Divestment project for a British Retail & Commercial Bank
The challenge:
Our client, a British Retail & Commercial Bank, which was going through a divestment programme and had to transform 25% of the branch network – former building society locations. As well as a major IT system change, this required training and communication to over 1,000 colleagues – designed and built in just three months with rollout in a further three months.
Our solution:
We deployed a team led by a Programme Manager, as well as five Workstream Leads, 10 Business Analysts and SMEs and three Project Management Specialists.
As part of the roll-out, branch staff needed to undertake a complex set of branch close-down and re-open procedures which they had never undertaken before. In order to achieve the timescales, 97% of this needed to be done remotely with only phone support.
Our team developed a 65-page user-centric guide to take the branch colleagues through the steps they would need to carry out, with common troubleshooting pitfalls and what to do in the event of issues. Every lesson learned was iteratively applied to the document so that issues raised were reduced to almost zero by the fifth week of the 12-week rollout.
The outcome:
- The executive team were absolutely delighted with the quality, speed, and manner of delivery
- Collective previous experience was aggregated to allow enhancement to implementation processes leading to exemplar outcomes
- Over 1,000 staff were trained on the new systems and process, plus over 400 accredited to sell current account and consumer lending products
- The overall project was delivered in six months, three months of scoping and design followed by branch rollout in just three months
- Delivered a legacy without dependency by embedding the newly developed processes into the divesting business
- The project delivered for £5.8 against an original forecast of £6m – that’s on time and under budget