Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

Working in the banking sector, you get used quickly with complex flows created in time, due to the size  and structure of the organization and to heavy regulation. This can lead to staff not having the wide  picture, to clients not being served quick enough and to errors. One of the flows we decided to review  and simplify was: campaigns for complex investment products. 8 teams were involved into the flow until  the product reached the clients – each of them appearing and reappearing at different points – and 5  teams were involved for processing of the transactions and documentation. There were errors occurring  and several manual tasks.

Selection

In the process of reviewing and simplifying the flow, we used visualization, as we needed for all the  members of the project team to get to the same image for the initial and final flow. Otherwise, each of  them would have in mind only their part of the flow and their issues.

Application

We created a project team to address this optimization, one person from each team involved in the flow  was part of it. Initially, the problem we aimed at solving was inaccurate documentation and lack of checks,  which was thought to be caused by lack of front officers’ attention given to this subject. With all of their  input, we managed to draw the current flow on the board and highlighted the problematic areas which  we noted to be much more than we initially thought (documentation going back and forth, no automatic  checks for basic information and list of documents, front officers having too many tasks, manual reports,  etc). After the first meeting, the flow was drafted on the computer in order to have it available at any time  and help us identify more potential optimizations. It became clear that some tasks were doubled or could  be performed by another team to reduce time.

After few meetings and several iterations of new flow drawing, the project team was able to come up  with a new, simplified, much more automatized flow and also with much better understanding of other’s  tasks and roles. Practically, the documentation to be sent to the clients became more standardized (some  teams’ inputs were not necessary anymore); in terms of processing – once the front officer had all the  information for one subscription with just one button push several automatic checks were done, the deals  were input and the reports were done; some double tasks were discovered and eliminated. The number  of teams involved was reduced to 4 for the creation part and 3 for the processing, but even their tasks  were heavily reduced.

Insight

By applying the visualization tool, the initial status was identified and the ideal one was drawn. One of the  most important gains is that the mindset of the people involved into the flow was changed to see also the  issues others have and to understand the importance of certain tasks – visualizing the entire picture was  key. The results were better than what we initially aimed for, as not only issues with the documentation  were addressed, but much more, and it was seen that the errors made in front office were caused by too  many tasks.

Approach

After taking this course, I am even more confident that visualization is a very important and helpful tool  to be used. It’s so simple, but so effective - maybe due to its simplicity we sometimes tend not to use it  and concentrate on more complex tools.

