The Life and Times of a Change Manager

(Part 2b)

Contributed by Ron Leeman on October 8, 2015 in Organization, Change, & HR

Editor’s Note: Ron Leeman is a world-recognized Change Manager and author of

several Change, Process, and Project training guides on Flevy. He has decided to write a

series of articles that chronicle his personal “change” journey. This is the

second installment (part). You can read beginning from the first piece here. You can also

learn more about Ron and his approach to Change in our recent interview with him.

* * * *

To try and personalize things a little, here is a picture of where I am writing all this stuff.

Not really (LOL). I actually do my writing inside… this is a staged shot, as if you didn’t

know!

OK, moving on.

Like Part 2a, this relates to my Abbey National/Abbey years between 1989 and

1996. Specifically, this part is after Productivity Services re-located from the Baker Street

HQ to the Abbey National HQ in Milton Keynes.

I lived in a place called Bicester in

Oxfordshire and used to travel to London by

train. As Bicester was only approximately a

30-minute drive from Milton Keynes, I was

nominated as one of the first people to move

there. Along with that came my first new

assignment… an exciting one! Not.

We had been allocated an amount of space

in the building at Milton Keynes, which was

to be shared with another Department (can’t

remember which one), so I was tasked with designing the layout of the new Productivity

Services area. A simple task you would think! Well, yes it was and working together with

Abbey National’s Space Planning people, I went about measuring the area, allocating desk

spaces, deciding on the number of cabinets required, defining the IT requirements, etc.

Having designed the layout and had it agreed with the Space Planners and with the other

Department, I submitted the final design to my Line Manager (one of the Senior Productivity

Consultants who initially interviewed me). After studying the design, the only comment he

made was “It looks like we may be slightly disadvantaged on space compared with the people

we are sharing with”. “Slightly disadvantaged”! Huh? I didn’t realize it was a competition!

That was the end of it, I thought, and, over

time, the other members of Productivity

Services moved to Milton Keynes and

seemed quite happy with what I had done.

Well would you believe that when I received

my Annual Appraisal at the end of the year

the “slightly disadvantaged” comment was

reflected in it! Despite the successes of the

other projects I was involved in, the overall

appraisal that I was given was

“Satisfactory!” Well, not being one to take things lying down, I decided to appeal against this

rating.

The appeals process stated that you were only allowed to submit your appeal on one side of

A4! After some considerable thought and effort, I wrote my appeal, but it was over the limit,

so being a bit innovative, I reduced the overall font size from 12 to 8, which did the trick.

What was the result? Surprise, surprise my appeal was not upheld. This was the first time I

had encountered any kind of negativity from my Line Manager. But, hey!, at least I had the

satisfaction of putting forward my case. More on Annual Appraisals in Part 2c.

Moving swiftly onto the next chapter!

Abbey National had a habit of regularly reorganizing to reflect changes in the way the

business was moving and also to ensure that Departments were focused on that direction and

that they sat in the correct part of the wider organization.

Consequently, Productivity Services was deemed “old hat,” so they changed the name to

Process Improvement. One of the problems was where this “new” Department (still

consisting of the same Consultants by the way, but with different Line Managers) would

logically sit within the wider organization. I think it eventually came under Retail Operations.

This “out with the old and in with the new” approach also came with a change of senior

people, so a new Process Improvement Manager was duly installed. Because the two Senior

Productivity Consultants didn’t want to relocate, after some while operating a fairly “lean”

department, it was decided to create two new Senior Process Improvement Consultant

positions, so an internal recruitment process was started. An opportunity for me I thought so I

duly applied. I knew that I was in competition with a few others but having been with Abbey

National for some while (although this was not a prerequisite) and having done, what I

thought, was a good job to-date I thought I would at least get an interview. Guess what? I

didn’t!

I think by now a lot of readers will have guessed that I have a somewhat outgoing and

gregarious personality and am not afraid to shy away from things and to also speak my mind

so you will not be surprised by the following anecdote which I have included, not to be

critical (well kind of), but merely to help you understand the environment in which I worked.

My esteemed Process Improvement Manager decided to interview a number of individuals.

One, who I had the greatest respect for got the job so no qualms there. However the other

individual who was appointed had joined Abbey National after me and had really done

nothing of any significance or consequence since starting but he did have a Degree which I

didn’t (this will come back to haunt me … I will reveal that in Part 2c). The appointment of

this second individual always puzzled me and I did question the judgement of the Process

Improvement Manager although not openly!

Was I right to do that?

Yes I was because low and behold sometime later this individual was found to have, let’s just

say, dishonestly appropriated a not insignificant amount of money through the re-location

process. The word vindicated and self-satisfied come to mind.

After that distraction let’s get back to the work I was involved in.

The Branch Staffing Model was a tool being built to facilitate the accurate prediction of the

number of staff needed to man Branches based on financial transactions. If you think about it

this was kind of aligned to the Saturday

Afternoon Opening project I did when I was

in Baker Street part of which was based on

transactional data. Unlike that project which

required Branches to send in transactional

data I was tasked with capturing an amount

of representative transactional data from

Branches to use as core information to drive

the Branch Staffing Model.

So off I went travelling around the country

to a number of selected Branches reflecting a number of criteria e.g.:

City Centre Branches.

Town Branches.

Rural Branches.

Branches in Shopping Centres.

Each Branch had an amount of information which was backed-up/captured onto 5 1/4”

Floppy Disks and stored in filing cabinets in Branches.

On arrival at each Branch I would randomly select a number of Floppy Disks from the banks

of filing cabinets, download the data into a spreadsheet and undertake an amount of analysis

again based on a pre-set criteria e.g.:

Different types of transactions … each transaction had a category code.

How long each transaction took … start and finish of each transaction,

What time of the day the transactions were undertaken … in hourly segments.

Calculating and average time for each transaction.

What a mind-numbingly boring job I here you say and yes I would agree but I got to travel

around the UK a lot and visit some interesting places.

With my process improvement hat on, one of the questions I raised during this exercise was

why we were not able to obtain this transaction data from the mainframe which could

automatically feed the Branch Staffing Model thereby doing away with all the travelling and

painstaking analysis. Well what a furore that caused because, would you believe it, this was

not available from the mainframe! I was told that to have this facility it would require special

code to be written to enable the data to be

extracted in the format we wanted it so we

would have to write up a business case for it.

Talk about bureaucracy! Anyway to cut a

long story short we did and it happened.

Branch Study

This involved a team of Consultants visiting

selected Abbey National Branches to

undertake a programme of activity to gain an

overview of how a Branch functioned, its overall efficiency and the identification of potential

process improvements which was, after all, what the new Department was all about!

Activities included:

Activity Sampling of all Branch activity to identify overall activity e.g.:

o Work time.

o Break time.

o Lost time.

Analysing counter transactions e.g.:

o Cash withdrawals.

o Deposits.

o Card transactions.

o Account Book updates.

Sales activity e.g.:

o Financial Adviser interviews … Mortgage, Loan application etc.

o Lead generation.

o Prospecting.

Back office functions e.g.:

o Application processing.

o Reconciliation

o Lost and stolen processing.

Some of the information gathered fed into the Branch Staffing model.

These studies normally lasted about 1-week but they were great because I was able to get out

of the Head Office environment and interact with front-line staff.

One of the Branches where we did a study was Bermondsey which was in South London. I

can recall having to do a 15 minute walk to the Branch from the nearest Underground Station

every day for a week which involved winding my way through a number of industrial areas

where there were numerous businesses holed up in old dark and dank railway arches.

In those days South London was not a

particularly salubrious place and I have two

vivid recollections of this study:

Even though I thought I was “street

wise” you can imagine me walking through

these places wearing my best “bib and

tucker” looking totally out of place and

being eyed with some suspicion. I was

constantly looking over my shoulder looking

for potential problems and was glad to reach

the Branch unscathed.

A few weeks earlier a neighbouring competitors Branch had been the subject of an

armed robbery which caused me some trepidation and didn’t exactly fill me

confidence.

Finally to end this article there were a couple of other projects that spring to mind:

Current Accounts vs Term/Deposit Accounts

I not entirely sure how this project came about but it was to do with identifying Current

Accounts in which customers had large amounts of money deposited to see if better use could

be made of their money

Basically the premise was that Current Accounts were paying minimal interest whereas if a

customer transferred a sizeable chunk of their money into a Term Savings/Deposit Account it

would earn them more interest.

So off I went to a number of Retail Banking Centres to identify Current Accounts containing

a large amount of money. I can’t remember what we determined as being “large” but I do

remember we categorised it into amounts e.g.:

5,000 to 9,999 GBP.

10,000 to 14,999 GBP.

15,000 to 19,999 GBP

Over 20,000 GBP

Having done my initial analysis I presented my findings and made a recommendation that we

contact customers with large amounts of cash in their Current Accounts to see if they wanted

to transfer monies to a better interest paying Term Savings/Deposit Account. This actually

sparked off an interesting debate around the following:

From a customer service perspective:

o Positive … customers would get a better interest rate.

o Negative … customers would not have instant access to their money.

From an Abbey National perspective:

o Negative … Abbey National would be paying a higher interest rate to

customers

o Positive … Abbey National would have money to use as long-term funds for

other purposes.

Following an amount of deliberation the decision was to maintain the status-quo as the

instances of large amounts in customers Current Accounts was relatively low so would not

significantly benefit Abbey National. Mmmmmm … what about the customers!

Mortgage Redemptions Process

Abbey National’s core business in those days was Mortgage Lending but there was a

considerable focus was on attracting new customers with headline rates which were normally

designed to compete with the other big mortgage lenders of the day such as the Halifax (now

part of Lloyds Banking Group), the Nationwide (still a Building Society), the Alliance &

Leicester and Bradford & Bingley (both now part of Banco Santander who of course took

over Abbey National).

At that time there was little attention paid to existing customers so I was tasked to look at this

aspect to see whether there was anything that we could do to retain them. One of the early

identifiers of an existing customer looking to possibly change their mortgage was that their

Solicitor would request a Mortgage Redemption Statement from Abbey National. This

statement would be used to calculate how much equity was in the old property which could

be used to secure a mortgage for a new property. On receipt of a redemption request Abbey

National’s process was merely to undertake the calculation and send the statement to the

customers Solicitor!

This was a “no-brainer” really. So I recommended that before the redemption statement was

issued that Abbey National put in place a simple process to contact the customer to ascertain

exactly what their intentions were e.g.:

Planning to stay with Abbey National.

Moving to a new Lender because of a better deal.

If it was the former then no further action would be taken. If it was the latter then enter into a

dialogue with the customer to get details of the new deal and to see if Abbey National could

match or better it. Pretty simple really! Clearly there were no guarantees that following the

interaction with the customer that Abbey National National could offer them a better deal.

Whilst I have no specific details of outcomes I do remember anecdotal evidence that the new

process was successful in a level of customer retention which would otherwise not have

happened.

Good grief how things come flooding back. It never ceases to amaze me how one memory

suddenly triggers many other memories–total recall (LOL).

That’s it. Get ready for Part 2c soon which will be the final part related to my Abbey National

National years.

About Ron Leeman

Ron Leeman has been involved in “change and process” work for more years than he cares to remember. He has worked extensively across the UK, Europe, and globally--and has an enviable track-record of delivering organisational change and process

initiatives across a wide cross section of industry sectors. In 2012, Ron was bestowed with a “Change Leader of Tomorrow” award by the World HRD Congress “in recognition of my remarkable progress in initiating changes enough for others in the same industry to follow my example”. Ron is firm believer in knowledge transfer and now wants to share his vast knowledge with those who are considering getting into or at various stages of “change” and/or “process” work or those working on specific Projects wanting to gain practical insights into “how to” type situations. You can connect with Ron Leeman on LinkedIn here, where you can view his 85+ Recommendations and in excess of 800 Endorsements from clients and co-workers alike to give you an indication of the quality of service that he has provided and can offer. Ron is also a document author on Flevy. Browse his frameworks on Change Management, Process Analysis, and Program Management here: http://flevy.com/seller/highwayofchange.

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