Improve the way you do business by making use of your experts’ intellect. It is an opportunity not to be overlooked, claim McKinsey consultants. Process times became 20 % faster and error rates fell by 70 % when a US-based financial institution tried it. Experts are prone to some of the typical basic problem-solving errors, and often need practice in following structured problem-solving methods. When they do, outcomes can be impressive.
Deploying their own experts to solve the problem
The first step the institution took was to ask its financial analysts to identify challenges in serving the relationship managers – their primary customers. They claimed a huge challenge was correcting errors in data the offshore centers provided. The analysts proposed an extra quality-control step to check the calculations. Yet after it was implemented, this extra check exacerbated delays and even introduced more errors.
Was the problem that the offshore data was delivered in a way that was incompatible with IT standards? No, there was an unrecognized bias: the leader who brought up this issue defined almost every problem in IT terms.
The real cause found
The organization noticed that the propm0osals lacked input from both the offshore teams and the IT staff. Everything changed when representatives of all the groups involved worked together with compliance experts. They relied on factual analysis and avoided blaming others. They discovered the data the offshore team was using was compromised from the very beginning. They traced the data to another division of the organization and then developed a customized data feed.
The experts continued to expand on their newfound capabilities. They recognized that they were the ones responsible for improving their process.
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