It’s a reverse pyramid for Infosys, as the tech giant gets ready for organisational delayering

Infosys, which is India's second-largest software exporter, is one step closer to rolling out its ambitious delayering exercise. Infosys COO Pravin Rao said that the tech giant may look at rolling out the delayering exercise across the company as early as the next financial year.

"Our engineering services unit - that is where we've started the pilot.Once we're confident that it's moving in the right direction, then we'll do it at scale and extend it to the rest of the organisation," said Rao. "Sometime in the coming year, in FY17. The pilot has been underway for just a quarter and we'll probably look at one more quarter before extending it to the rest of the organisation."

As told earlier, Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka wants to be at ‘Zero Distance’ from his clients, which is why it’s working towards cutting down redundant organisational layers and working on a pilot project with 10,000 people. It has also broken down the traditional, five-layer organisational structure and made its structure a two-tiered one.

Terming it "reverse pyramid", he had said, "In certain service lines, we are trying out a radical delayering... and create this reverse pyramid where the project managers and teams are in front working directly with customers and taking decisions."

It is because of addition of thousands of employees over the past decade, that there are many layers of middle management, which in all these years have been under-utilised.

"We've seen that people who are not getting billed, they also tend to get a little bit away from technology and so on. The best way to address that is to make them more active in project execution - that's the whole notion."

Infosys is also opening up its Zero Bench marketplace, which would give employees on-the-bench experience on projects to its clients.
"About 70 per cent of the people on the bench have at least worked on one project in the Zero Bench programme. Though it does not affect our utilisation rate as it is measured by analysts, we are working on more projects such as giving clients access to post their requirements on the marketplace," Sikka had said.

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