Importance of a Centralized Quality Program in a Bank

Banks around the world are what I refer as "Cheetah Organizations" where organizations have to speed up the execution and delivery to match up the changing needs of the customers and organizations.

I have been fortunate enough to experience transformation and reengineering in Retail, Corporate & Finance function of a Bank.

Many banks are having decentralized teams to drive reengineering efforts in their respective areas like Wholesale Banking Reengineering team , Credit Card Reengineering team , IT Service Teams , Retail Banking Reengineering , Finance Reengineering team etc. .

It is good to have focused teams for respective areas but what risk it carries is what this article is throwing a light and impacts CEO Budget of Process Excellence not utilized efficiently and results in less value creation for the organizations.

1. Duplication of efforts: - If teams are decentralized, each team can take similar results in their respective zones and creating waste in the process. E.G. Each respective team launching Ideation exercise resulting in duplication of efforts, generation of duplication ideas across the organization resulting in effort wastage with no concentrated efforts in implementation.

2. No End to End View: - For CEO there is no end to end view of the problem, may be individually each leader is targeting their own areas without having a clue of the bigger picture it carry and it will impact the organization in a big way.

3. Communication Gap between leaders: -Due to lack of synergy the leaders leading reengineering efforts in respective domains are not speaking. Any CEO or COO would not like leaders not speaking to each other. As it leads to creation of more waste in the organization which creates more variation in the processes as well.

4. Lack of Alignment to common goal: - For a bank agility is more important and what is more important is how all departments together can make an honest attempt to bring customer closer and increase its customer satisfaction level and retainment. This can only happen when there is a single goal and alignment to the KPI goal which the reengineering and transformation teams are trying to achieve, I have found this missing in most of the reengineering and transformation program banks are driving now days.

5. Leaders not moving up the value chain: - Imagine Contact centre reengineering launching Green Belt training drive in the Mar '14 and then Wholesale Banking reengineering copying the same launch in Aug’14, followed by a launch from Finance Reengineering team in Oct'14.

For a COO his organizations resources are being used several time for the same thing, it is absolutely a waste and can be done collectively with each team sharing the case studies for their respective teams in a common forum which actually results in a better learning for the individual participating in it .

It may also results in leaders getting promotion in driving the same thing in their respective domain, resulting in less value creation for the Bank.

Example for a multinational bank:-

Imagine in a bank , Finance data standards team doing their project independently and Client static data team doing project independently both actually try to improve same thing in their respective zones ( Cleaning of master data ) but lack of synergy lacks in Business Analyst not enhancing the Business Requirement Document due to lack of vision and end to end view . This results in not doing the things right at the first time and resulting in waste of resources and time and not achieving the success completely

If you are a CEO / COO leading any shared services centre for the Bank or leading a Bank, this article is must for you to read. It can help you realign and refocus your reengineering team efforts in the right direction with much more value addition.

In the end I would like to re quote Mark Graban words i.e.

"Our own attitude is that we are charged with discovering the best way of doing everything."