This Year's Challenge?

In my first couple of years at The Bank I was always feeling as if there was six month's work for me and then I would be out, as the job would be done. My manager at the time told me that it didn't matter: exactly what we did would simply change, but there would always be work. He lacked the re-assuring bedside manner to deliver the message with conviction, but it's turned out to be very true. In the last three years, I've moved from pricing implementation, to reporting-centered MI, to projects intended to fill in some large gaps left by the IT and data people, to insight analysis, and my latest incarnation is now apprarantly as a product manager. No change in job titles, but some quite real changes in function. The sail of my job description swings with the organisational and political winds.

A little bit of background. When I started working at The Bank, it was dominated by the retail sales function, along with every other financial services company for the last thirty years, which is why the FSA is fining them now over insurance and will be fining them later over Added Value Accounts. Specialist functions such as pricing and product development trembled at the thought that what they had done might have reduced sales. (The same sales the FSA are saying shouldn't have been made.) There was no room for creative thinking about products or promotions: all anyone wanted was a edge on stuffing more down the customers' throats.

It took a change of top management to see that maybe there might be a better way of running things, and sometime last year, product management was duly granted a divorce from sales. It's taken a while for the management to work out what that means for how and what they contribute. The result is that I have become a product development guy with a sideline in insight-focused MI. No more regular reporting, no more projects to make up for the shortcomings of the IT function. A couple of weeks ago, in a fit of absent-minded doodling in a meeting followed by Powerpointing the next afternoon, I put together a product outline that people think is a neat idea and needs developing. By me. It's dawning on me that I should be thinking about spending much of the rest of this year developing and shepherding through the NPD process (pretend The Bank really has something that deserves the name for the moment). Which means I have to look like I'm actually a part of what happens there, and I'm not sure I want to be that. Because what has happened there has attracted a lot of attention from the regulators. Do I really believe it's a different organisation? Has Daddy really quit drinking?

The change in priorities is probably a good thing, because I'm getting tired of working round the limitations of The Bank's IT and data capabilities. It's time other people developed some serious chops, or were hired to provide some. If there was some cool software to be used, or a new language to be learned, I might feel more reluctance, but our three-year-old Chinese laptops use Windows XP SP4 and Office 2007. We don't have access to a real programming language - thought VBA deserves less sneers than it gets. So I'm ready to move on. It's very probably this year's challenge.