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Managing Change in Financial Services

Founded in 2011, ChangeWise believes that employee engagement is critical to successful change. ChangeWise will lead, train and coach your employees to embed successful change and build the momentum to continuously improve and adapt to your environment. In terms of the clients we serve, we specifically work in the financial service, public, higher education, utilities and outsourcing sectors.

ChangeWise specialises in streamlining processes using lean to increase efficiency, enhancing customer interactions with Service Excellence techniques, improving quality with Six Sigma tools and reorganising work to provide greater effectiveness, reduce costs and build a competitive advantage. We ensure change is embedded successfully and sustained, using excellent operational management techniques and ways of working.

We also support strategic change through specialist planning tools, aligning project portfolios to strategic objectives and providing portfolio insight and prioritisation methods, so you will able to invest in the best projects matched to your competitive environment. Furthermore, you will be able to ensure an efficient and successful delivery in terms of time, quality and budget.

In regards to the process of change, our goal is to ensure you have the right tools, techniques and experience along with the management systems to identify the processes that will improve customer satisfaction and operational productivity. With these in place, we believe you will be able to realise an improved customer delivery at a reduced cost. Essentially, ensuring that you can understand your business processes better, and have the skills to continuously improve in this area is what ChangeWise are all about. We believe that this sustains a culture more adaptable to change in the long term.

Encouraging employees to adapt and embrace change is not always easy, because people can easily get stuck in their ways. However, that is where ChangeWise come in, indeed it is our job is to ensure the leaders of a firm can manage people through any process of change. As a result, we help you share your vision for change, prepare and manage different change scenarios and ultimately support staff during the transition journey through engagement, involvement, communication and hands-on delivery.

In regards to the financial services sector, we have worked with a retail bank based in the Republic of Ireland (taken into government protection in 2010) supporting the delivery of a transformation plan ready for a return to public ownership. The focus was improving the customer service processing activities (circa 1000 staff and 90 teams) through target operating model design, implementing ways of working (WoW) operational excellence techniques, and process improvement based on lean.

This created exceptional customer service, best-in-class operations, reduced cost-to-serve and improved profitability enabled by a continuous improvement culture. There was a 26% improvement in productivity, a 20% reduction in direct costs realised as 114 FTE released and a 300% gain in mortgage applications that were right-first-time.

A major UK retail bank’s anti-money-laundering function was significantly behind its year-end target in May, with headcount costs increasing sharply (trying to catch-up) and the consequent training and quality issues of on-boarding new staff into a complex process. We delivered Operational Excellence (OPEX) training and coaching to team leaders, managers and senior managers across sites.

We designed and implemented two centre of excellence workflow designs enabling significant increase in operational performance by removing non value-added work, enhancing planning and prioritisation methods as well as improving workflow and quality. One site was able to hit end-of-day targets mid-afternoon and use the latent capacity created to support other teams and the other site doubled output from the same number of people, better matched skills to work types, improved first-time quality with better feedback loops and achieved that end-of-year target before October.

With a major UK general insurance group, wehelped create centres of excellence in the back office claims, contact and accident repair centres. For another large German insurance provider, we delivered multiple operational diagnostic reviews in the UK and India to identify opportunities for improving performance of telephony and back-office claims centres for their pet, commercial and motor insurance products.

In the higher education sector, ChangeWise worked with a south coast University and helped them to set up the strategic governance framework, and to create a portfolio of strategic change projects, aligned to organisational strategy. In addition, we initiated a lean process review programme across the administration processes, to save costs to re-invest in the academic staff and enhance the student experience.

In regards to the public sector, Wehave experience of delivering Lean Six Sigma operational improvement training in a number of organisations (including the FCA, Rural Payments Agency, UK Asset Resolution), and we have worked with a Midlands Police Service, proposing new operational practices to improve sanctioned detections.

Lastly, in the business process outsourcing sector ChangeWise have worked with a final salary pension administrator, to implement project portfolio governance, and also to deliver £890k of extra revenue and a new customer relations centre. However, we are also proud of the fact that we have managed Lean Six Sigma and Operational Excellence initiatives, which saved approximately £750k per annum.

For another pensions outsourcer, ChangeWise performed a comprehensive operational diagnostic review across multiple UK operations (pensions, payroll, employee benefits solutions and shareholder registration services) to identify significant opportunities for improvement (circa 20%).

We trained 219 people in the basics of lean and 37 Team Leaders in operations management.

Finally, ChangeWise mapped all of the pensions processes, identified the variations between clients and schemes and provided the inputs for an automated workflow system, based on optimised skills matching and design considerations for their new target operating model.

Typically, our lean and operations management training courses are aimed at directors, managers, team leaders and key staff who are responsible for managing and facilitating operational back office delivery, complaints handling and customer service contact centres. Our training courses can also aid complex organisational transformation, process improvement reviews and the implementation of new IT systems and regulatory practices.

Our Lean Awareness course helps you to understand the history of lean, how to apply the principles of lean production in different environments and how to improve your internal processes. The Team-Based Process Improvement course builds on the former providing practical experience of how to engage staff in the improvement of processes that deliver products and services. You will learn about the customer journey in order to provide an excellent customer service at affordable costs using the team based process improvement in five steps: define, measure, analyse, improve and control.

The Achieving Excellent Customer Service course covers the concept of customer demand, and is split into value demand and failure demand. You will understand the ‘voice of the customer’ and the principles of ‘lean consumption’ to reduce the effort a customer has to exert to use your services and in turn improve service levels and customer satisfaction.

When you are sending someone on a training course and expecting them to change the organisation when they return, it is easy to underestimate the learning that has to occur before tangible results are seen. If training is backed up with ongoing coaching and support, then we believe that the development will of course progress much more quickly.

These courses we provide can be delivered on-site and partnered with on-going coaching and mentoring. This supports and encourages further development to maximise the individual impact in the organisation, through continuous improvement and sustaining change, leaving you to evolve the rest of your business.

ChangeWise strongly believe business management systems and processes can limit the ability of good organisations from becoming great. Successful management of change is essential to meet today’s economic climate, and employee engagement is also critical to successful change. It is then our hope that your organisation will be able to build a continuous improvement culture – linked to your strategic objectives – enabling you to adapt to your competitive environment.

Any significant transformation can create people issues, therefore it is important the leaders of an organisation embrace new approaches to challenges, in order to both motivate and inspire the rest of the workforce. Involving team members in the process of change is essential if you want to achieve the best results.

Looking ahead to the future, ChangeWise’s aim is to build our reputation in the industry and identify the opportunities to help our clients prosper. To become the outstanding leadership and organisation development firm we strive to continuously look at our ‘ways of working’ so we can improve our services for all of our clients.

 

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