PRIMED | Use Cases
Consumer Duty - Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement, demand management and change control -
bringing it all together within one platform.
Embedding the Disciplines of Consumer Duty
Consumer Duty Disciplines:
Set against different organisational and engagement contexts, the requirements of Consumer Duty not only pull on the discipline of framework governance but also and significantly on the change management disciplines of continuous improvement, demand management and change control. Below we detail and reflect on some of our experience and observations regarding implementation of consumer duty and the value that PRIMED has been able to offer to address them.
End to End process Reviews and Demand Management and Tracking:
The end to end process reviews set out by the regulation require analysis of consumer impacting processes and the determination of how they can be adapted for improvement.
Once identified any suggestion must then be moved through a process of validation, and evaluation before a decision is made to move them through the subsequent phases of a delivery cycle.
The associated tasks can vary in complexity, cost and impact and in the absence of a more systematic vehicle to facilitate demand management, the way that the challenge is beginning its life, is as a reasonably protracted regulatory change program. However, because the opportunity to review and to improve does not stop after one cycle, there is the need to embed reviews into a sustainable and efficient operating model. For those who have not started yet the benefit of systemising the approach from the outset is also now available.
The process itself appears to be best served through the operation of a two lane process, differentiating the approach taken for quick wins from the more project based demands for which further information is required and a wider stakeholders community involvement is needed.
Quick wins:
A quick win is an opportunity for which the process owner identifies an opportunity for improvement within the process they own, and where adjustment can be made autonomously within that department without drawing on other departmental resources or incremental funding. These include things like adjustments like training routines, amending call scripts or making simple process adjustments.
Relatively easy to define and implement, the quick win can be tracked and implemented relatively easily through a simple linear process but can still have the ability to make significant impact on the customer experience and the protection of reputation.
Root Cause Analysis & Demand Management:
Other improvement suggestions are more challenging to administer and execute against. These are often where the root cause lies somewhere other than the process itself, where system work is required for example, or where external departments or third parties need to be involved and or incremental funding is required to implement the suggested change.
Not all suggestions put forward will be approved and decisions made and recorded on the basis of cost versus feasibility and commercial merit. To facilitate the selection and approval process an indication of relative cost, complexity and value is therefore required to inform approval process and for this reason additional information needs to be gathered as part of the journey.
To step through this process in an efficient way is not an unfamiliar challenge and appears to present an additional opportunity to look at the general systemisation of demand management & continuous improvement.
Change control:
Once stakeholders have reviewed processes and adjusted them to be in line with Customer Duty, a process is also be required to ensure that these benefits are not undone by unapproved or ill-informed process change. For this challenge, in much the same way that one might perform a Data Impact Assessment to ensure process change remains within data protection policy, there is a similar need for a workflow to be initiated when consumer facing processes are created or changed in what one might call a Consumer Impact Assessment.
The relevance of PRIMED:
Designed for cost effective, rapid deployment and delivering a simple systematic approach, PRIMED is able to cope with all of these issues: Capturing business processes & hierarchy and allowing opportunity and risk to be captured in relation to either the process of the individual step, PRIMED is also able to map the opportunity to a root cause. Then with a variety of workflow options, information can be passed through a structured process, engaging stakeholders through secure email.
The system is able to segregate quick wins and larger projects and move larger projects through the demand cycle, gathering further information about actual cost and value, prior to approval and then provides a platform to monitor and record progress through the delivery cycle. With a simple low touch way of facilitating change control and control oversight within the same data model, PRIMED is an agile and low cost way of bringing some or all of these things together into an automated and efficient process.
For those who have not started yet PRIMED also has the ability to manage the entire end to end implementation program in a similar simple and effective way and to expand as required to accommodate principles of continuous improvement.
