Interim Head of Simplification

Following a change in leadership, Nationwide found themselves in need of an expert on leading process improvement, simplification and automation who could hit the ground running, define a strategy and execute the implementation.

Nationwide needed someone to begin almost immediately and as the role is head of the department, it would normally mean a 6 month lead time (as a minimum) to find the right full-time replacement.

Developing Strategy

Due to the nature of annual budgets and funding rounds, we had an extremely short window (around 4 weeks) to define the strategy and complete our due diligence on costs and benefits to a point that would satisfy finance and other key stakeholders.

Managing Stakeholders

This area had had 4 directors in the previous 2 years – due to this unexpected churn, stakeholders weren’t always getting the results they expected and relationships needed to be reset and rebuilt with key stakeholders. Getting delivery moving was critical to the success of stakeholder management. Open, honest and straight-forward communication was also key.

Executing the plan

Working with the permanent team, we quickly scaled our capability with external Lean and RPA experts. We also built strong relationships with different departments and divisions, demonstrating our new capabilities and how we could help them achieve their internal goals. We delivered dozens of improvements across IT, Mortgage Operations, Banking Operations, Savings Operations, Branch Network, Payment Operations, Contact Centres, Document Management and Customer Complaints.

Achieving results

At the end of the first year, we delivered an amazing £6.5M in year cost benefit to the organisation (with an annualised benefit of £10M). We had also built a pipeline of opportunities for the value of £25M. We also delivered reductions in the time it takes to fulfil customer requests and managed to increase the digital footprint of the organisation by increasing their paperless communication capacity.

Recruiting a permanent replacement

Lean Consulting promised to fulfil the requirement for 1 year to help get the capability on a solid foundation. We also promised to help recruit a permanent replacement to run the capability into the future. Lean Consulting would stay on for a further 6 months to support the new Head of Department deliver on the Simplification and Automation goals of the organisation.

The new Head of Department started almost exactly 1 year after Lean Consulting began the work – and we were delighted to support them during the 6-month transition.