Original article from the Flevy business blog can be found here: http://flevy.com/blog/the-life-and-times-of-a-change-manager-part-2b/ To try and personalize things a little, here is a picture of where I am writing all this stuff. 1 Not really (LOL). I actually do my writing inside… this is a staged shot, as if you didn’t know! OK, moving on. Like Part 2a, this relates to my Abbey National/Abbey years between 1989 and 1996. Specifically, this part is after Productivity Services re-located from the Baker Street HQ to the Abbey National HQ in Milton Keynes. 2 I lived in a place called Bicester in Oxfordshire and used to travel to London by train. As Bicester was only approximately a 30-minute drive from Milton Keynes, I was nominated as one of the first people to move there. Along with that came my first new assignment… an exciting one! Not. We had been allocated an amount of space in the building at Milton Keynes, which was to be shared with another Department (can’t remember which one), so I was tasked with designing the layout of the new Productivity Services area. A simple task you would think! Well, yes it was and working together with Abbey National’s Space Planning people, I went about measuring the area, allocating desk spaces, deciding on the number of cabinets required, defining the IT requirements, etc. Having designed the layout and had it agreed with the Space Planners and with the other Department, I submitted the final design to my Line Manager (one of the Senior Productivity Consultants who initially interviewed me). After studying the design, the only comment he made was “It looks like we may be slightly disadvantaged on space compared with the people we are sharing with”. “Slightly disadvantaged”! Huh? I didn’t realize it was a competition!

1. The Life and Times of a Change Manager
(Part 2b)
Contributed by Ron Leeman on October 8, 2015 in Organization, Change, & HR
Editor’s Note: Ron Leeman is a world-recognized Change Manager and author of
several Change, Process, and Project training guides on Flevy. He has decided to write a
series of articles that chronicle his personal “change” journey. This is the
second installment (part). You can read beginning from the first piece here. You can also
learn more about Ron and his approach to Change in our recent interview with him.
* * * *
To try and personalize things a little, here is a picture of where I am writing all this stuff.

2. Not really (LOL). I actually do my writing inside… this is a staged shot, as if you didn’t
know!
OK, moving on.

3. Like Part 2a, this relates to my Abbey National/Abbey years between 1989 and
1996. Specifically, this part is after Productivity Services re-located from the Baker Street
HQ to the Abbey National HQ in Milton Keynes.
I lived in a place called Bicester in
Oxfordshire and used to travel to London by
train. As Bicester was only approximately a
30-minute drive from Milton Keynes, I was
nominated as one of the first people to move
there. Along with that came my first new
assignment… an exciting one! Not.
We had been allocated an amount of space
in the building at Milton Keynes, which was
to be shared with another Department (can’t
remember which one), so I was tasked with designing the layout of the new Productivity
Services area. A simple task you would think! Well, yes it was and working together with
Abbey National’s Space Planning people, I went about measuring the area, allocating desk

4. spaces, deciding on the number of cabinets required, defining the IT requirements, etc.
Having designed the layout and had it agreed with the Space Planners and with the other
Department, I submitted the final design to my Line Manager (one of the Senior Productivity
Consultants who initially interviewed me). After studying the design, the only comment he
made was “It looks like we may be slightly disadvantaged on space compared with the people
we are sharing with”. “Slightly disadvantaged”! Huh? I didn’t realize it was a competition!
That was the end of it, I thought, and, over
time, the other members of Productivity
Services moved to Milton Keynes and
seemed quite happy with what I had done.
Well would you believe that when I received
my Annual Appraisal at the end of the year
the “slightly disadvantaged” comment was
reflected in it! Despite the successes of the
other projects I was involved in, the overall
appraisal that I was given was

5. “Satisfactory!” Well, not being one to take things lying down, I decided to appeal against this
rating.
The appeals process stated that you were only allowed to submit your appeal on one side of
A4! After some considerable thought and effort, I wrote my appeal, but it was over the limit,
so being a bit innovative, I reduced the overall font size from 12 to 8, which did the trick.
What was the result? Surprise, surprise my appeal was not upheld. This was the first time I
had encountered any kind of negativity from my Line Manager. But, hey!, at least I had the
satisfaction of putting forward my case. More on Annual Appraisals in Part 2c.
Moving swiftly onto the next chapter!
Abbey National had a habit of regularly reorganizing to reflect changes in the way the
business was moving and also to ensure that Departments were focused on that direction and
that they sat in the correct part of the wider organization.
Consequently, Productivity Services was deemed “old hat,” so they changed the name to
Process Improvement. One of the problems was where this “new” Department (still
consisting of the same Consultants by the way, but with different Line Managers) would
logically sit within the wider organization. I think it eventually came under Retail Operations.

6. This “out with the old and in with the new” approach also came with a change of senior
people, so a new Process Improvement Manager was duly installed. Because the two Senior
Productivity Consultants didn’t want to relocate, after some while operating a fairly “lean”
department, it was decided to create two new Senior Process Improvement Consultant
positions, so an internal recruitment process was started. An opportunity for me I thought so I
duly applied. I knew that I was in competition with a few others but having been with Abbey
National for some while (although this was not a prerequisite) and having done, what I
thought, was a good job to-date I thought I would at least get an interview. Guess what? I
didn’t!
I think by now a lot of readers will have guessed that I have a somewhat outgoing and
gregarious personality and am not afraid to shy away from things and to also speak my mind
so you will not be surprised by the following anecdote which I have included, not to be
critical (well kind of), but merely to help you understand the environment in which I worked.
My esteemed Process Improvement Manager decided to interview a number of individuals.
One, who I had the greatest respect for got the job so no qualms there. However the other
individual who was appointed had joined Abbey National after me and had really done
nothing of any significance or consequence since starting but he did have a Degree which I
didn’t (this will come back to haunt me … I will reveal that in Part 2c). The appointment of

7. this second individual always puzzled me and I did question the judgement of the Process
Improvement Manager although not openly!
Was I right to do that?
Yes I was because low and behold sometime later this individual was found to have, let’s just
say, dishonestly appropriated a not insignificant amount of money through the re-location
process. The word vindicated and self-satisfied come to mind.
After that distraction let’s get back to the work I was involved in.

8. The Branch Staffing Model was a tool being built to facilitate the accurate prediction of the
number of staff needed to man Branches based on financial transactions. If you think about it

9. this was kind of aligned to the Saturday
Afternoon Opening project I did when I was
in Baker Street part of which was based on
transactional data. Unlike that project which
required Branches to send in transactional
data I was tasked with capturing an amount
of representative transactional data from
Branches to use as core information to drive
the Branch Staffing Model.
So off I went travelling around the country
to a number of selected Branches reflecting a number of criteria e.g.:
 City Centre Branches.
 Town Branches.
 Rural Branches.
 Branches in Shopping Centres.

10. Each Branch had an amount of information which was backed-up/captured onto 5 1/4”
Floppy Disks and stored in filing cabinets in Branches.
On arrival at each Branch I would randomly select a number of Floppy Disks from the banks
of filing cabinets, download the data into a spreadsheet and undertake an amount of analysis
again based on a pre-set criteria e.g.:
 Different types of transactions … each transaction had a category code.
 How long each transaction took … start and finish of each transaction,
 What time of the day the transactions were undertaken … in hourly segments.
 Calculating and average time for each transaction.
What a mind-numbingly boring job I here you say and yes I would agree but I got to travel
around the UK a lot and visit some interesting places.
With my process improvement hat on, one of the questions I raised during this exercise was
why we were not able to obtain this transaction data from the mainframe which could
automatically feed the Branch Staffing Model thereby doing away with all the travelling and
painstaking analysis. Well what a furore that caused because, would you believe it, this was
not available from the mainframe! I was told that to have this facility it would require special

11. code to be written to enable the data to be
extracted in the format we wanted it so we
would have to write up a business case for it.
Talk about bureaucracy! Anyway to cut a
long story short we did and it happened.
Branch Study
This involved a team of Consultants visiting
selected Abbey National Branches to
undertake a programme of activity to gain an
overview of how a Branch functioned, its overall efficiency and the identification of potential
process improvements which was, after all, what the new Department was all about!
Activities included:
 Activity Sampling of all Branch activity to identify overall activity e.g.:
o Work time.

12. o Break time.
o Lost time.
 Analysing counter transactions e.g.:
o Cash withdrawals.
o Deposits.
o Card transactions.
o Account Book updates.
 Sales activity e.g.:
o Financial Adviser interviews … Mortgage, Loan application etc.
o Lead generation.
o Prospecting.
 Back office functions e.g.:
o Application processing.
o Reconciliation
o Lost and stolen processing.
Some of the information gathered fed into the Branch Staffing model.
These studies normally lasted about 1-week but they were great because I was able to get out
of the Head Office environment and interact with front-line staff.

13. One of the Branches where we did a study was Bermondsey which was in South London. I
can recall having to do a 15 minute walk to the Branch from the nearest Underground Station
every day for a week which involved winding my way through a number of industrial areas
where there were numerous businesses holed up in old dark and dank railway arches.
In those days South London was not a
particularly salubrious place and I have two
vivid recollections of this study:
 Even though I thought I was “street
wise” you can imagine me walking through
these places wearing my best “bib and
tucker” looking totally out of place and
being eyed with some suspicion. I was
constantly looking over my shoulder looking
for potential problems and was glad to reach
the Branch unscathed.

14.  A few weeks earlier a neighbouring competitors Branch had been the subject of an
armed robbery which caused me some trepidation and didn’t exactly fill me
confidence.
Finally to end this article there were a couple of other projects that spring to mind:
Current Accounts vs Term/Deposit Accounts
I not entirely sure how this project came about but it was to do with identifying Current
Accounts in which customers had large amounts of money deposited to see if better use could
be made of their money
Basically the premise was that Current Accounts were paying minimal interest whereas if a
customer transferred a sizeable chunk of their money into a Term Savings/Deposit Account it
would earn them more interest.
So off I went to a number of Retail Banking Centres to identify Current Accounts containing
a large amount of money. I can’t remember what we determined as being “large” but I do
remember we categorised it into amounts e.g.:

15.  5,000 to 9,999 GBP.
 10,000 to 14,999 GBP.
 15,000 to 19,999 GBP
 Over 20,000 GBP
Having done my initial analysis I presented my findings and made a recommendation that we
contact customers with large amounts of cash in their Current Accounts to see if they wanted
to transfer monies to a better interest paying Term Savings/Deposit Account. This actually
sparked off an interesting debate around the following:
 From a customer service perspective:
o Positive … customers would get a better interest rate.
o Negative … customers would not have instant access to their money.
 From an Abbey National perspective:
o Negative … Abbey National would be paying a higher interest rate to
customers
o Positive … Abbey National would have money to use as long-term funds for
other purposes.

16. Following an amount of deliberation the decision was to maintain the status-quo as the
instances of large amounts in customers Current Accounts was relatively low so would not
significantly benefit Abbey National. Mmmmmm … what about the customers!
Mortgage Redemptions Process
Abbey National’s core business in those days was Mortgage Lending but there was a
considerable focus was on attracting new customers with headline rates which were normally
designed to compete with the other big mortgage lenders of the day such as the Halifax (now
part of Lloyds Banking Group), the Nationwide (still a Building Society), the Alliance &
Leicester and Bradford & Bingley (both now part of Banco Santander who of course took
over Abbey National).
At that time there was little attention paid to existing customers so I was tasked to look at this
aspect to see whether there was anything that we could do to retain them. One of the early
identifiers of an existing customer looking to possibly change their mortgage was that their
Solicitor would request a Mortgage Redemption Statement from Abbey National. This
statement would be used to calculate how much equity was in the old property which could
be used to secure a mortgage for a new property. On receipt of a redemption request Abbey

17. National’s process was merely to undertake the calculation and send the statement to the
customers Solicitor!
This was a “no-brainer” really. So I recommended that before the redemption statement was
issued that Abbey National put in place a simple process to contact the customer to ascertain
exactly what their intentions were e.g.:
 Planning to stay with Abbey National.
 Moving to a new Lender because of a better deal.
If it was the former then no further action would be taken. If it was the latter then enter into a
dialogue with the customer to get details of the new deal and to see if Abbey National could
match or better it. Pretty simple really! Clearly there were no guarantees that following the
interaction with the customer that Abbey National National could offer them a better deal.
Whilst I have no specific details of outcomes I do remember anecdotal evidence that the new
process was successful in a level of customer retention which would otherwise not have
happened.
Good grief how things come flooding back. It never ceases to amaze me how one memory
suddenly triggers many other memories–total recall (LOL).

18. That’s it. Get ready for Part 2c soon which will be the final part related to my Abbey National
National years.

19. About Ron Leeman
Ron Leeman has been involved in “change and process” work for more years than he
cares to remember. He has worked extensively across the UK, Europe, and globally--
and has an enviable track-record of delivering organisational change and process
initiatives across a wide cross section of industry sectors. In 2012, Ron was bestowed with a “Change
Leader of Tomorrow” award by the World HRD Congress “in recognition of my remarkable progress in
initiating changes enough for others in the same industry to follow my example”. Ron is firm believer
in knowledge transfer and now wants to share his vast knowledge with those who are considering
getting into or at various stages of “change” and/or “process” work or those working on specific
Projects wanting to gain practical insights into “how to” type situations. You can connect with Ron
Leeman on LinkedIn here, where you can view his 85+ Recommendations and in excess of 800
Endorsements from clients and co-workers alike to give you an indication of the quality of service that
he has provided and can offer. Ron is also a document author on Flevy. Browse his frameworks on
Change Management, Process Analysis, and Program Management here:
http://flevy.com/seller/highwayofchange.

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