'We had an operational review in October through to December [1993] last year looking at paper flow and information flow between us, Services, Accounts Services and Claims but not within Claims and muggins here had to head that project up as well because it dovetails in with this one. ... we came up with 24 options of how we could improve methodology and some of that was as basic as there are different ways of doing things, one of..that was where the programme summary form came out of because there was no consistency of flow of new programme or renewal information to Services from the underwriters ...X036 page 003.17 (tape 03.1.02) Jenny Notes/Tape 02/03/94And it was done very well, we had an operation review manager in to act as the facilitator ... and he basically came in with all the management theory of how you organise and you look at it and see what's there, what we're meant to do, whether we do it and then go through and look at options and then implementation. So it's analysis and evaluation and implementation. All classic textbook stuff and it worked brilliantly. Each week he introduced the next step in the process because when you went in there for the first meeting, you thought we're never going to get this done, not enough time to do it, it's too broad an area to look at, but it did actually work very well.
And where did it start to fall apart, potentially, when we got to the implementation of the human stage of it but it worked, it did work, but the classic meeting was at the nineth week where we had a person from Accounts Services and they were the ones with the most areas of change because they never had many systems in there and they'd help design all these options or whatever, when the question was said well when are you going to start running with this, well we can't do that before then and this until after Christmas, can't do this and I can't do that, then I had to put my diplomatic hat on and say I think we need to step back a bit and see what we're trying to achieve here. I think there was some conflict, I think she was being dumped on by her boss politically bringing in all sorts of jobs that she wasn't going to have time anyway. There's one thing designing and another about actually going ahead and doing. ...
You can't be lateral enough if you tie it in that tightly [with IT], you can't think of all the aspects of that particular project you're always thinking what's the effect on the other part and I think you need to look at both parts independently ... '
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© Clare Tagg 2000