"The key is in applying innovation to classic improvement approaches..." - Interview with Dee White

The programme that Ms White leads is focused on improving efficiency and effectiveness of the Front-to-Back processes for a business that provides expert advice, innovative solutions and comprehensive access for clients to the fast-moving, data-intensive world of the capital markets.

In addition to initiating the Process Architecture, process mapping a KPI framework of metrics and creating a management dashboard, Ms White has devised a complete deployment strategy for Process Improvement based on the rigour of Six Sigma. The programme embraces DMAIC for improvement and DMADV for re-design, as well as a completely new and unique Continuous Improvement methodology known as Blitz Sigma.

Designed for rapid execution whilst employing the basic tools and structure of Six Sigma, Blitz Sigma projects deliver within 20 days and directly engage the Senior Business Sponsors and Process Owners by making them involved and accountable.

Ms White previously led the global deployment of the Volvo Car Corporation Six Sigma programme for the Marketing, Sales and Service Teams, and then went on to establishing the deployment programme in Vodafone UK, before moving to UBS in Switzerland. She has a Masters in Change Management from the London Business School and has been leading Change Programmes for the past 15 years.

What does Six Sigma mean to UBS Investment Bank, and how does it fit into the organisation’s strategy for improvement today?

And where do you see it going next?

What does Six Sigma mean to UBS Investment Bank, and how does it fit into the organisation’s strategy for improvement today?

Six Sigma is a key driver in the Process Excellence initiatives at UBS Investment Bank. It kicked off in UBS around 3 years ago within the operations of the investment bank and was a rather classic, Green Belt-led deployment programme, with a small team of Master Black Belts. Now there are a couple of hundred Green Belts across the investment bank, still largely located within the operations teams.

I joined UBS about 1 year ago, and was recruited to lead a cohesive change programme that broadened the improvement perspective. We needed to look at the full ‘front-to-back’ picture, starting with what we call “FX Cash” - Foreign Exchange Cash. Front-to-back literally means from when a trade is captured, all the way through the ‘machine’, to where a trade is settled and finally ledgered.

What I didn’t want to do in those early days was push Six Sigma into an organisation that was a healthy and profitable company. For the Investment Bank to have Six Sigma forced upon them would have resulted in a cultural clash. Also, we weren’t looking at a cost reduction drive, we were, and still are, looking at a performance efficiency drive. However, this efficiency should result in an improved experience for the customer, making it easier for clients to deal with us.

How did you approach leading such a change?

To begin with we mapped out our processes in FX Cash, from front-to-back. We looked at how we acquire new customers, how we ‘on-board’ them, how we set them up to trade effectively and efficiently within the bank, how we capture their data whether its client data or trading data, and then how we move our clients through their transactions; how we trade with them, and how we manage risk. We took the process all the way through to the maintenance of the client’s account, managing the lifecycle of events, the collateral assets, etc, and then also into our inter-dependency with our wealth management bank. So we worked through those processes down to our controls and our reporting.

Historically, the Bank was more functional and silo driven than process driven. It was therefore a real challenge to sit down with these functional heads and say: “I’m sure you’re doing a great job, managing your functions, but if we’re really going to improve the experience that the customer gets, which means improving our internal efficiency, we’ve got to start looking at it from within the front-to-back context and actually from the client’s perspective.”

We went on to map all potential errors and defects that could occur at every step of our process, and we made a Key Performance inventory. From that, we can understand what our performance improvement needs are. The data is telling us how efficient we need to be, and we have certain things weighted so we know which areas we need to be focusing on first.

We’re reporting on that weekly now to our steering committee and also to our process owners. There are senior process owners at MD level responsible for all of the processes and they themselves are accountable for them.

What have been your biggest challenges with implementing these changes at UBS Investment Bank?

One of the biggest challenges was moving the culture to ‘think process’ rather than think function. Capturing VOC and VOP have been fundamental in assisting us to look at how we do business and where the focus on improvement needs to be.

My experience in other organisations taught me that there are different ways to deploy Six Sigma and I experienced situations where Six Sigma can fail; i.e. leadership not fully bought in, which can happen for a number of reasons, sometimes resulting in them paying lip service. Therefore I decided that we needed to make leaders accountable for the programme from the very beginning. This brings a certain clarity of focus on the programme.

However, whilst leaders are demonstrating their buy-in to the programme, its usually people lower down in the organisation who are responsible for the implementation of projects improvements. Classically there is a middle ‘layer of clay’ –- middle or senior management –- that can block or slow down improvements. Therefore, it was from this level of management, where I decided to conscript resources for the projects.

We made Directors and Executive Directors project leaders! Taking them out of the organisation to run a project may seem scary for many people and most organisations. But we can survive when these guys go on holiday for two weeks, so we can survive when they lead a project for 9 days. That, I believe, is the power of this approach: it’s saying, at this middle and senior leader level, “you are process owners and you are accountable for your processes. You are also responsible for improving on the defects that are shown in the KPI scorecards”.

What I am saying, is rather than go through a bottom-up or top-down approach, I focused on the middle!

Is this how Blitz Sigma came about?

Yes. In addition, I like the rigour and structure of Six Sigma, I like DMAIC, I like the key, basic tools. I didn’t want to throw any of that away but I also realised that to demonstrate improvement much more quickly, you need to apply the 80/20 rule to measurement and analysis.

When reporting data back to senior leaders, I’ve found they want ‘big picture’ analysis, rather than micro details that statistically demonstrate what they knew anyway. (How many times have we been in a Black Belt presentation only to hear a senior leader say, “I could have told you all that in 6 minutes rather than 6 months!”) They just want a storyboard of: what’s wrong, why is it wrong, how much is it costing, what can we do to put it right, how much will it cost, and if we don’t put it right what will that mean to the business, and how are we going to ensure these improvements are sustainable in the organisation?

Sometimes data is needed to back up your storyboard. However, I have found that a good FMEA, fed by a solid process map with a Pareto of baseline data are the key ingredients to satisfy their hunger.

I tell MBBs and the Process Owners to keep their ‘Sigma speak’, in their back pocket. Generally, if you can go in and answer those storyboard questions, senior leaders will become engaged.

Were people skeptical about Blitz at first?

In March when I suggested we go with Blitz methodology, a lot of the leaders were skeptical. They questioned whether we could get sustainable change in twenty days. But we went ahead with two pilot projects and they delivered extremely well: one was completed in fourteen days and the other in nineteen days. So then we did another three and they came through even quicker. And it’s great for a programme to be able to deliver projects in a month, rather than taking two BB pilots, and waiting six to nine months before you can say we were right and these are the improvements we’ve made. Personally, I think Leaders ‘lose the faith’ waiting for 9 months or so for those initial BB projects to deliver.

When you have a KPI framework, a balanced scorecard reporting on defects, reporting on problems that the organisation’s facing, you can’t wait six to nine months to put things right. You have to be able to do something that demonstrates rapid improvement but in a sustainable way, as opposed to going back to a knee-jerk reaction of just doing ’something’.

However, there is a place for Just Do It. Sometimes it is pretty clear what needs to be done, however, I would recommend that these JDI projects become integrated into the Continuous Improvement Portfolio so that they can be tracked and reported on too.

There are places where Blitz just won’t work. If the improvement required is one of design or fundamental re-design, or where significant IT change is required for example, then DFSS is needed and DMADV is your path.

However, when looking at improvement, and you have good processes but perhaps they are just a bit sloppy, maybe the business has evolved but the processes haven’t, give a programme like Blitz some room to show what can be done.

I believe ours is a cohesive programme: it’s not about saying one part or approach works better than the other, its about demonstrating a balanced portfolio of approaches and projects. I have never bought in to the ‘one size fits all’ approach.

So that’s how you would categorise your areas, as improvement and innovation?

Yes, driven by data that’s collected on a weekly basis from the KPI framework and the balanced scorecard. Every two weeks the senior team sit together and review not only the scorecards, but the improvement projects we’ve decided that we really do need to kick off, and we prioritise them. So again, you don’t have senior leaders saying “this was the wrong project”, as they choose them, nor middle managers criticising the improvements because these are the people who have recommended the improvements through their work in the project.

Do you have set criteria for deciding whether a process needs a re-design or an improvement?

Not really, the approach required would normally be very clear. When we require new business models, it’s more likely we would design something new. But as we’re at a very early stage in our journey, there are so many areas that can be improved; its more a case of deciding which takes priority. The criteria we look at are which of these defects across the KPI framework are affecting our Straight-Through Processing, that’s our number one priority.

Number two is saying which of these areas for improvement incur the greatest cycle time and which one of those could be reduced more greatly than the others. The third one is understanding how many full-time employees are required to resource that defect. We can reduce those defects and redeploy our employees on doing other value-added work.

You mentioned that Blitz Sigma has now got recognition for training. Do you have a certification process?

No, we don’t certify for Blitz, but all our employees are required to go through 5 days education/training every year which is appropriate for them. We have a managed portfolio of training courses that UBS operate, and it has now been agreed that the Blitz methodology be incorporated into that portfolio. So if someone goes through the 5 day elements of Blitz -- which is training plus project development -- then they get 3 credits counting towards the required 5.

I am delighted with this, there’s no other part of Sigma training, be it GB, BB or process owner training, that have been incorporated into the education portfolio. This demonstrates UBS’ commitment and endorsement of this improvement methodology.

Is reducing project timescales something that you’ve been thinking about for a while?

I think a lot of organisations are thinking about a similar approach to UBS Blitz. People are saying: “how can we do this faster without losing the rigor and the structure?”. But for me it wasn’t an option: it was a case of senior leaders saying: “we have not got time for 6 months projects, we’ve got to fix these issues now”.

When you’re met with that kind of challenge, you have to come up with a solution, and for me, the only way was to really get them engaged, to make them accountable and active in the programme. What has made it powerful is that a number of people have said that it has changed the way they do their day-to-day work.

When I was first introduced to Six Sigma in 1999, I remember reading from the Six Sigma academy, that it’s not really just about projects, it’s a cultural mindset change, it’s a philosophy, as well as a methodology and a toolkit. It’s really about how you tackle your day-to-day work. I can honestly say that in UBS Investment Bank, this is the first example I’ve seen where it is doing just that. People are using these tools in a very creative way, they are being selective, they are talking the language of Six Sigma, and for that to happen in really a short period of time, maybe six months, is phenomenal.

What do you think is responsible for such a quick change in mindset?

It’s down to people’s understanding of what the methodology and the toolkit provides, and the acceptance and the need to do more and more rapid improvement. The key is getting the right people at the right level in the organisation engaged and accountable, because if you don’t make them accountable, their engagement will wane.

It’s also about aligning reward and recognition, so if they are rewarded and recognised for improvements, as opposed to just sales or productivity, then that will focus them as well. I think a lot of organisations select objectives for different parts of the organisation. So, if you’re in sales, you will be rewarded for conquests and productivity, bringing more and more into the pipe. If you’re in operations you will be rewarded for getting more throughput, faster. And then if you’re in quality you’ll be rewarded from that perspective. But quality has to be built in to every aspect of the organisation, from front-to-back, and that’s when you really get true buy-in and F2B improvement.

Did you take part in a Kaizen Blitz previously and have some experience of that Lean culture?

We did some Kaizen in Vodafone, and when I was at the Volvo Car Corporation Lean was very common-place, especially in manufacturing and production. Kaizen was used in Volvo too, especially on the shopfloor.

All these things impact your perspective on how you can just keep tweaking and evolving approaches. If somebody was to say to me today, “do you think deploying the original and classic GE/Motorola model is the right way to go for Six Sigma?”, personally, I would say no. It’s not anymore, the world has moved on. The key is in applying innovation to classic improvement approaches.

We should retain the fundamental aspects of those classic deployment programmes, but there’s been so much work done since the mid-80s which demonstrates that deployment has evolved. I would recommend people look at a change programme that’s more holistic, that has aspects of Lean, Six Sigma and other CI approaches and BE innovative in adapting approaches to fit their own organisation and its readiness for change.

What would you say have been the biggest challenges in implementing Blitz Sigma at UBS Investment Bank?

The first challenge is that it hadn’t been done before, so whilst there are similar approaches out there, nothing had been documented that we could find that says: ‘this has been a successful approach’. When you’re trying to deploy any new programme, first of all one generally refers to case studies to say that this company tried this and look what benefits they got! But when you haven’t got that to refer to, you’re going in asking for blind faith. That was my first challenge. People said to me: “prove this Blitz approach works”, and I couldn’t!

It was really in trying to influence senior leaders, who didn’t want to go with classic Six Sigma, and giving them this approach as an option. It still keeps the rigour and the structure, it’s still founded on the original philosophy. It’s a pragmatic approach that utilises different levels of the organisation for rapid change. Basically, that’s what brought them in: they wanted rapid change, but they also wanted sustainability. So what I gave them was a proposal that would give them the things they asked for.

The next challenge, similar to most change programmes when they start to get a little traction, is engaging the populace. You have a small pocket of people who are involved in the first projects and talking about the programme, but the vast majority of the people are saying: “What are they talking about”? “What’s this Blitz Sigma”? “What’s all this hype”?’ You have to deploy a planned communication and marketing programme too. Use every opportunity you can, whether its lunchtime sessions, the company magazine, having agenda items on your management committees, having steering committees headed up by the most senior people you can get. It’s really having a good hype machine, but from a fact-based perspective. The more projects that run the more it will bleed across the organisation. The more successful it is, the more people will want to be a part of it.

Those were my two biggest challenges. The third is really trying to get Six Sigma experts in the organisation to see that there is another way. When you have highly skilled MBBs and deployment champions that have bought into classic deployment, it’s almost too much for them to embrace a new way, because its not clean in their eyes, its not ‘the right’ way.

Have you had to face criticism from that section of people?

Sometimes, but basically it’s the results that will speak for themselves. I try to get them to understand that this isn’t instead of what they do, this is as well as. It’s just another tool.

Do you have classic Six Sigma projects going on as well as the Blitz Sigma?

Yes we do. Blitz cannot be the only approach and it sits alongside of GB and DFSS projects too.

And where do you see it going next?

I think there are going to be a lot more Blitz projects kicking off. At the moment we can run three a month. I hope we could be ramping up to run five a month soon. That will be an enormous strain on the organisation though to pull that many people out from their day jobs, but obviously the more you do, the faster the gains happen. You could spread the ‘pain’ out but you won’t make the improvement as fast as you would like.

I also see the Blitz methodology being spoken about in other parts of UBS, so I’d like to see me, taking the Blitz methodology – which I kind of see as my baby – and helping other parts of UBS work with that change initiative.

It sounds like you have support behind it, so there’s no reason why you can’t take it throughout the business now...

Yes, and when you look at the process architecture, there are a couple of areas where we are inter-dependent. So when I take the Blitz methodology into other areas of UBS, it’s not going to be that much of a shock because they may well have run a couple of projects already with us. It won’t be the same as when I started this in March, because now we CAN prove it and they can see its working.