Month: November 2019

The Sillybilly Bank (TSB)…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Banking, Business, Delivery, Education, Ethics & Regulation, IT Project Management, Systems Integration, Uncategorized

Mainstream IT services companies wouldn’t be around today if they hadn’t learned lessons from poor delivery over the years. That doesn’t mean their delivery machinery is perfect – far from it – but it does mean they’re generally good at identifying and addressing risk. With 35 years IT delivery under the belt, the Badger’s nose still twitches when he sees, hears, or reads about IT delivery that’s gone wrong. Recently the nose twitched uncontrollably as the Badger caught up on past material about the 2018 TSB IT migration debacle and assimilated TSB’s independent review by Slaughter & May into their disastrous migration from Lloyds to their own systems. The latter has attracted lots of media comment – see, here, here, here and here, for example.

The Badger’s quietly followed the TSB debacle since it happened, labelling the bank as the ‘The Sillybilly Bank’ for the catalogue of failings. Throughout the last 18 months the Badger has always felt the debacle was unlikely to have just a single root cause. There’s been enough signals to suggest that corporate dynamics, financial pressure, poor planning, poor Go-live decision processes, lack of a solid fallback strategy, IT delivery expertise, and – as picked up in the media – poor common sense, all played a part. Future reports from the UK Banking Regulators will hopefully add more colour into the mix and provide more certainty.

In mulling things over, three impressions have come to the fore in the Badger’s mind. Firstly, that TSB’s parent Banco Sabadell – Europe’s ~36th largest bank and ~ 100th in the world – might be guilty of an ‘arrogance of acquisition, we know best’ attitude. They knew the migration was more complex than anything they’d attempted previously and they were warned in 2015 the migration budget was aggressive. Secondly, that Banco Sabadell appears keen to direct all the responsibility for the debacle onto TSB. This smacks of ‘responsibility denial‘ because Banco Sabadell must have endorsed the migration decisions and it was their own IT arm, SABIS, doing the IT. If they didn’t endorse decisions, then surely their corporate governance failed?  The third impression is that the Abilene Paradox was most likely rampant!

One recent piece of commentary neatly says ‘no one comes out of the TSB debacle smelling of roses’, and ‘the whole sorry episode is an example of how not to behave in an overseas takeover’. It’s hard to disagree. So, here’s a question. Would you trust a bank and its parent where there seems to have been governance, risk management, decision- making, and IT failures and the parent points the finger wholly at its subsidiary? You’ll have your own answer. One thing’s certain. When confidence is lost, customers overcome their lethargy and move elsewhere, which, if you look at the switching statistics, is exactly what TSB’s customers have been doing…

Work Meetings: Be more selective with your attendance…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Delivery, Education, IT Project Management, Uncategorized

Some years ago, the Badger established an annual awards evening to celebrate the work of his IT services employer’s delivery and technical people. It proved to be a great success, and it became a much-anticipated annual event in the company’s calendar before ultimately falling victim to a cost cutting programme. The evening events produced many memorable moments. One of these was the Chief Executive’s opening sentence when giving a few words of thanks at the end of one of the evenings. The sentence was ‘Tonight it’s a pleasure to be surrounded by people that actually do things when I’m normally surrounded by people who talk about doing things.’

The Badger was reminded of this a few days ago when there was some media interest in research by Malmo University about work meetings. Apparently the number of pointless or ineffective work meetings is on the rise and meetings are often more about therapy than productivity. One of the reasons for this seems to be that organisations increasingly have more people that talk about doing things and less people that actually do things! The former – often rising numbers of consultants, advisors, strategists or variants thereof – are apparently vague about their role or what to do which spawns more, mostly ineffective, meetings that impinge on an organisation’s productivity.

The Badger doubts this is a surprise. It’s certainly been the Badger’s experience that the number of work meetings and the number of participants has proliferated in recent years. Focused meetings with the right attendees are, of course, necessary for any organisation to function smoothly but many attendees are often there because they think they should be, or they might miss something by being absent, and not because they need to be. Few people can claim they haven’t either looked at their emails or browsed the internet with their smartphones during a meeting, or worked on something else with the phone on mute when on a conference call! That’s hardly a good indicator that it’s an effective meeting and a good use of your time.

If you’re a doer it’s almost certain that you’re frustrated by attending other people’s meetings just in case ‘something comes up’. So, ask yourself the following. How many meetings did you attend last week? In how many of these did you actually say something useful? In how many of these did you either use your smartphone, or do something else while the meeting was in progress? How many of the meetings made no difference to your normal work? Look at the resultant numbers and really question if you or your organisation got any real value from your attendance.

So, be brave. Discipline yourself to do less meetings! Your organisation needs doers to do productive things rather than be frustrated followers of the herd. Oh, and one final thing. If you’re reading this while you’re in a meeting then tell yourself off…you should be doing something more productive.

‘Smart’ motorways help to decide on a car purchase!

Posted on by The Information Badger in Automation, Climate & Environment, Digital devices and the environment, Driverless transport, Education, Technology, Uncategorized

The Badger’s made a decision about whether to replace his car. Three seemingly unrelated events ultimately underpinned the decision. The first was reading ‘Road Traffic Estimates: Great Britain 2017’ published by the UK Department of Transport in 2018. The second was a knock on the door by a man with a large white van. He was delivering a package ordered online 18 hours earlier. The third was being captive in horrendous motorway traffic on the way to and from an exhibition. Progress on the ‘Smart’ motorway was stop-start, maddening, and the lane speeds indicated on the gantries were laughable. It certainly didn’t feel like ‘Smart’ had made any difference to the journey experience whatsoever!

These three events influenced the Badger’s thinking along the following lines. Roads are more and more congested, so there’s little real benefit sitting in a traffic queue in a newer car, and although more UK motorways are being converted to ‘Smart’ – see short articles on the types of ‘Smart’ here and here – there are growing safety concerns as illustrated here, here, and here, for example. In the last 70 years traffic on UK roads has grown ~10-fold and vehicle ownership has grown ~6-fold, driven largely by economic growth and population growth. The upward trend is likely to continue and so there’s little reason to think congestion will ever reduce, even with the deployment of ever more sophisticated technology which, after all, has a habit of producing a peak of inflated expectation followed by a trough of disillusionment. Technology is not a panacea, and the nirvana of a driverless car society seems a long way off.

The environment featured in the Badger’s thinking, but a simple analysis quickly showed that the whole-life carbon footprint of a vehicle owned by the Badger – current or future – is tiny compared to that of one van in the growing army of vans that deliver our internet purchases to our homes. Since 1997 there’s been a 75% increase in the number of vans on the road, and a 67% increase in the miles they travel, with internet shopping and home delivery underpinning much of this rise. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future, and so the environmental incentive for the Badger to replace his personal vehicle is not high.

Replace or not to replace. You’ve surely guessed the decision by now. It’s the latter. The ‘business case’ for changing the vehicle doesn’t stack up! It’s just cheaper, more environmentally friendly, and healthier to keep the current car and change behaviour to reduce its usage. That doesn’t mean taking a backward step in personal independence or convenience, it just means being disciplined, thinking ahead with a moral compass, and taking different decisions on a day by day basis. Like many things in life, just simply adjusting our core behaviour costs little but can lead to a wide spectrum of benefits…

Have you been asked to ‘drain the swamp’ to fix a project?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Delivery, Education, social media, Technology, Uncategorized

Having a meal with Jack and his wife Jill recently raised the possibility that ‘draining the swamp’ has become a popular mantra within companies when they need to fix project delivery problems. Jack and Jill, by the way, are not their real names. Jack is an old friend and works as a project manager for a large defence contractor. He has just been asked by his line manager and a company executive to fix a seriously underperforming project by ‘draining the swamp’. The project is haemorrhaging money, seriously missing milestones, and has a demoralised and unproductive team. The client no longer believes the project team, or the company, can deliver. Jack ’s the fourth Project Manager appointed to fix things in the last nine months. Sound familiar?

The Badger asked why Jack could fix things when three others couldn’t. Jack said he was confident that he had the full support of line and executive leadership. They wanted him to ‘drain the swamp’ in order to avoid expensive litigation being threatened by the client. Jack wondered if the Badger had any thoughts. After a mouthful of mellow Merlot, the Badger offered three thoughts. Firstly, executives and line managers are just as much part of ‘the swamp’ as you, me, or any project team. Secondly, executives and line managers will support you 100%…until it suits them not to! Thirdly, to ‘drain the swamp’ you need to understand the swamp’s nature, which means understanding people and their behaviours.

Jack grinned and thanked the Badger for reminding him that those who appointed him are just as much part of ‘the swamp’ as his project team. He intended to keep that in mind when trying to ‘drain the swamp’. We chuckled at the thought that life came from a swamp, and while ‘the swamp’ today is different… it’s still a swamp!

Over dessert, Jill – who has dual UK & US nationality – moved our ‘draining the swamp’ conversation into the realms of President Trump, US politics and political turmoil in the UK. She expressed strong views about the abuse politicians get via the internet and social media, and lamented that ‘it wasn’t like this 25 years ago’! Jill wondered what had changed.

A lively debate ensued, but the answer was simple. Politicians are, and have always been, just one of the life forms in ‘the swamp’. Unlike 25 years ago, all life in ‘the swamp’ now has an instant and global voice via the internet and social media. Technology has changed the dynamics of ‘the swamp’, much to the distaste of some of the life forms that live in it!  We ended the meal with a final glass of wine, wishing Jack well with his challenge, and with just one final conclusion – there’s no going back…