Delivering sustainable change in Off-shored IT for a global investment bank

The Global Technology and Operations division of a leading Investment Bank had made a strategic decision to adopt a Lean approach in its global IT network support function operated by offshore partners in India. However, the initial implementation had failed to gain staff engagement and leadership buy-in which produced inconsistent results across teams and locations. This led the Bank to challenge Unipart to implement a sustainable approach to performance improvement that was also aligned to its central Lean programme.

A global challenge

Our objective was to engage teams to deliver world-class levels of customer service, while at the same time boosting productivity and driving down costs. The scope of the programme included eight locations in India, representatives in Manila, Budapest and Singapore together with the Investment Bank’s management teams in the UK and India.

Our own experience has shown that engaging staff at all levels in adopting a new way of working is vital to sustaining performance improvements. We began by working with each team to understand why the earlier implementations had failed to gain wider employee engagement.

We identified that there was a need to build in-house expertise while also engaging leadership in championing new ways of working. In addition, there was the need to develop frontline capability to analyse, standardise and improve work processes. We coached the teams in a new way of working that they could use in finding and implementing solution to the problems they faced.

The issue of leadership involvement was addressed by implementing a coaching programme that would develop the understanding and skill levels of management. This prepared managers to help support and champion the new ways of working in their areas.

By the end of the programme, the following benefits have been achieved:

• Significant improvement in staff engagement and communication, with all teams self-assessing their performance on a daily basis
• The programme has helped the bank to realise its goal of an £11.7M reduction in its off-shored IT support costs
• The solutions implemented delivered a 40% reduction in unnecessary client follow ups
• Team problem solving has resulted in a productivity improvement of 18%, due to an increase in the number of issues resolved
• Our involvement has enabled the Bank’s offshore partners to be confident that they now have the resource and infrastructure in place that can sustain Lean within their operations