Internal Partnership
As an example of having the right change agents,
we took a high flier, an area manager from the network. We gave him carte blanche to challenge the status quo. From that idea, an executive sponsor was prepared to champion the changes that would become the new model. It would not have worked for a project team alone to do it. Yet the business team didn't have the skill to be able to structure it. So we created a partnership where the project teams went in to help structure the trial, but it was the area manager who drove the changes. It was his - and his team's - ideas that were being generated. We 'married' him to a senior programme manager who put the structure in place, did the initial scoping workshops and generally facilitated the methods. The pressure of worry about those things was taken off the business team so they could concentrate on the delivery.
 
Prototyping
Behavioural change by peer example was achieved
by several means. It's interesting that the skill set
we're looking for in this retail environment is quite different from what you traditionally have in a banking environment.

This links to the communication process, too. With 7,000 people the rumour mill will get your message
out faster than any formal channel can. But we've worked hard at the 'formal' communication aspect. When we chose to roll out the change, the area manager we selected in the trial was pulled out and
he became the National Business Implementation Manager. He became the person to communicate. He'd take the stance of 'this is how things have changed, these are the benefits and you absolutely
can do this change because I've been there and done it.' At the end of the rollout the Business Manager was promoted to the Divisional Director. This helped bed the change in further to the operational line.

Communication
We have a TV station where we put out messages once a week, we have the internet and so on. We
have feedback buttons on the web to let people have
their say and communicate back in a structured way. We're quite rich in terms of communication.

We've had success with all that and rolled it out, and we're a year on, and the end result is we're franchising the local market. In a very short while four area managers are going to create their own plc of which Abbey will own 51% and they will own 49%.

Coherence
By trying to manage the change coherently we've been able to create an understanding that there's some longevity running through this and the change isn't just a bunch of diverse initiatives. We've been able to take an organisational change and stretch it through a number of iterations that you would never have been able to jump to, from that basic start.”

Do you have any comments about IBT's
Alignment Model?
“You've got to have your board believing in the need for a strategic model and you've got to have the whole organisation understanding what part they play in the model. Your model is not rocket science but in organisations people can lose sight somewhere along the way of having to go through this piece of the jigsaw.

Organisations can spend a lot of money trying to get people to learn statements about 'what our vision is' but nothing actually happens unless you get that model facilitated to a level where people can actually do something. Sometimes getting a vision can be done but getting that vision down to working group level, so you physically know how to move the business forward, seems to be a real trick. There has to be something that bridges that gap and it seems to be a competence that isn't widely available. There's a niche there, and I think in Abbey, the programme managers and the project managers are trying to perform that role. The change programme that is supporting the business has a character like me reporting in to each of the operational directors trying to facilitate delivery.

That wasn't there three years ago. Three years ago there was a business plan, a three year commitment - but a process to support what they wanted to do.
So in reality, we had a commitment on paper to do something that bore no resemblance to the activities that were happening on the ground. You'll know from Tony's material (Tony Teague, Abbey's Retail Transformation Director) they had some 280 projects they were trying to do. They had delivered 2 or 3
the previous year. Now something says, the way they were going about change management there wasn't very effective. It was the 'burning platform' that fuels change. It was sufficiently hot to stimulate a radical change in approach.

Doing the Right Project
Well, at a stroke the 283 projects got stripped by 221 down to 62. As Tony said we were now 'doing the right projects - and doing the projects right'.

Three years on, when the programme managers get into the annual planning cycle and someone says, 'the market is going in such and such a direction and we need to do such and such', we get involved in the process at an early stage. I and my colleagues continue to challenge an idea or a vision until we understand exactly what's wanted. We take it and try and work it into something concrete to generate the change needed.”

How does that relate to the value drivers?
“As far as value drivers are concerned, of course you want to do the biggest things, the highest value things first, but you're always going to have a constraint on the resource of the organisation, be it people or money. There's always going to be that trade off for what you want to do versus what you can afford to do commercially. There's also a constraint from your customers too. What level of change are they prepared to accept and what will the marketplace allow?
Then there are regulations that will force you to make changes irrespective of how much that change is going to cost you.

It's mandatory work. If you want to be in that business you've got to play by the rules. So there's no point in valuing these. You need to recognise that you're doing them because they truly are mandatory and it's not like someone's slipping it in through the back door and that's why you're doing it.

Project Scorecard
If you take all that away, you're left with discretionary work. If you tackle it from a project/programme perspective then you can put in techniques that allow you to score initiatives. You could cross score all proposed projects against things like value, brand value, is the change a re-usable change. The latter is the componentisation concept. If you built a systems solution, for instance, in 5 or 6 component modules, some of those modules might be re-usable. So you can use a balanced scorecard and score the initiative on its P&L value, its brand value, its infrastructure re-usable value and so on. Any organisation can set its own scorecard up. And then you use that scorecard to force the debate about what it is you're doing and why.

Flexibility
But organisations need to accept that there has to
be enough flexibility in the approach to deal with the ordinary day to day commercial tactics that need to happen. You can't always stick rigidly to 'the 20 items that will take us to the three year plan'. You have to
have a means to review some of the ‘business-as-usual processes’ if they need it. It's a balancing act. We've used and adapted a CAP / Gemini / Ernst & Young model, a gatekeeper mechanism that keeps
you on track.

E-MAIL Wars
There's an awful lot of work that gets run through as business-as-usual. If you take the enterprise organisational view and you examine the level of business-as-usual resource, there needs to be some challenge in terms of value drivers. With a business-as-usual base and a project based organisation you could be spending a disproportionate amount of your available resource on a business-as-usual change that slips through the back door and soaks up a lot
of resource for a limited value. You have to have - and stick to - some kind of model. In our industry a lot of
our business hinges on IT and products are
developed from an IT solution. You only need to have Sales developing something and Marketing trying to develop something else, and the impact on the poor programmer gets you to realise that unless you sequence and prioritise the change, your model is going to look like no model, and you have tension in the organisation. In organisations like that, you get change forced through by whoever shouts the loudest or who can engage in the biggest e-mail war. I don't think that people intentionally set out to do that and that's why you need a process.


We use a three month rolling prioritisation process where we value the work proposed and we'd at the same time assess the resource needed to do the work. Invariably you'll find you don't have enough resource to be able to actually do the work. So you've got to challenge out 'What work are you going to move off the table?' to allow you to move forward. Sometimes the exec managers are reluctant to remove work - it is all critical! You just have to keep trying to
be realistic.

Further down the line
We're back to the burning platform. Unless you have executives who buy into the ‘gatekeeper’ concept, the process just crumbles. Organisations that don't get this right are hard work.

It’s an evolution thing I’d guess. Speaking to other programme managers from other organisations - at Abbey we seem to have embedded the process pretty strongly. I believe you need to work with a value driver scorecard for a while - get it established, learn, and get somebenefit out of it - and then perhaps you’ll get new insights that will take you further down the line.”

How do you stay on top of all of this?
“Well it's all about how you get change to happen
out there. So you've got to handle your priorities. It's about how you modify the way you work and adapt to personal change. In the last two years I've moved from being a programme manager to being a programme director and the way I'm having to work is significantly different.

Eighteen months ago I was a programme manager with no real admin support and swamped with detail, on what was a relatively small programme of work compared to now. Sarah joined in December last year and she takes full responsibility for the administrative side of the partnership. She's always on top of that - which allows me to use my strengths in the right way. We're a good team. We were probably 60% there before IBT came in, but the extra bit has been a dramatically different way of working and thinking.
The way I use my time, like any manager, is really at
the heart of whether certain things succeed or not.”

You're unusually enthusiastic about change.
How come?
“I went straight to work for Woolworth's from university, 15 years ago. I arrived at a time when the organisation was struggling. It had just gone through the throes of demerger from its US parent. They were highly cost focused, trying to bring the business back on stream and as a young graduate going into an organisation
full of people who didn't want to change, people who'd been there for many years, the challenge as a young manager was how do you front off against these individuals and get in new structures and new working practices without dropping the ball? Because dropping the ball is quite easy to do. So from an early stage
I had an interest in management techniques and the toolkit that helps people to start to change.

Cutting Edge Projects
After five years of operational management I came
into the project arena just at another point of change. Previously in Woolworths, projects were things that were done to you by someone in the Centre who didn't really understand the operational aspect. But then,
they decided to take experienced line managers and got them to be project managers who would represent the end user in a more positive way. I got sucked into more cutting edge projects, new technology and so on. There were one or two big scale changes in the early days that we didn't get quite right and we had to come back over the next two or three years and plug away at putting things right. I did notice back then that it isn't the technology, it's the behaviours that surround it - that's the trick of making change happen.

Transferable Experience
Getting into the finance sector four years ago was another great change for me. The radical changes you saw around 15 years ago in retailing, new technology, new working patterns, 7 day working etc., well, the banks are just starting to wake up to all that. So the transferable experience is quite high, both in terms of commercial psyche and the experience to bed-in change. Any bank would have been a good move but with Abbey, organisationally it's the sixth biggest bank in the UK but operationally it sees itself as a retailer.”

What advice could you offer others who want to initiate change?
“Years ago the traditional business model Abbey was running had evolved though mergers and acquisitions as the bank had grown. It was appropriate for the time but no longer appropriate for what it was now trying to achieve. The burning platform was sufficiently hot for the board to recognise that they needed to change their approach. Many other organisations haven't managed to light the fire or to stoke it. But commercial pressures are going to still be there, technology, globalisation,
all of that is going to force you to keep modifying your model. so if you can't get into the change bit, you're really going to struggle to exist. Someone else is
going to change it for you.

Matching Individuals
I'm not convinced that piling in the big five players is
the answer. They can force a change but it can be very difficult to bed that change in and sustain it when they walk out, which they surely will, because you can't afford to keep them forever. Look internally first. Are there some individuals who are senior enough and who have the characteristics to create, or experiment with starting a change. You need a topic to get your teeth into and then match that person to the topic. Recognise too that you will need to supplement the skill set. You could even take someone and have them take a sabbatical in an outside organisation (or two) and start them thinking differently. There are lots of approaches if you're committed.

Some of our directors have recently visited Disney to look at how people get recruited and inducted. What's interesting is that Disney, in a one day cycle, will interview, decide, recruit, and induct a person. You go in the morning and by the time you've walked the Disney Hall of Fame - which effectively gives you a visual history of that organisation, its culture, its values set - and you've sat down and been interviewed, you'll know at the end of that day that you've got the job and you've even started an initial induction.

As a comparison, we take about 4 weeks. I'm not saying that we should take a day, but there always
has to be a better way of thinking about things. The cultural aspect is very strong too.

Nothing Stands Still
We all have to keep expanding the toolkit. I can’t say what the next change will be, but that's the great thing about change. Nothing stands still.”