Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:06]
Hello and welcome back to the HFS GCC Advantage. This is the show where we speak with GCC leaders to understand how GCCs are being built for the next phase, where ownership, speed, AI and business accountability are becoming more important than just scale alone. Today I’m joined by Shalini Sankarshana, Managing Director, Planview. Shalini, welcome to the show.
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[00:33]
Thank you, Achyuta, and thank you, HFS team. Looking forward to the show.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:38]
Shalini, to start with, can you give us a brief overview of Planview, your role leading the India GCC, and the goals the GCC was set up with? My understanding is that the intent was to build a multi-functional center right from the beginning, and this happened in a PE-backed environment with M&A activity happening. So can you walk us through some background, and share your own background in building and scaling GCCs so far?
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[01:02]
It’s been a very interesting journey, so let me give a quick overview of what Planview is. Planview is a software product and platform provider, essentially focusing on work management and portfolio management solutions. And yes, we are a private-equity-owned organization, having been in the industry for close to 40 years, really shaping the domain, and being called out as a market leader by almost every leading analyst in our domain, which is strategic portfolio management and, in an adjacent domain, value stream management.
What we do is help organizations connect the work and the business outcomes all the way up to the strategy. And that problem has really not gone away. You continue to have cycles of strategy planning, delivery and outcomes, and the gap has never been more pronounced than today with the advent of technologies like AI. We see this across sectors, from BFSI to auto, pharma, real estate and construction.
My journey with Planview started here in late 2022, with the remit of building and scaling India as a strategy for the organization. Before that we did have some presence in India through an acquisition, but Planview really wanted to be intentional about how to build out the India strategy.
Let me start with my current remit. My current remit is about how I help drive this India organization to achieve Planview’s broad business goals. Number two, I have a specific section of the business carved out, which I run independently as a global remit, and which includes product, tech and everything under the sun, because it’s a number-carrying role. And third is to continue to help build out India as a market.
We began with the charter of building scale. We had certain globalization goals. We had grown as a company with multiple acquisitions across multiple geographies, but as we grew, we needed a set of global practices, processes and people, a set of global capabilities. So that was one of the key goals for India. Second, we wanted to look at certain optimization goals, from finance and accounting to DevOps and engineering. Then we said, if we are becoming the core strategic organization for the broader Planview, how do we build some of the next-generation talent? On technology we were going towards modernization; on ops, towards AWS, DevOps and cloud; on services, ramping up professional services talent. So we looked at what next-generation goals look like and started building it out.
It’s been a zero-to-one journey over the last three-odd years. We spent the first few months planning, and did it as a big-bang transformation. In the last two and a half years we’ve set up teams across every product, geography and function, now completely mainstream and core to the organization. And now we’re looking at what’s next.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[05:03]
Thanks, Shalini. One of the most interesting parts of the Planview India story is the overall engineering mandate: eight out of sixteen products are now run end to end from India, and two flagship products are shared between India, the US and Israel. So how did the India GCC team earn that level of product engineering ownership?
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[05:20]
Very early in our journey, we skipped the GCC playbook. We said: take on the problems of the organization, take on the key business goals. And that has really proved fruitful, because that walk-the-walk has to happen from structure to design to the ability to build talent, taking on the pains of the organization. All of this happened through what I would call cultural harnesses.
A quick overview of engineering: we are a core product organization, with about 16 to 17 products, most of them acquired; we have one really home-grown flagship product, and then we have been building our Planview platform. The Planview platform becomes one uber platform for everything, as these products become capabilities, and this also drives the data and the AI journey. So it has elements of modernization, complete new build-outs, and a whole host of journeys around data and AI.
As we looked at the product and engineering organization, one goal was to be truly globalized. So we looked not just at individual products but also at the horizontal processes, like ops. We started centralizing a bunch of ops activities in India and building the talent, because what we had in the rest of the organization was a more legacy way of operational activities. We wanted to move into a core DevOps and SRE culture.
When we look at individual products through a PLM lens, whether they’re in an inception, growth or truly mature stage, and which we’ve sunset, we did this exercise, and continue to, like any good product organization. We started looking at classes of products we should look at and operate differently. Part of that was how we transform the organization to drive end-to-end ownership. Given that this has the biggest engineering base, where more than half of R&D sits here in India, we said that inherent ownership should happen here. That became a very early goal, which helped us set the organization up that way.
We had two of our biggest products spread across, one between the US and India, one between Israel and India. As we took on extended ownership of all these products, while we started as a two-in-a-box model, now we have a very clean differentiation about what the key accountabilities are. This became even more pronounced as we did an acquisition, which led to more growth in India.
From an engineering standpoint, we are a truly agile-based organization. We probably have two to three levels of ownership: end-to-end ownership of a product, and within large monolithic products, modular ownership; and because there is a truly agile full-stack team, with product management, design and the entire function here, each scrum team by itself is also fairly self-sufficient. So I think that’s been the constant of the organization.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[09:14]
We often talk about global roles from India; that’s common in a lot of GCCs. But Planview India has taken on global P&L responsibility as well, and this is quite different. How are you preparing the India organization to take up this responsibility very differently?
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[09:38]
This is a relatively newer motion for the broader organization, because we are truly carving out sections of the organization and running them independently. It’s not just about an India story told globally, because that was the next evolution we had to take. And we are also saying all of this has to be truly backed by an AI harness. So P&L ownership is one part of it, which essentially means truly market ownership, customer ownership. I think that’s where we are doing the biggest part of the work.
Within those, we are also looking at how we build largely fungible teams, really blurring the lines between what ops means, what customer support means, what product and tech mean, because there is so much opportunity today with AI to reimagine your overall delivery organization. We are also looking at how we bring each of these team members closer to the customer, trying to make this as customer-facing an organization as possible, including our engineering leaders.
The customer orientation I spoke of is also a business orientation. Business does not always mean you keep building or keep adding features, which is where most of our minds are wired as a core technical workforce. We are staying away from that, towards what we really need for the business, and truly focusing on bringing value to the customers, truly building technology that makes sense for the customers. So that value and business orientation is something we are being structural about.
We are also rethinking what really requires some core in-region presence, because of contractual and country-level obligations, and what requires a lot of centralization with fungibility.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[12:07]
You talk about AI, Shalini. AI is becoming core to every organization. Can you talk about Planview’s AI and intelligence platform, and the role the India team played in developing it?
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[12:25]
Planview has been incorporating AI for several years now into our core product set, because, as we all know, AI is not new, though it has taken on a different avatar in the last few years since the ChatGPT demo. The generative-AI flavor today changes the way you interface with the machine, but AI is a technology that has existed for a while. So that classic AI we continue to have in our products and capabilities.
What we’ve done in the last couple of years is truly double down on building our AI brand and products. As we build the Planview platform, how does it go AI-first has been the journey. Our AI capabilities are fairly well embedded into the Planview platform overall. And it comes in a few flavors. The most foundational is the interface layer, which is how you converse, even with this large, complex portfolio management space, how you converse with the system so you can keep accomplishing your tasks. Then, how you make the core capabilities, whether investment planning, work planning or resource management, how you drive AI nativity into those capabilities, has been the second layer. And the third layer has been truly building intelligence and governance, with a lot more real-time flavor.
With the amount of technology advances, even with all the growing pains, it opens up a very different lens to technology execution, almost driving towards commoditization of the so-called coding cycle. So the idea was, every organization is thinking about this too: speed has grown, because AI gives you speed; volumes have grown; but what has not changed is the structure, the current workflows, the process and even talent to an extent.
So amidst all of this, two or three dimensions become very important. One, most sectors are heavily regulated, and how do you drive governance on a real-time basis? In the past it was a human workforce with human workflows. Now we have human-plus-agent, then agent-to-agent, then human-in-the-loop, human-in-the-lead, and potentially 100% agentic with only oversight by humans. So governance is one of the key themes. Second is intelligence. Intelligence no longer is a premium; it’s considered an expectation. You’re not going to look backward; you want every system to drive the forward behavior. And third, how do you tie all of this back to the original outcomes we started with? So these are three big things we are pushing via our AI platform, and the overall Planview platform.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[15:49]
Thanks, Shalini. Last question. India as a market is something you’re actively exploring. What’s the role of the India GCC? How are you moving from a cost center to a proper revenue center?
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[16:02]
We began the India market journey a few quarters ago. It’s been a very good start. India as a market is very attractive, and at the same time has a lot of complexity, like many markets. We have a field organization which continues to build amazing relationships with the most marquee logos, from automotive, where we have players like TVS Motors as a customer, to pharma, one of our biggest focuses right now, with Biocon, Dr. Reddy’s and some amazing names. And banking continues to be an important sector.
To drive this market execution and awareness, and create that support harness for market development, it’s essentially the India center which is driving this whole thing. And it is a very symbiotic relationship. This orientation to the market and customer creates a lot of value in the current India center. At the same time, there is a comfort for customers that the largest center of this organization is right here in Bangalore. You have services, sales, support, development, product management, all coming together to drive value.
We continue to nurture the fact that this is a very thriving GCC ecosystem. Which opens up two angles. One, most large global organizations have influential global entities sitting out of here. How do we build that ecosystem that is not only a market opportunity but also drives thought leadership around strategic portfolio management? How do we bring a whole host of CXOs into this community, which is our global customers? Second, given the maturity happening with GCCs, where ownership is being driven more and more, how can Planview help that ecosystem think through what’s next, how they drive value in their own organizations, and help their customers to a valuable journey? So we are exploring on both, and lots of learning so far.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[18:46]
Shalini, thank you for joining us and sharing your perspectives. What I found interesting is the pace and ambition of the Planview India journey. The GCC story moves from setup to product ownership to capability, business and possibility, and now India is a talent location and also a growth opportunity. It also shows where the GCC model is headed: deeper ownership, strong business context, and clear accountability for outcomes. Thank you again for being a part of the HFS GCC Advantage.
Shalini Sankarshana — Managing Director, Planview, Inc.[19:17]
Absolutely, Achyuta. It’s been a pleasure, and thank you for allowing me the space to explore this journey with you. And I see a similar journey, with many of my peers.
