Challenge
A global financial institution set a lofty goal for its new Chief Productivity Officer (CPO): To achieve a multi-million-dollar cost savings target across back-office operations while increasing productivity and reducing risk. To realize the savings, productivity and actions needed to be aligned across nine teams after a recent merger. However, the organization wanted to avoid the significant change that would come from restructuring all 9 teams under the CPO. Instead, the priority was to lead through influence, negotiation, alignment, and communication.
The CPO reached out to Point B as a thought partner. Our teams embarked on a process of discovery, discussion, and brainstorming to define the challenge and scope in close collaboration with our customer.
Opportunity
To tackle this project, our team needed to align a highly distributed and matrixed organization around a single, audacious goal using indirect influence.
We referenced agile, organizational excellence, and culture assessment experience to create and execute a bespoke plan to balance the efficiency of centralized processes with flexibility to support innovation. Our team took a multi-faceted approach to drive buy-in, alignment, cultural change, and operational updates across the organization.
Approach
While automation was a core goal, the organization’s challenges went beyond technical limitations. In fact, leaders had previously invested in major tech updates to streamline processes, mostly developed in-house. Yet lack of adoption and buy in led to frustration.
Simply implementing the tools had not been enough to disrupt familiar ways of working and change culture.
To identify key stakeholders and understand their needs and barriers, we embarked on a listening tour, using written and verbal survey responses and conversations to inform our process.
Our holistic approach included a new operating model within the CPO’s team and an overhauled governance mechanism design to capture benefits and drive alignment. Our team created detailed stakeholder maps, established a steering committee, distilled findings into actionable next steps, and helped the CPO begin facilitating cultural change.
We helped implement communities of practice; structures specifically designed to succeed in a decentralized organization. Communities of practice bring diverse individuals together across business and tech teams, creating space to discuss shared goals and challenges in their work and build solutions together. In addition to establishing initial communities of practice, we ensured leaders had the tools needed to establish additional communities as needed over time.
Simply implementing the tools had not been enough to disrupt familiar ways of working and change culture.
Project Outcomes
In just 18 months, a small, core team from Point B helped the organization achieve its ambitious cost-saving goals. In addition, the CPO hit all defined efficiency and productivity targets.
Additional results:
- Reduced operational risk
- Elevated CPO profile
- Enabled critical resources to focus on higher-value activities
- Delivered faster and more consistent customer service
Today, the organization continues to gain momentum in implementing advanced automation, using the tools and processes we shared to facilitate collaborative, efficient work across business units.
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