Q&A with Tony Pirih, Nortel’s R&D Operations leader
As part of our focus on Nortel’s R&D transformation this week on Buzzboard, yesterday I talked with Tony Pirih about Nortel’s recent R&D efforts. Tony joined Nortel in March 2007, supporting R&D operations in the carrier organization under Richard Lowe. In November he moved into the CTO group - reporting directly to John Roese - to take over R&D operations across the company.
Tony Pirih, leader of R&D operations at NortelI asked Tony about a wide variety of topics, including his role (which is new to the company) and the challenges he faces, the future of Nortel’s Ottawa labs, Nortel’s China Labs, our ability to innovate, and the effects that these R&D transformation initiatives are having on the company.
Below is our conversation.
What is your role in the CTO organization? My role title is R&D operations leader, and I report to John. Fundamentally my job is to put an operational structure around all of the R&D being done across the company. To help facilitate that, all of the key R&D leaders from across the company report dotted line into me. John has responsibility for a lot of areas, and he realized he needed somebody who could really focus on the operational side of things. It turns out that a lot of the things that I did for Richard Lowe when I joined the company in Carrier R&D are what I’m now doing across the company. In a nutshell, my job really is to ensure that the whole of R&D is greater than the sum of all the parts.
How was R&D organized before your R&D Operations role was created?
One of the things this new role is intended to do - and where John has spent a lot of his efforts over the last year - is to bring back a sense of community to the R&D population. While I haven’t been at Nortel a long time, a lot of people have shared with me how things used to be. At one time, we had a very centralized R&D model and there were a lot of basic best practices here. Then Nortel went to a distributed structure, where R&D was fractured or broken up. Basically, each of the businesses had its own R&D organization and managed it independently. Although there were benefits in moving to a distributed R&D model - in many ways it got the R&D teams closer to the customers - there were also disadvantages in terms of duplication and inefficiencies. Also there was really no place where all of R&D rolled up to. So the goal of my role is to bring the R&D community back together again from an operational perspective, in order to improve overall R&D efficiency and effectiveness by better sharing across Nortel’s businesses.
What has been your primary focus to this point? Since November, my primary focus has been to drive five key initiatives that are targeted at fundamentally creating a more effective and efficient R&D function. Although work in some of these areas had been going on for some time, we officially launched the initiatives to the entire R&D community last December when we brought together all of the senior R&D leaders for a two-day working and planning session. A couple of significant things came out of that session. One was a detailed 100-day action plan for each of the initiatives. The other was the realization that an aggressive and targeted internal communications plan would be really critical to ensure understanding and acceptance across the company. It’s only April and we’re making great progress on all fronts.
Can you talk about the five initiatives that you mentioned that are your key focus to this point? It starts with people. One of the five initiatives is focused on talent management. You can’t execute without great people, so the talent management initiative is absolutely paramount and clearly one of the most important ones of the bunch. This initiative involves things like ensuring that you have a very comprehensive career development and mobility program in place, and training initiatives that will enable people to fulfill their careers in Nortel.
