Tori Global Blog

Establishing a Programme Management Office can significantly improve programme success.  Projects are continually criticised for being single-minded in their pursuit of an objective and do not always consider whether decisions made align to the organisational strategy.  A Project Manager may not consider this alignment part of their objectives and performance reviews are not dependent on it.  A Programme Manager, on the other hand, has to ensure programmes are aligned to the organisational strategy – it’s a key part of their role. 

The corporate world is seeing rapid change, whether it is due to changing global markets, competition, demand for time on the day-to-day operations, or keeping up with exponential IT growth – all these factors leave less time for management to keep track of every project deliverable.  Programmes allow organisations to see at the macro-level, a group of related projects. In addition, programmes give structure, foster visibility through reporting and help consolidate metrics to monitor progress and, once implemented, increase benefits. 

In these days of scarce resources and tight budgets, monies spent in the right areas leading to key benefits will save organisations the long-term head- and pocket-ache of break fixing what haphazard or pet projects implement.

However, before organisations start employing Programme Managers and defining what programmes are needed, it is key that the organisational strategy is defined – without this, good programme management practices will be futile.

Sanam Pervez
Programme Management Practice, TORI Global

As Retail Banking takes great strides towards front to back automation by effectively leveraging the latest in workflow tools and channel integration, one must raise the question:

Are the same efficiencies possible for more complex investment and corporate banking products?

Getting it right from the client perspective is an ongoing challenge for banks in these sectors.  On the whole customers are frustrated with lengthy processing delays, poor feedback, and repeated requests for information.  The perception is often that the right arm doesn’t know what the left is doing, and this is frequently the case.

In my experience, relatively few banks track the performance of their on-boarding processes, or have the capabilities to effectively monitor progress and provide adequate feedback to relationship managers and client facing teams.

Behind the scenes a large volume of paperwork and emails circulate across departments, reliant on knowledge workers to direct it correctly and efficiently to the next stage.  Prioritisation is largely based on who shouts loudest, if front office teams can even track where the application sits at any one time!  From a front office perspective there are effectively two stages, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Complete’, the in-between, it seems, is a complete blind-spot.

Daily I engage with banks implementing projects to improve transparency and streamline on-boarding processes.  Key challenges are:

• One size doesn’t fit all – Every client is unique, and for corporate and institutional clients a standardised ‘one size fits all process’ is largely unrealistic.  Workflow tools need to be flexible and support on the fly process adaption while still ensuring all critical compliance steps are complete.
• Paper, paper and more paper – On-boarding remains a heavily paper based process, and managing the paperwork effectively is key to driving efficiency.  From managing the generation and approval of outbound client contracts, to inbound document classification and storage, systems need to support complex document associations and workflows, and ideally combine document access with access to core client data. 
• Line of business on-boarding – Many banks opt for specialised teams to manage on-boarding for specific product lines.  This, however, shouldn’t preclude effective data sharing across other organisational divisions and global centres.  Banks should consider a centralised on-boarding system, which provides access to both centralised on-boarding functions and individual line of business teams.
• Implementing metrics – Performance improvement comes with in-depth process understanding.  Seek to implement KPIs at each process stage and proactively track performance.

Fenergo

Fenergo was established in 2008 as a software product company focused specifically on Client on-boarding, Client Due Diligence and Account Opening in Financial Institutions. 

Currently there are 26 customers live on the product.

Marc Murphy, CEO, Fenergo  (TORI Alliance Partner)

TORI is seeing a shift in sourcing strategies as a result of major global economic factors.  Instead of outsourcing services in their entirety, global financial organisations are seeking partnerships with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies to reduce costs, share risks and retain control. 

We’ve found that clients value the investment and expertise BPOs offer and these joint ventures can be an ideal solution for the long-term profitability of the business.

Creating a new vehicle to provide services and run as a joint venture, takes the client’s value journey from cost arbitrage to transformation over a relatively short period of time.  Financially this makes sense because staff costs and risks are shared and both parties have a vested interest in making the venture work.  As these partnerships mature, what starts off as a way to ‘do it cheaper’ will progress to ‘do it better’ and by 24 months the partnerships ‘do it differently’ through transformation.  Successful partnerships can start seeing a Return on Investment (ROI) after just 12 months.

But what’s so appealing to clients is that specialist BPOs are investing in their company with a long-term view to jointly develop the business to a point where innovative strategies take the service to a new level.  Even more appealing is that the ‘outsourced’ service is under the client’s control and not outsourced totally. 

It’s a win – win situation if you get it right!

Regards,

Yogi Patel

This will be my last formal bi-weekly TORI Global blog, so I wanted to reflect over the past couple years of highlights and lowlights.  Two years ago we were wondering how we would recover from the banking-led collapse of the early Noughties.  Now we are still wondering when we are going to recover. 

Technology hype has moved on.  When I started this blog, SOA was still seen as the answer, with all the vendors hitched to the SOA and SaaS bandwagons.  Nowadays, these same solutions are branded Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or some variant.  Thirty years ago, when I was a naïve and geeky graddie, we offered a similar service to our customers – a large remote server farm offering SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.  Only we called it a mainframe bureau.  

ITIL was seen as the saviour of poor service.  However, most of us have found it devilishly difficult to implement, hampered by fuzziness between V2 & V3 and a set of manuals that Confucius must have written, full of gnomic utterings rather than practical advice.

The Outsourcing/Insourcing debate continues its Circle of Life as organisations try to replace a costly poor service with a poor costly one.  People will at some stage realise that this is the wrong debate – if you get the processes right it won’t matter who does it, as you will get good service at the right price.

Worryingly, investment in people (training, mentoring, salary packages) seems to have dropped off the radar at the time when they matter most.  Motivated, skilled staff will drive your organisation forward in any market condition.  Screw with your workers and they will screw you.

IT programme and project management has failed to reach a professional engineering level of discipline.  Neither PRINCE2 certification nor wall-sized MS project plans seem to be making a difference to the quality of management and delivery of business change.  Finding someone with the right experience without the bad habits developed out of desperation is difficult.

Security has rightly re-asserted itself as a must have – thank’s Sony.  Chief Security Officers have re-appeared but many boards still don’t get that the brand risk can outweigh any specific IT costs and inconvenience related to security.

Finally, I would like to thank TORI for two exciting and enjoyable years keeping true to their spirit: Trust, Openness, Respect and Integrity.

Regards

John ‘My Way’ Moe

You might think it was an obvious statement to say that in a world where there is a horror story, almost weekly, about an embarrassing high profile project failure costing millions and delivering nothing, sensible companies would have in place effective, metrics driven Project Portfolio Management (PPM) systems and processes.  I’m sure you all have.  No?  Don’t worry you’re not alone. 

Having been responsible for my fair share of cost- or time- ‘challenged’ projects (overrun has such an unfortunate connotation …), I am fully aware that knowing what is sensible and achieving sensibility are not common bedfellows.  So why have I and my fellow Project Professionals (my PRINCE2 is more Machiavellian than yours) failed to keep a tight control on these black holes? 

My first observation is that Project Management and PPM are different beasts, requiring different skills and experience.  Using a PM to do PPM seems sensible, but there are an alarmingly large amount of ‘gotchas’.  For instance, it is quite feasible to plan, design and manage a project using MS Project (yes, I know that real PMs use Artemis).  However, trying to prioritise and schedule 50 business-critical projects using this software would be ambitious to say the least.  

Secondly, project prioritisation requires interacting with some of the most powerful people in your organisation.  Business projects are seen by their sponsors as a test of virility and woe betide anyone who doesn’t treat these symbols with the respect they feel they are due.  Senior management are only interested in their pet projects being delivered immediately.  They don’t give a damn for anyone else’s projects, and normally prefer everyone else’s projects to fail to make themselves look better … 

So, giving a sponsor the reasons why their project is going to be delayed, while their rival’s goes ahead, might seem logical, captain, but you shouldn’t be surprised to suffer a verbal (and possibly physical) roasting, probably leading to a rapid and permanent posting to the Anchorage, Alaska office of your organisation. 

But what about the PPM software the vendors are pushing?  Surely, given it costs a fortune, it will solve these problems?  I get too many icy postcards to believe that.  PPM software saves some nifty Excel macros, but fundamentally only gives you one part of the answer – the depth.  By this I mean the detailed metrics about the benefits, risks, costs and implications of the projects.  These are very important, but you need two other pillars in place to succeed. 

Width.  The only way to get protection from the wrath of individual sponsors is to organise the equivalent of a group hug, commonly known as a PPM steering committee.  This needs to consist of the sponsors and preferably their bosses to publicly debate and agree relative groupings, priorities and resource allocation. 

Height.  Depending on your organisation, you will need the support of the main board or divisional head to protect you from unhappy executives.  Or if you are built like Martin Johnson, you are probably safe already. 

So there you are, PPM solved in three dimensions.  Next week, how to make an ESB using origami …

Regards,

John Moe

In previous discussions on SOA and agile, most of the emphasis has been on speed of implementation.  Business pressures dictate faster response to change, so naturally your IT team run around and burn through the shrinking IT budgets quicker than you can say scrum (and they often also resemble sixteen people with their heads between each other’s thighs with no idea where the ball is).

However, as the contrarian that I am rightly labelled, I want to convince you to step back and consider the measured approach to SOA, which I have amusingly called “Slow-A” (pronounced ‘slo –uh’ for whose who need the feeble pun explained to them).

I’m not going to harangue y’all about ‘less haste, more speed’, although I believe this to be a mostly true cliché.   Many companies I have visited have rushed ahead with their SOA initiative and shot their wad, so to speak, on a shelf full of software that they couldn’t get to deliver any business benefit.  To badly paraphrase Welsh rappers Goldie Lookin’ Chain, “Software doesn’t solve problems, people do”. 

In these accelerating times there is something to be learnt from the Slow Food Movement.  This was started by an Italian (no, really) to combat fast food culture.  In fact I am going to use their 3 main tenets (Local, Fair and Quality) to illustrate my point:

Local means starting small with a departmental issue rather than aiming to solve the climate change sized Enterprise Architecture problem as a good way to start.  Sure, it makes it more difficult to build a complete Service Oriented Infrastructure if you start piecemeal, but at least you can focus on a single problem and solve it before the world changes around you and the users lose interest.

Fair means considering the context in which you are developing an SOA solution.  Very few problems can be solved with technology alone.  In fact I and a million other consultants are kept well fed by the ongoing inability of most IT departments to see this.   Involving pesky people and plodding processes slows things down, but helps to produce the balanced solution the users really need – sometimes with very little IT required.

Quality is often sacrificed at the altar of expediency because users want their solutions NOW, and will insist on timeliness over excellence – until they see the output and harangue you for the rubbish you have produced.  Proper quality SOA needs to be designed and built on strong foundations, which may take longer to build, but will last longer, be easier to change and will be truly agile.

So take my advice and start small and slow, to become big and nimble.  In my experience SOA leads to agile, not necessarily the other way around.

John ‘Chillin’ Moe

It seems that the rush towards a Cloud-based future (no I am not talking about the Rapture) has had some crowd control applied to it in recent weeks with a number of events that have reduced the need for kettling. 

As the big boys spend billions on secretly building larger and larger data centres (or centers as they are mostly US-based) for the inevitable move to the Cloud for all our IT needs, a few spots of reality dripped down causing many of us to look up nervously. 

First Amazon, then Google, had brownouts (like blackouts but smellier) of their online services.  Couple this with Sony sharing millions of gamer details with even less savoury characters and you have the makings of a panic.  Of course, Apple launching its iCloud offering can be seen as a sort of endorsement, but this is the usual Apple easy to use and limited functionality consumer offering. 

This won’t come as a surprise to those old cynics like me who have learnt to steer clear of bleeding edge techology solutions for anything serious until at least three major disasters have happened.  So does this mean it’s safe now?  No one who has been in IT for any length of time would use the words ‘computing’ and ’safe’ in a sentence without a ‘not’ between them.  You can build reliable and logically flawless systems but, unfortunately at some stage people get involved and it all goes Pete Tong. 

With Cloud this is not only true, but you also have a long piece of string between you and the data centre that workmen the world over are expertly looking to cut through with a well placed shovel.  The ISPs, struggling to cater for the exponential traffic growth are gleefully throttling your pipes under ludicrous ‘fair play’ small print. 

So my advice is to treat Cloud like any other IT service: 

• Halve the claimed benefits
• Double the proposed costs
• Add six months to the delivery time
• Make sure plans B & C are in place
• Wash your hands afterwards 

John “Hello clouds, hello sky” Moe

In these days of belt-tightening, one of the first budgets to disappear is the mythical training budget.  I call it mythical because it has always been “without foundation in fact; imaginary; fictitious” in most organisations I have known.  You may find that the costs are put into the annual budget to meet HR box-ticking, but the chances of you actually receiving some meaningful paid knowledge transfer during the year are minimal. 

During good times, you will almost certainly be busy and your manager will not be keen to release you if there are projects to be delivered.  They will flatter you by saying you will pick the skills up on the job as you are so bright/intelligent/gullible* (*possibly not to your face for the last one).  You will be too busy to complain, so nothing much happens.  At the end of the year, if the budget has to be seen to be spent, the managers will find some general inane ‘life skills’ course and get you all to attend an horrific team building event that involves planks, rope and rain. 

In tighter times, the budget will shrink or be forgotten.  If you are not busy, you will be nervously looking over your shoulder and pounding on your keyboard for all you are worth to look as if the world depends on you.  The thought of raising your hand and asking for training would be seen as a ‘sack me’ signal by revealing that: a) you are not currently adding any value; and/or b) you are lacking in useful skills.  Your manager in turn will be trying to show that they can manage budgets (because, let’s face it, that is all they seem to do with their time) by not spending. 

However, there are 3 very good reasons for continuing to invest in skills for you and your staff: 

Motivation:  Being sent on a (at least partially relevant) course is a great motivator in that it proves that you are seen as an asset by your company.  They are investing in you and are saying that you have a future with them.  Being refused training has the opposite meaning (they can feel Alan Sugar starting to point at them). 

Productivity:  Even the most experienced staff can benefit from updated knowledge, skills and motivation.  A good training course will make them more effective and this improvement will last for several months.  If you need to get more out of your staff (e.g. because you’ve sacked their colleagues), this will help ensure your key staff (i.e. the ones you’ve kept) are doing more, in less time at lower cost. 

Flexibility:  In a fast changing market, where the normal rules have broken down, you need your staff to be able to cope with whatever is thrown at them.  With the right education, training and mentoring support you can ensure that they and your business become more agile, and able to track and manage these changes. 

In a previous blog I talked about reducing waste and not cost.  You should consider training to be an investment to reduce waste.  However, make sure it is relevant, specific and tailored to the needs and ability of your staff.  Otherwise it will be waste. 

Mentoring is the next step after training to ensure that the skills learned are best applied back in the workplace.  It differs from consultancy in that the mentor advises, corrects and reinforces behaviour rather than do the work.  Sounds cushy, but all the leadership gurus consistently promote mentoring as the most effective way to improve performance of key staff.  Just make sure the mentor actually has the experience as well as the skills required.  

And finally, couldn’t resist the old chestnut: What is the difference between education and training? 

You probably don’t react if your child comes home from school and says: “We had education about sex today.” 

You react differently if he says: “We had training in sex today!”  

John “Chalky” Moe

A few years ago you couldn’t endure a PowerPoint presentation without the obligatory fuzzy, unreadable Dilbert comic appearing to either badly illustrate a point, or to inject irrelevant humor, sorry humour, into a dull pitch from the unimaginative suit in front of you.  At times, reader, that suit was me. 

Having just about weaned myself off of this lazy habit, I thought I would instead steal one of Scott Adams’ book titles instead for this diatribe, which is all about the leadership of change.  Or at least it started out that way.  It struck me that if you separate leadership of change from the day to day running of a business you are missing what change is all about.  In fact if you are not leading change all the time you’re screwed.  Why?  Let me start with Peter Drucker’s pat definition of the difference between a manager and a leader:  “A Manager “does the thing right” and a Leader “does the right thing.”   While a number of you may be stroking your beards and nodding sagely at this, let me just deconstruct this a bit. 

In traditional organisational structures managers did indeed manage, and bosses did lead (or at least bossed).  But this is no longer good enough for the current state of flux that most organisations are in now.  It is difficult to do things right if the thing changes frequently – careering from John Carpenter’s The Thing to the Addams Family’s Thing.  Even the leader will struggle to do the right thing when there is no rules or clarity on what to do – we are living in a grey spectrum from right to wrong that has infinite gradations. 

Leadership of change is now a full time job, but don’t make the mistake of appointing Transformational Leaders or Change Managers as the owners of change.  The only true leaders of change are the line managers who need to deliver real business value to your customers through customer-focussed processes.  They need to be mentally equipped to find the slightly whiter shade of pale in the grey options that present themselves fleetingly, grasp the opportunity and bring their team along in exploiting the ‘thing’ for the short time it will be profitable.  They will then need to be tough enough to stop doing the ‘thing’ when it loses its value, and find the next chance. 

As Paul Weller snarled: “This is the modern world, we don’t need no one to tell us what’s right or wrong”.  Read the rest of the lyrics to this Jam song as it provides a much better life guide than any number of management books could. 

John “the Mod” Moe