The financial crisis of 2008 was a significant challenge to the UK financial regulatory landscape. It showed up some significant shortcomings which led to a fundamental rethink of how the industry was regulated (The Turner Report 2010). Shortly afterwards, in 2011, the establishment of a new Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) as part of the Bank of England (BoE) was announced, divesting from the FSA. This necessitated all IT systems and all personnel working in ‘prudential supervision’ moving from FSA premises to BoE premises and for PRA to exist as a single entity by 1st April 2013.
Engagement
iCore had a long association with the BoE and we were successful in a competitive bid to deliver the following as part of the overall Programme:
- Analysis of existing IT Service Division’s operational capability to clearly understand what needed to be changed to accommodate 1400 new employees, almost doubling the number of employees
- Designing Service Management process and Organisational changes required to enable the transition
- Evaluating and defining revisions to ITSM Tooling
- Defining the transition plan to enable the 1400 people to move seamlessly from Canary Wharf to their new offices on Moorgate
- Training new employees and new IT staff on what was required to minimise detrimental impact on services (no IT staff TUPEd over to the BoE)
- Supporting other workstreams tasked with delivering the new or changed applications, transferring data and fitting out a building refurbishment
Approach and Deliverables
iCore proposed a phased project to bring the required specialists at the time they were needed, managed by a single Managing Consultant who would oversee the strategy and deliverables.
The first team of two began work as the ‘Operational Readiness’ workstream to review of existing capability in Jan 2012 and at the same time outlining the transition approach that would be required and a recruitment programme to bolster existing capability. Once the transition approach was agreed then one of iCore’s Service Transition subject matter experts was brought in to turn the approach into a detailed transition plan, including training, knowledge transfer, recruitment, and sourcing options.
Work continued on all workstreams and during Sept 2012 it was agreed that there was enough detail to be able to start to build the very detailed migration and early life support plan. Again another one of our experienced Service Transition SMEs was brought in and immediately started to outline the detail and present this to senior stakeholders and impacted resources.
As the programme moved in to 2013 the military operation swung in to place to move the personnel, equip them all out with laptops, have their applications ready, move their data from FSA to PRA, continually communicate, and track everything to the minute.
Tranche 1 of the people arrived on the 7th Jan 2013 followed by another tranche every two weeks after that until March 2013. The KPI for a successful migration was that everyone was fully operational within 4 hours of their first working day, and of the 1400 staff there were less than 20 over the 6 tranches who did not acknowledge that they were ‘operational’ within that time and many were pleased to be fully functional within an hour.
Outcome
A combination of floorwalkers, control centre, airline style inductions, long weekend data migrations, and damned good planning and delivery by all workstreams meant that this was seen as a roaring success. Over the period of the migration there were 2818 Incidents and 3477 Service Requests handled and by the end of March 2013 there were only 55 open tickets but importantly 1400 happy employees. The new incoming CEO of the PRA, Andrew Bailey, commented on “the calmness and the absence of significant disruption”.
Simon Moorhead, the Bank’s CIO at the time stated “The events over these first months of 2013 were tremendously successful thanks to the hard work, tight management and an unrelenting service ethic”.
The success was recognised by the then Governor of the Bank, Baron Mervyn King, who stated that “In all my time at the Bank this was by far the most ambitious, yet most successful moves of this kind”.
iCore continued to support the ongoing operation of the new IT Service organisation and gradually withdrew our team from April to June, having truly embedded best practice and left behind a highly motivated service management team.
