Ola's internal processes were slow and unpredictable, leading to inefficiencies in product delivery and causing problems in release planning.

Lack of ownership & prioritisation led to late start of development processes. Teams working independently resulted in silos, and integration of all was delayed. Loss of key people due to attrition caused reduced productivity. Hence resulting in slow marketing time.

Slow time to market

The process of product delivery and their undertaken modules were not prominently visible, reported, measured, or tracked.

Low predictability of product delivery

Lack of standard coding practices & absent automation testing led to the product delivery being less efficient and in need of optimization. There was a gap between business asks and demands because of disconnected independent units.

Less product delivery efficiency

The successful transformation of processes at Ola led to faster delivery, a smooth communication channel, a revamped organizational structure, a streamlined prioritization process for different organizational levels, and defined roles for Managers, Product Owners, and team members.

The implementation commenced with the process of Discovery where we conducted workshops to understand the issues in the current process and found the improvements that needed to be made. We also identified the stakeholders that are involved in the process. Once recognized, we proposed changes from team management, technical and HR perspectives that can improve the product development at Ola. We then organised workshops with individual teams to suggest how these improvements can be implemented and provided the relevant documentation they can refer to.

CB worked with Scale Factor on this project to suggest improvements in the Ola product development process.

CoffeeBeans analyzed the end-to-end product development process at Ola to identify dependencies. We proposed improvisation for their processes.

Solution

We proposed defining roles to avoid gaps, for better accountability. We implemented appropriate communication channels with follow-ups for employee retention. For HR, we advised introducing KRAs aligning for evaluating individual performances.

Calibration of Business and Technology

We suggested a robust DevOps and Testing strategy to ensure that releases have better quality. The strategy improvements will ensure that quality does not deteriorate.

DevOps and Testing strategy

Enhancing Ola's Product Development with our Solutions

Ola collaborates with us to redesign its internal structure for greater agility

Supply chain industry is highly fragmented. With huge number of players and various roles at each level makes it difficult for the companies to provide visibility at each and every level.The major challenge was to create a platform which allows players to be onboarded easily and manage the supply chain.

To provide visibility and to manage and record delivery at all the levels for all the stakeholders

Onboarding of new players and allowing them to manage E2E supply chain

Huge overhead cost for maintaining a network of service providers

Client wanted to build a unified platform for Supply Chain Management and democratize the supply chain by allowing multiple participants to collaborate while continuing to provide visibility across the shipping journey. This platform would be a single platform to onboard multiple Service Providers manage E2E delivery operations and also act as an Integrated platform for automated selection of Service Providers including first mile, last mile, air cargo & trucking.

This project was started by first recognizing and mapping all the users that will be involved in the supply chain. After this, processes were created to onboard these users to theapp and give them functionalities to make the process seamless. Tracking pages were created for every user persona possible to maintain visibility at all levels. A demoable product was built within the pre-decided period of four months. It was done so that we can validate the product before it is taken to the market.

There were certain aspects taken care while designing the solution for the project. An integrated platform was created for automated selection of Service providers & Airlines hence improving efficiency. And bringing all the different Service Providers (SPs) under one umbrella & maintaining the handholding.

Enhance control tower dashboard & easy workflow management w.r.t. locations and product types (e.g.apparel, electronics, livestock)

Enhance workflow management

Bringing all the different Service Providers (SPs) under one umbrella & maintaining the handholding, thereby removing dependencies with other third-party systems

Created single platform for all different Service Providers

Creating an integrated platform for automated selection of Service providers & Airlines henceimproving efficiency.

Creating integrated platform for automated selection of Service providers and Airlines

Focus on networking aspects where each Service Provider can find other Service Providers to fulfil orders, thereby increasing their operational range

Focus on networking aspects

Built a mobile app and website adeptly navigating challenges with advanced technology

Built a platform that transforms supply chain management with smart tech implementation

Creating an integrated platform for automated selection of Service providers & Airlines hence improving efficiency.

When scheduled, each production upgrade resulted in a 300% increase in system downtimes, flaky systems after the upgrade, internal teams becoming burnt out, reducing productivity, and longer cycles between releases, reducing market penetration. Overall, the impact on business revenue and the end customer's trust in our client

It was not a rolling deployment due to the technology stack. This resulted in definite downtimes for a production upgrade. The end customer was promised a one-day downtime. Due to unanticipated issues, it would eventually result in a 3/4 day downtime.

Prolonged deployment downtimes during production upgrades 

Most production upgrades resulted in the app not working immediately after the upgrade, resulting in additional downtime and revenue loss. Following a production upgrade, multiple sev 1 and sev 2s were logged

Flaky production upgades

Production issues were logged from multiple locations due to multiple end customers. While the team was technically proficient, there was a significant gap in prioritizing these incoming requests while keeping the business impact, available bandwidth, and so on in mind. As a result, the team worked long hours and burned out faster.

Prioritsation of post-production issues

Client wanted to manage the product release process and post productionsupport.They also looked for assistance in management of the infrastructure team to ensure that deployment protocols are followed and the pipelineruns smoothly.

The combined impact of all of the changes mentioned above, as well as some others, resulted in a visible improvement in end-customer trust in the client, and thus the client's trust in us, thus improving client relationships. Production upgrades were also much smoother, allowing the rest of the team to shift their focus away from firefighting and toward more revenue-generating features.

We found problems in production upgrades in three releases. Gave solutions of top four recurring patterns. We ensured that situation changed, such as developing internal checklist, quality checks, solving dependency upgrades, introducing processes such as deployment windows, pre-approvals, and shielding upgrade team.

Prolonged deployment downtimes during production upgrades

Some approaches we took for this included defining the Definition of Done at each stage prior to deployment upgrade, sharing ownership for production upgrade across all teams rather than just the upgrade team, and introducing checklists and quality gate processes.

Production issues were routed through a review tunnel for prioritization, considering factors like available bandwidth & impact. Clear expectations for SLAs of production issues and POCs were achieved. This aided production support team in efficiency, and achieving a stage with no incidents in active lane.

Expertise

CoffeeBeans' Impact: Real Stories, Tangible Outcomes