For SHL and Virtusa, collaboration was the key to addressing CX while tackling technical debt

SHL, a global workplace transformation firm, partnered with Virtusa for a managed services engagement to address technical debt in its TalentCentral platform. There was a key caveat: Customer experience (CX) had to be at the core of everything SHL did. Virtusa quickly discovered the key to maintaining and improving CX while tackling SHL’s legacy core was a deep collaboration between the SHL and Virtusa teams. Any enterprise considering a similar transformation should be interested in how they made it work.

SHL is on a quest to tackle technical debt with its TalentCentral platform

SHL provides psychometric testing and cognitive talent assessment services as a part of its offerings. It enables companies to manage the end-to-end process of job applications, talent engagement, and retention. SHL provides these services via its TalentCentral platform, which has more than 240 embedded assessments related to coding, skill language, video interviews, and other items relevant to talent management.

SHL was an early mover in talent management, and its long history comes with the challenges of legacy technology. Challenges included backlogs of more than 1,000 issues on the TalentCentral platform, a legacy monolithic codebase that limited scalability, and the attrition of people who maintained the code. Also, there was no built-in mechanism for logging issues and their resolution and no specific documentation for the platform and its integrated systems.

In a growing competitive environment, SHL needed to resolve customer pain points to enhance customer experience (CX). SHL sought a partner that could bring stability to the platform, keep it user-friendly for improved CX, and deal with age-old technical process debt.

SHL wanted to ensure the organization could support a big software platform like TalentCentral and its employees could access it, respond to issues, and provide technical solutions to clients. They sought a partner to help achieve these goals.

Virtusa’s one-point agenda for SHL was to eliminate technical debt and help accelerate the resolution of existing platform issues

The SHL team identified Virtusa as a partner for eliminating technical debt from the TalentCentral platform. Virtusa managed the entire process, and one program manager from SHL kept an eye on outcomes. The steps Virtusa took to provide a solution adhered to these key principles:

• Engineering excellence: During weekly sprints, the team analyzed issues, ascertained their validity, and resolved them, creating immediate value for SHL.
• Enabled teams: Virtusa’s experienced team worked closely and seamlessly with SHL, providing query resolution and production support to leverage platform knowledge. The team comprised twelve engineers, including back-end and front-end Java engineers, cloud engineers, and a multi-discipline lead.
• Weekly progress checks: Virtusa shared weekly reports on progress, health, and roadmap status for transparency, timely feedback, and course corrections as required.
• Assurance that resolved issues in legacy code did not reoccur: A key measure of success is ensuring that resolved issues don’t reoccur; this was a key focus area for Virtusa.

Virtusa identified the critical success factors and lead indicators to eliminate bottlenecks, including time to inputs, average analysis time, average time to implementation, effective throughput rate, and defect reopen rates. The team’s concerted efforts enabled SHL to fix more than 390 defects in the platform, 42% of which were a high priority. In addition, the team attained a 234% increase in defect throughput and a 77% reduction in the defect reopen rate. When Virtusa finally wrapped up the engagement, the system had hardly any bugs, and internal SHL teams were empowered to handle them. The engagement enabled SHL to maintain its client base, renew contracts, and avoid client attrition. The tangible benefits positively impacted CX by making the user experience more seamless, stable, and user-friendly.

Virtusa took ownership of SHL’s problems to turn solutions around quicker

SHL’s engagement with Virtusa started during the pandemic. Virtusa proactively led in knowledge-sharing sessions and learned terminology to understand the niche nature of SHL’s business.

After the pandemic, the Virtusa team visited the SHL team to better connect, understand the core problems, and create paths for progress with training, the tech stack, and testing. Initially, there were only back-end engineers involved in the project. However, as the team’s understanding of the technical debt problem grew, Virtusa quickly brought in a multi-disciplinary, cross-skilled team (called Squad by SHL, referring to agile teams), including full-stack, back-end, front-end, and technology architecture capabilities.

SHL is now carrying forward Virtusa’s best practices

During the middle of the engagement, the Virtusa team faced attrition issues that led to delays and some confusion, which the Virtusa team quickly remedied by putting in place a new lead.

Overall, SHL was happy with the outcomes achieved during the year-long engagement, and it worked with Virtusa to transfer knowledge from the Virtusa team to SHL. Even though the SHL-Virtusa partnership is no longer active due to internal ecosystem changes, SHL has largely been able to bring forward lessons learned, continue tracking outcome-oriented KPIs, and minimize technical debt. Continuing this path will enable SHL’s corporate users to experience the changes’ positive impacts, increasing CX.

The Bottom Line: Prioritizing CX while addressing technical debt is possible with a collaborative mindset to deliver successful modernization solutions to clients steeped in technical debt.

Nikolaos Synodinos, Director of Engineering, SHL, precisely summarized the working relationship with Virtusa: “I think what people mostly remember is the relationship, how it felt, how the conversations went, how feedback was exchanged, how actions were taken, and the result. In the case of our engagement with Virtusa, we were happy in terms of all the above.”

Global services engagements with a robust plan and the right mix of talent are achievable, but they require a collaborative working plan and a proactive approach. Talent development is becoming increasingly important, and having a partnership like Virtusa-SHL’s will directly impact corporate clients aiming to foster a talent pool rich in skillsets and relevant required knowledge.