Towards the end of last year, FusionExperience ran a series of interactive webinars providing insight and guidance into important issues relevant to operations and outsourcing.
In the first webinar we set out the importance of having a good operations strategy and gave detailed guidance on the level of resources to be devoted to developing and updating one. When considering operating model strategy, two questions are clearly prominent on the participants’ minds, namely why to have one in the first place, and why or when should it be reviewed. Answering these will identify the key elements that a good operations model must contain. Examining what happens if you don’t have an operating strategy can start to answer this, namely sub-optimisation, urgency winning over importance and inefficient allocation of resources.
The second webinar looked at the importance of managing the outsource suppliers that are an increasingly large part of most asset management operations. Outsourced service provision is central to the operation of almost all asset management firms. The basic rationale for outsourcing across all industries is that the benefits of scale outweigh the additional management costs of acquiring services from suppliers.
The third webinar looked at important techniques for Managing Major Change, focusing on techniques for achieving momentum and coherence at the fuzzy front end of projects. Change in asset management is constant and pervasive; new products must be launched to respond to changes in customer preference, service features must be added in line with demand for more tailored service and service levels need to be continually upgraded to keep pace with customer expectations, at ever lower costs.
However the change process can fail if some basic tenets are not followed; requirements must be properly understood, scope must be fully defined and accurate estimates of the resources required must be produced. Moreover stakeholders must be fully engaged and the acceptance criteria defined.
Our final webinar entitled ‘Managing Operations’ covered measures companies can take to improve operations. It is through operations that companies deliver services and brand. Good operations will deliver to expectation, are flexible and allow for the rapid launch of new products and new services. By contrast, poor operations will undermine a brand, will consume management resources dealing with failure, and will divert financial resources away from other areas of the business.
Operations consist of a company’s people, its technology, and its process. If operations are important it therefore follows that they should be managed. In the webinar we looked at a framework for process management described by the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Services (CMMI). This is a model used globally by many large organisations to drive cost reduction and improvement in services delivery. The CMMI model is a progressive model, with each level describing in detail the process goals to be achieved, and the practices required to improve them.
Whilst the webinar targeted the asset management sector, the issues raised were sector agnostic. The reason we held these webinars was to impart some of the knowledge at FusionExperience have garnered over many years and hear from other back office professionals who shared their opinions and asked some often challenging questions. We have written up the findings of the webinars, which can be accessed at Sourcingfocus.com, our media partner’s website. These can be viewed at http://www.sourcingfocus.com/index.php/search/results/8c749bd8a1c7bae36e39218ebd80920d/
Gordon Easden, Financial Services practice head.
