Philips India
2018 to 2021. 62 events, 27 documented in depth.
Role
- Nov 2021Promoted to Software Excellence Competency Lead with the transfer to Philips North America (see the Philips North America layer).
- Mar 2021Took on a managerial role as Software Competency Specialist II and led software excellence transformation projects for Philips businesses with small teams of architects and specialists.
- Jul 2019Moved to Competency Specialist, Software Excellence, in the Software Center of Excellence, to lead initiatives such as technical debt reduction across Philips businesses.
- Sep 2018Joined Philips Innovation Campus, Bengaluru, as Project Architect for Identity Management, responsible for its architecture, delivery pipeline and code-quality rules.
Scope and responsibilities
- Advised business leaders on software quality, security and regulatory compliance in medical software development and delivery, and helped set the strategies and policies for their practices.
- Held medical software lifecycle responsibilities under ISO 13485 and IEC 62304, covering planning, design reviews, verification and validation cycles, and change control.
- Set new interview policies, goals, KPIs and procedures for global software hiring at the India site leader's request, with tools that met each region's data rules, and trained senior leaders on them.
- Built recruitment strategies with recruiters and HR across regions, mentored senior managers through shadow and mock interviews, and interviewed for senior roles as a decision maker.
- Taught cross-competency teams through hands-on workshops, seminars and pairing with leaders and architects, mentored leaders on DevOps and drove adoption of BizDevOps practices.
- Brought measurable code-quality practice to business units, from duplicate-code detection to quality gates at the developer's desk, and gave direction on Philips HealthSuite platform solutions and on moving legacy systems to Philips' cloud platform.
- From Mar 2021, led software excellence transformation projects end to end with small rotating teams of architects and specialists: scoped them with business heads, allocated and supervised the work, presented findings and approved remediation actions.
Signature work
- 01
Set one hiring bar across regions
Started interview standardization at the campus, designed and ran the bar-raiser program (global inductions for Brazil, North America and Europe, seven cohorts) and led the senior-hiring redesign sponsored by the India site leader: candidate NPS up 18%, hiring-manager NPS up 15%. The CTO award citation named the data-driven hiring framework.
- 02
Made code quality measurable and got teams to act on it
Raised identity management unit-test coverage from 63% to 86% with no extra people, brought duplicate-code detection to business units with hands-on workshops (teams removed 18,688 duplicate lines) and took the data to the CTO's call, then led the quality-at-desk program, with three teams live on its quality gates.
- 03
Savings and reach at company scale
Lead coach for the technical-debt program, which realized about EUR 2.1M in savings in 2021; the connect program reached 341 connects across 109 business units in 2019, about 2,125 participants in 2020 and 575 connects in 2021.
In numbers
- 7bar-raiser cohorts
- 18,688duplicate lines removed
- 29workshops at 8.93/10 in 2019
+18% candidate NPS. ~EUR 2.1M savings. CTO Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (one of ~30 worldwide). campus annual award. Exceeds in 2019, 'top score' in 2020, promoted in 2021.
What people said
“Exceeds is related to the speed with which Datta built a network, ramped up to many workshops and preparations and got good feedback.”
“I wished to thank you for all that you have been doing regarding the bar-raiser project, all the effort that you are putting into this. There is no way we could make this work without you.”
Year by year
- 2021
Took on a managerial role in March as Software Competency Specialist II and led software excellence transformation projects for Philips businesses, then was promoted to Software Excellence Competency Lead with the transfer to the US in November. I led the senior-hiring redesign sponsored by the India site leader (candidate NPS up 18%), was lead coach for the technical-debt program that realized about EUR 2.1M in savings and spoke at a developer conference in Brazil. The CTO Annual Address named me one of about 30 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award recipients, and I won the campus award for organizational capability.
12 events
- 2020
Designed and ran the bar-raiser hiring program, with global inductions for Brazil, North America and Europe, and led quality checks at the developer's desk, with three teams live on its quality gates. As work went remote I kept the connect program going online, with about 2,125 participants across 12 cities, and co-authored the company CI/CD reference architecture. Four goals rated Exceeds, 'top score and top results'.
15 events
- 2019
Moved in July from architecting one product to company-wide software excellence, after leading identity management to automated end-to-end tests and unit-test coverage from 63% to 86% with no extra people. I brought duplicate-code detection to business units with hands-on workshops, put the data in front of the CTO, started and led the campus interview-standardization work and ran 341 connects across 109 business units. Rated Exceeds.
30 events
- 2018
Joined Philips Innovation Campus in September as project architect for identity management, responsible for its architecture and delivery pipeline. In four months I set the team's pull-request and code-quality rules and its 2019 CI/CD goals, and built a DevOps architecture strategy with the team that my first review recorded as delivered.
5 events
What I took from it
Philips India is where I learned to build systems for other people. A central team earns its place by going to the teams, measuring honestly and handing them tools they can run themselves, which is how the duplication program and the craftsmanship assessments worked. Hiring and code quality turned out to be the same problem: make the bar explicit, train people to it and measure the result, which is what the bar-raiser program did across three regions. That belief has shaped every program I have led since.