Written by Tom Shearwood, consultant at Simplify Consulting
Our recent Wealth Ops: Live! Conference in October looked at the changing face of wealth operations and how organisations are utilising advances in technology to leverage integrated systems.
The goal – to improve processes and drive better outcomes for customers. However, the reality for many operational teams is that before they can get to that desired end state, they are faced with myriad issues in their existing processes. Legacy change initiatives, such as workarounds or system bugs can create inefficiencies in processes and consume a higher proportion of resources in certain areas. There’s also often a level of resignation within operations teams that there are limited avenues available to challenge and change existing inefficient solutions.
Whilst some changes will struggle to justify a business case, some of the workarounds do have a compelling case for funding, and often there are options which are easy and cheap to implement, but just lack the push to get resolved.
It’s important that when we’ve found those high priority changes and developed a plan to resolve the biggest challenges that we also help the operations team adopt that change mindset going forward. Continuous improvement can be cliché, but it’s vitally important that when operations teams are being pushed to do more with less, that those working directly on the systems, or following the processes, feel empowered to make suggestions and improvements. Those end users are usually the ones who know first-hand where the biggest problems lie.
One of the biggest challenges we see are that the Operations team and the IT teams are not aligned, don’t talk often enough, and when they do, they aren’t always speaking the same language.
Adopting a Change Mindset:
Whilst it’s true that legacy systems are still widely used, we are seeing an increasing move towards open architecture, where systems are more configurable. Where legacy systems exist, we know that improvements can be introduced without huge IT changes through the use of Robotic Processing Automation (RPA), and potentially with wider adoption of AI. Ultimately, there are more avenues to improve how processes function available now than there were even a few years ago.
Operation teams should embrace the ability they have to suggest and implement changes but they need a channel to do so and to have these suggestions recorded and taken forward at an operational level. On a cultural level, leaders should champion change suggestions and reward ones that deliver real value for the business. It’s also important that the right skills and experience are brought into operations team so people are able to question existing ways of working and identify new ways of doing things. A change mindset is vital within operations so that they do not have to be at the mercy of wider change budgets and the resources that come with larger projects. It also means that operations teams can continue that journey once the project has been wrapped up.
Increasing Collaboration:
Operations can’t achieve this alone and need the support of delivery partners that can help navigate the ideas and suggestions they have. Not only are IT support able to help understand the art of the possible, but they are also going to be able to understand the root cause of the issue and identify the fix.
Close collaboration between Operations and IT needs to be embedded in the operating environment of the business. It’s important that strategy and priorities agreed at the top level of an organisation feed through the layers so there is an understanding of where the biggest challenges are to that
strategy. Regular communication between teams, to agree focus areas, allows a strategy to be put in to action rather than relying on the big ticket projects and programmes to drive the benefits. This collaboration allows for the ideas and suggestions to be categorised, prioritised and quantified so that there is a clear agenda and roadmap for improvement. Having ‘champions’ within business areas can act as a focal point for IT change and help building stronger relationships between the teams – eventually leading to IT becoming more embedded within operations as a whole.
Delivering lasting benefits
Identifying where effort should be spent is a large part of getting this right, but there needs to be clarity on sourcing the problem and developing the solution. Assumptions of how or why things are done can distort the focus. IT teams also need to spend time with the business to understand the business challenge, developing a common language that allows for the requirement to be clear. Missing those key elements could lead to functionality being developed, but put in the wrong place, or driving the incorrect behaviour. Essentially, further inefficiency.
We all know that the scale and pace of change is increasing. Organisations that can adopt a culture and way of working which integrates BAU and change are going to be in a much stronger position to navigate change than one that relies on wider change projects to deliver value and benefit to the organisation. Developing and nurturing that culture is challenging, but rewarding for organisations that can get it right.
