ITC plans to invest Rs. 25,000 crores over the next 5-7 years in various projects across India to accelerate investments and build assets. Currently over 40 projects are under implementation. ITC's initiatives in farmer empowerment through e-Choupals now cover nearly 40,000 villages and 4 million farmers, with a vision to expand coverage to 100,000 villages and one sixth of rural India over the next 5 years. ITC also aims to scale up its rural retailing and demonstration farms to further empower farmers and reach more consumers. Managing these various initiatives and aggressive targets while ensuring quality, on-time delivery and budget adherence presents challenges around resource allocation and management attention that need to be addressed through prioritization,

1. Meeting with ITC Agri Business
Leadership
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2. Accelerating Investments in India
Building Assets for the Future
• ITC has charted an investment programme of nearly Rs.
25,000 crores over the next 5-7 years in support of the
need to raise the pace of investment in the Indian
economy.
• At the current moment over 40 projects, large and small,
are in various stages of implementation cross the country.
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3. Agri Commodities & Rural Services
• Farmer empowerment through e-
Choupals
• This initiative now comprises about
6500 installations covering nearly
40,000 villages and serving over 4
million farmers.
• Over the next 5 years it is ITC's
Vision to create a network of
20,000 e-Choupals, thereby
extending coverage to 100,000
villages representing one sixth of
rural India.
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4. Choupal Saagar & Pradarshan Khet
• 24 'Choupal Saagars' have commenced
operations in the states of Madhya
Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh.
ITC is engaged in scaling up the rural
retailing initiative to establish a chain of
100 Choupal Saagars in the near future
Choupal Pradarshan Khet
• To help farmers enhance farm productivity by
adopting agricultural best practices. Started in
2005-06, This initiative, has covered over
70,000 hectares and has a multiplier impact
and reaches out to 1.6 million farmers.
To reach out to 4 million farmers
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5. Choupal Haat
ITC – ABD in its 2nd year has
successfully been able to
conduct 6000 events in 4 states
– Uttar Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh, Maharastra and
Rajasthan, reaching almost 5
million consumers.
The plan is to scale up these
events from existing 100
districts to about 500 districts
in other states to be able reach
20 million consumers
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6. Competitive Advantage
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7. Business Process Excellence - SOPs
• Standard Operating Procedures for ITC Agri Business is continual process
• Process Innovation started : 2005, ending 2012 (Kriya – implementation stage, through
games, quiz, prices, etc)
• SOPs in place : 100 (developed over 20-30 yrs), Scope: 8 states, 150 hubs, 250 Warehouses, 900 people
• Operations team : Warehouse (250 x 3) avg age (25-28), 300 field personal, 25 supervisors, 50 senior
personnel, 25-30 people at HQ
• Technology: SOPs exist on internal servers, plan for tablets to be given to teams at operation level for
following processes
• Audits : Operational Audits by Audit committee every year, period (4-5 months), Risk based
Challenges :
• Operations teams to understand purpose and objective of SOPs, the awareness (maybe skills training
required)
• Are there best practices which can be innovative and simpler to follow
• Gap in implementation and following the SOPs
• Better ways for SOPs to be followed if they are linked to KRAs
• Monitoring compliance of SOPs
• Common Practices to enable multiple service offering through Sustainable value platform (choupal haat)
• Goal : to develop and increase market service and explore opportunities through same channel – Choupal
Haat
• Goal = “Supply Chain Efficiency” and best practices/benchmarks across ITC Agri Business
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8. Summary of Discussions
• Audacious goals and targets for the management
• Scalability of existing agri services / initiatives
• Visibility of current initiatives / projects
• Constant follow up and review of progress
• Not enough time for research and trends
• Process innovation at each business line
• Using existing platform to extend more value add
services to rural markets
• Resource management and accountability
• Multitasking
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9. Challenges
• Scale up several times
• Lots of projects to
be managed
• Constant follow up
and reviews (fire
fighting)
• Little time left for
learning/upgrading
• Resource contention ZUBIN POONAWALLA 9

10. ActionsCriteriaObjective
(Quality, Speed,
Economy)
Scale up with
lots of project
to be
completed
Apply a lot of
management
attention
Constant review
and follow up on
every project
Complete more
projects on time in
full with in the
agreed budgets
Prioritize and
focus on selected
few
Solving The Core
Management Dilemma….
Conflict
How can we
take on
aggressive
targets, yet
achieve them
reliably?
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11. Dilemmas aren’t
conflicts between
right and wrong; they
are conflicts between
two rights
- Georg Hegel
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12. Fundamental Assumption
• The current state of any organization is an
effect of the decisions of human beings.
• The main thing that is controlling the rate at
which a company grows and it’s strength and
stability, is how much attention Top
Management can put on
1. The quality of the decisions they make
2. The speed they can respond to issues
inside and outside of the company.
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13. Fundamental Assumption
“Management Attention”
is the true constraint of
most organizations
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14. ZUBIN POONAWALLA 14

15. The challenge of managing multiple projects, through functional resource management, is
made more complex under the influence of uncertainty.ZUBIN POONAWALLA 15

16. Recommendations
• We must recognize that the most valuable problem to solve is
the overloading of Management ( Initiatives Chart )
• We must create a management system to address all these
initiatives from the corporate
• In order to effectively manage and have control over the
initiatives. We must projectize, prioritize and identify resource
constraints.
• Early warning signals must be available to make sure decisions
are made swiftly at all levels
• Implement methodologies, system and tools to better
manage initiatives and focus to scale up with better resource
utilization.
• A 6 week pilot implementation on any one of the service
offerings
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17. Multi-Project Dashboard Top Management
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18. This can be explained with an example (Another real life case)
Notice the number of projects in parallel
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19. Which contains a sample of staggered final assembly
plans with same dispatch dates
Staggered starts
will cut bad-multi-
tasking
Formalizing them will cut bad-
multi-tasking in E, P &
component/ subassembly
Manufacturing also
Some Early finishes
will cut pressures
on Quality & Safety
Fewer concurrent final
stages will enable
better focus on Quality
& Safety
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20. Single Project Monitoring
The project progress
trend is plotted on
the graph
Projects status colors
are assigned based on
the status on the
graph
Chain Completion % =
(Original Chain – Remaining Chain)/ Original Chain x 100
Buffer consumption % =
(Buffer Consumed)/ Original buffer x 100
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21. COO
Agri Services
Head
Area Manager
(Agri services)
Hub Incharge
Field supervisor
Hub Incharge
Area Managers Area Managers
Manager
Rural Marketing
New Initiatives
Head
Agri specialists Managers
Sanchalaks
Level-1
Level-2
Level-4Level-3
Level-5
Systematic escalation through the system ensures stable
priorities
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22. Let us Now Summarize the CCPM Way of
Managing Projects
CCPM
Planning
Multi-Project Cut
bad multi-tasking
Project
priorities
Release
control
Single Project
Cut Students’
Syndrome
Cut
Parkinson’s
Law
Cut
Integration
losses
Execution
Task
Management
Uniform, Stable
Priorities
Resource
assignment
Reporting
Remaining
duration
Escalation/
troubleshooting
Relay race
Advance
preparations
Completion
criteria
Project
Control
Status
measurement
Buffer
Recovery
POOGI
Reporting
Causes
Focusing
Improvements
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