stakeholders in bi-weekly sprints vs. after 6-12-month periods via traditional waterfall methods. After implementing the new operating model enabled by the cross-functional product-oriented teams called “POD”s and DevOps for a pilot product segment, it was gradually rolled out to all business segments within the Commerce Services organization by 1Q 2018. This initiative has helped establish a new way of working at PBI that significantly increased IT-Business collaboration, speed to market and brought many other operational efficiencies along the way. Rajiv feels fortunate to have contributed in this key transformation and continuous improvement journey at Pitney Bowes, Inc.
Rajiv joined FWSIM in his quest to broaden and strengthen the channels of ongoing learning and professional advancement. Even though it has been less than one year since joining, Rajiv has already made some great friends via FWSIM’s networking events as well as some volunteering activities and FWSIM’s mentor circle. Rajiv’s been particularly impressed with the level of engagement at FWSIM’s events – it’s an open environment where having objective professional advancement related discussions with an amazing community of IT leadership peers becomes much easier. Rajiv’s conversations with SIM members have ranged from deeply technical subject matter conversations around challenges that CIO’s and other senior IT leaders face in the new digital world as well as seeking career advice from some world class executive recruitment professionals who are part of the FWSIM community.
Rajiv lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with his wife and 6-year-old twins who love to play tennis, swim, perform western (ballet & hip-hop) and Indian bollywood dance at local arts festivals and theaters. When Rajiv is not working or spending time with family, he loves to play drums and read/listen to books on business and leadership. Rajiv is looking forward to strengthening his engagement within the FWSIM network in the coming months and years while learning from and contributing to its members.
Written by Rajiv Arora and Beverly Lieberman
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