"Now the initial panic is over, normal service has been resumed but over Zoom rather than in crowded meeting rooms."
Despite the occasional tale of traders who could only access systems from their desks, or call centres that couldn’t re-route phones, the industry has generally responded well to the pandemic restrictions. With no physical product to manufacture or distribute and almost universal connectivity to the internet, the sector was well placed to adapt to social distance and remote working.
The last seven months has seen several large, traditionally conservative organisations move a long way on electronic signatures, digital payments, and straight-through-processing. Necessity has indeed been the Mother of invention and some in the industry are heralding a radical new approach to change. It’s an appealing thought but premature based on what’s actually happened. Whilst it’s true that a lot changed in a short period, most of that change by-passed established processes which are now being re-implemented on a remote basis.
Long approval cycles, multi-layer governance and big programme management teams haven’t gone away, they were simply side-lined while BAU teams implemented the urgent fixes they needed to carry on working. Now the initial panic is over, normal service has been resumed but over Zoom rather than in crowded meeting rooms. The challenge of coordinating multiple projects, managing their inter-dependencies and aligning them to an overall strategy still involves a lot of discussion and plenty of online meetings.
But there is another way. Instead of relying on committees of experts to divine the overlap and alignment between disparate projects, it is now possible to create digital models of a business and use these to track scope and progress much more objectively. Whilst not as precise as the CAD models used by construction engineers, the concept is similar; build a model of the current structure then use it to understand what might happen if you change some component parts. In the financial services industry, data is our vital raw material, so an effective model of a business needs to be underpinned by a detailed understanding of information and how it flows into, out of and around that business.
This approach doesn’t eliminate the need for change experts, but it can make them much more productive. By ensuring everyone uses the same language, FS firms can replace intuition with computing power, letting software spot overlaps and gaps in scope, highlight regulatory impacts, compare different operating models, validate test coverage, and calibrate performance. A business still needs to decide what to do with that information and that’s where change professionals should be focused – making progress rather than simply reporting on it.
There is plenty of evidence to show that the chances of successful change diminish in direct proportion to the size of the programme team. Most change veterans will have witnessed the “land and expand” culture of some large consultancy firms so avoiding that trap can be well worth the effort. Done well, a model-driven change process using the right technology can enable small, agile teams to deliver complex programmes without the need for bloated teams or excessive bureaucracy.
The engineering metaphor can only stretch so far in our service-focused industry, but if financial services firms embrace the power of modelling, then they may well get much closer to the kind of predictable outcomes enjoyed by other sectors. Place those models at the heart of programme delivery and it becomes possible to digitise how you do change rather than simply what you change.
