NISHI NARULA
Principal and Chief Performance Officer
BIOGRAPHY
Nishi Narula is a Principal and the Chief Performance Officer (CPO) of OST. Her mission is to measure, manage, and devise strategies for improving OST’s performance in all areas including growth, solution delivery, human capital management, and corporate shared services.
As CPO, Nishi architects the efforts to analyze the business by capturing and leveraging performance data to affect improvements and innovations in business and growth operations. She combines her analytical, operational, and strategic expertise to pull together key business metrics from across departments and optimize OST functions, business operations, and decision making. Her units, Business Performance Group (BPG) and Human Capital Management (HCM), provide the cross-functional platform to implement the components needed to collect, assimilate, analyze, and deliver business performance data. They monitor key performance and quality indicators across OST staff, projects, and functions.
Nishi and her units hold a unique, pivotal position within OST. They blend industry best practices, quality, and performance metrics with data analytics to create innovative process improvements. Under her direction, OST has implemented many performance initiatives, such as Balanced Scorecard, Project Playbook, and the Employee Career Path Suite platform, which includes detailed role agreements and goal achievement roadmaps for all employees. She has architected and executed the OST governance structure, OST’s central portal of all asset libraries, OST University, and the OST Engineering Review Board. She has also designed and executed OST-wide implementations of Agile5, DevSecOps, CMMI Level 5, ISO, and High-maturity analytics. An article that she co-authored on these methodologies was published in a Department of Defense Journal, CrossTalk .
Prior to being the CPO, Nishi led several customer delivery efforts at the federal and state levels. Her work spanned the areas of software and systems development, strategy, change management, governance, and process improvement. She headed and supported multiple assessments for CMMI L5 and ISO certifications and chaired OST’s Solution Engineering Process Group for more than 10 years.
Nishi holds two Master’s degrees in Operations Research and Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. She has been invited to present at the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) Conference, National Defense Industry Associations (NDIA) conference, and SEI’s “by invitation-only” High-Maturity Measurement & Analysis conferences. Nishi is also a Women Worth Watching award winner of the 2011 Diversity Journal magazine. On a typical day, she can be seen in deep-dive sessions with the staff to solve problems and create new innovative and lean processes that reduce waste. In addition to her extensive hands-on work, Nishi can also be found sharing the progress and results of performance initiatives as well as recommending a set of performance-based actions to the other executives.