A short while after the "leaks" incident in Midland GALM 2, I sat in a meeting between my boss and an Andersen partner, watching the Andersen partner twist my boss round his little finger. I see deviousness and manipulation very clearly when I am not the target.....if only I could learn to see it so clearly when I AM the target!
The Andersen partner wanted to get going with a pilot study for Phase 3 of GALM, which would bring in data from overseas entities and add additional reporting. He proposed to send in some of his minions, who were at a loose end, to visit the various user departments and produce a high-level scope and initial requirements document. The consultants would be supplied at a very large discount, since they were currently not gainfully employed. I listened in disbelief as my boss agreed to this Machiavellian scheme.
Afterwards I said to him, "You do realise that Andersen's real objective is to wind up the users into expecting a Phase 3 even though we haven't finished Phases 1 and 2 yet? He knows we don't have the resources to do phase 3. Before you know it the place will be crawling with Andersen consultants expensively doing Phase 3 at user behest."
"No, no," he replied. "He's got a problem - he has some staff he doesn't have work for at the moment. We're helping him out, that's all. There won't be a project from this".
Such naivety. I was right, of course. He did apologise, later.....after a very difficult meeting with Andersen Consulting at which he explained why they would not be running Phase 3 despite their reasonable expectations that they would be doing so. Followed by an even more difficult series of meetings with user management, as a result of which he was forced to create a Phase 3 project even though we had not finished Phase 1, Phase 2 hadn't started and there were no free resources for Phase 3.
I saw my chance. Overseas systems I knew about, better than almost anyone. And I had long thought that the GALM 1 massive database containing detailed data, while useful for investment banking and markets, would not be appropriate for the smaller and simpler - and largely autonomous - overseas units. So I wrote a formal letter bidding for the Phase 3 project on the basis of a stripped-down PC-based system producing a range of reports using summary data feeds from overseas systems and GALM1. It would be far smaller than the previous phases, far quicker and easier to implement, require a much smaller team and cost far less. It would need to be accompanied by a much larger programme of data enhancement in overseas systems themselves, but that could be rolled out over a period of time, with manual data submission to fill gaps until automated feeds could be provided. I didn't know it then, obviously, but this proposal was to become the blueprint for my later work with Nat West and RBS.
My proposal was accepted and I became Phase 3 project manager. I recruited a small team - helped by the sudden availability of people from other departments who would otherwise face redundancy under Midland's "Profits Improvement Programme". Work got under way on design and development of the PC system itself. Around this time, Phase 2 of GALM (which was supposed to incorporate UK retail banking data into the GALM 1 database) was cancelled due to cost constraints, so we bid for that one too on the grounds that extending the PC system to accommodate high-level data from the retail bank was no big deal and we happened to have a team member who had come from retail banking, knew lots about the systems and the data and - even more importantly - had good established user contacts in retail banking. We won that one too, and the project officially became GALM phases 2 and 3. Suddenly I was a success, doing the sort of project work I love - small quick win developments that deliver real business benefit at low cost.
I knew that to do the overseas systems part of the project, we would need to work closely with OSS. I didn't see this as a problem: after all, I had come from OSS. So I met with a senior manager in OSS, who was very interested in what we were doing. He offered to head up the overseas data feed part of the project, staffing it with OSS people. He was more senior than me, which was a trifle awkward, but it seemed an eminently sensible suggestion, so we agreed to it. His name was written into the project structure reporting to me. But in reality he had other ideas.
By this time GALM 3 was a hot topic. It was being discussed at very senior levels in the bank. So the head of OSS saw an opportunity to get approval for his own pet project - standardisation of all the overseas systems. This would of course supersede the overseas feeds part of GALM 3, since the feed requirements would be incorporated into the standardisation programme. He won his bid... but not for his department. A new Midland Finance-sponsored project was created, headed up by the manager who should have been leading the overseas feeds part of GALM 3. The heart had been ripped out of my project. And there was nothing at all that I could do about it.
I should have known, I suppose. After all, why would someone volunteer to report to someone more junior, even on a project basis? Why not bid to run the project themselves? He knew he couldn't dislodge me as project manager of the system itself - but he didn't want to. The job he wanted was the much larger overseas systems enhancement programme. He agreed to my proposal, then went behind my back to get what he really wanted.
Despite the loss of the overseas data feeds part of the project, we still continued with the rest. We delivered the basic PC system with manual data submission for UK retail banking (GALM 2) and the larger overseas units (GALM 3). There was more work still to do - more reports to be written and more data to collect - but my development team leader was well capable of running the remaining developments. So when Midland was taken over by HSBC and the rest of the GALM project was cancelled, along with the overseas standardisation programme, I engineered my own redundancy. I felt it would be wrong of me to hang on to a job that could be done by my team leader: I knew that he had a young family, so job security was important to him, whereas I had no children and at that time no plans to have any, and had now completed my MBA, so the sponsorship was no longer an issue.
By this time my original boss had been moved sideways and I had a different manager. Ian was one of the best "people" managers I have ever encountered, and I liked and respected him a lot. It is thanks to him that I am a qualified project manager: he sent me on the pilot run of Midland's in-house project management course which led to a formal qualification. And I felt for him, as a "people" person, being tasked with probably the most horrible job any manager can be expected to do: the silent dismantling of an entire department. SMI was being eliminated, not by making people redundant - that would cost too much - but by making life so uncomfortable for the staff that they left of their own volition. They hated him, of course, even more than his predecessor. But they did what he wanted. One after another, they found new jobs and left. How he coped with that personally I will never know. I know he hated doing it: I think I was one of the very few people he trusted enough to show a little of what he really felt about it all.
But he didn't do that to me. He simply asked me to produce my plans for next year. The plans I produced didn't include me. My redundancy came two weeks later. My former boss was made redundant a day or two before, and I knew mine would follow. I remember being very agitated for those two days, waiting for the phone call....."come on, get on with it!" I thought. Eventually the call came, and I went down to the basement room where my manager was waiting.
"You know why you're here", he said.
"What took you so long?" I replied.
I don't think he wanted to do it. But I had left him with no choice. Looking back now, I regret my decision to leave HSBC/Midland, although I don't see that there was any alternative. Ian was someone with whom I could have enjoyed working, and there were others too that I liked and respected. I remained in touch with ex-Midland people at HSBC for some time afterwards.
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