Reality Sets In

Right from the very start of the project, nearly everyone involved understood the goal was to migrate AGC's systems to GE Money; the hard part was figuring out exactly how large the job was going to be. When delays or other difficulties were encountered, as is always the case on complex integration projects involving two large enterprises, Felstead and McNamara say it was the effort they put into their strategy early on that kept relations from breaking down.

"Because none of us knew the size of what we were about to embark on, we put into the agreement that within the first 100 days we would come up with a mutual migration strategy," says Felstead, who refers to the decision to form a mutual strategy from the outset as "one of the most important lessons we learned".

"Neither side actually understood the dimensions, but we did agree that the first thing we had to do was to form a mutual view of migration. And we spent a lot time in those first 100 days working together with system architects to map out the architecture of AGC, to agree on what the target architecture should be and then to sign off on the streams of work mutually."

In the end, GE Money and Westpac created a "blueprint" document that was signed by Felstead and McNamara and their respective CEOs, as well as each company's legal counsel. It was a good thing, too. According to the pair, agreeing on such a strategy early helped to avoid one company pointing the finger at the other when the project began to hit snags. "When reality struck, in terms of delays and issues of amalgamating both organizations, we got over that hump and mutually agreed on a delayed profile," Felstead says.

Given the circumstances at the time, delays were inevitable. While the AGC integration project was taking place, GE Money was also launching a new card for Coles Myer and running out a new network of 140 branches around Australia. Over at Westpac, McNamara was busy deploying new technology into the bank's own branch network. He was also overseeing the integration of Westpac's three world management organizations into one. Both sides were feeling the squeeze.

When it became clear just how much time it would take to strip AGC's systems out of Westpac and integrate them into GE Money, Felstead says having a mutually agreed-upon plan was what enabled the two companies to overcome the project's early setbacks. But it was not until they conducted the first post-implementation review of the first project that the pair was finally convinced they would be able to navigate the rapids safely - when the team, made up of members from both enterprises, began to coalesce.

"It wasn't easy that first post-implementation review, but the fantastic thing was that everybody was really open and we came away with a game plan," Felstead says.

"We made a promise to each other that we'd take what we'd learnt from the post-implementation review and use some Six Sigma tools to do a health check on each and every project.

"That was incredibly powerful because we went to each project team and assessed their understanding of the goals, the roles and the interpersonal styles being used in each project. And we were able to get a sense, as a steering committee, of how everyone was doing."

Felstead believes in a strong steering committee model. Until the project was formally completed in November 2003, the two companies held steering committee meetings every second Friday. These were tightly controlled, tightly-minuted meetings, but in Felstead's opinion their most important characteristic was the fact that the two companies alternated as chair.

"GE and Westpac alternated and there were very formal, signed-off minutes," he says. "There was a report out on the previous minutes and actions. There was a report out on the various forums that had taken place in the meantime. And, of course, issues were raised at the meetings."

Felstead and McNamara also set up a series of forums where members of the project teams could air their grievances face-to-face. Divided into "business as usual", "commercial" and "migration", Felstead credits these forums with keeping the project on track. When issues or conflicts did arise among team members, the existence of forums where people could "present their exceptions", as Felstead puts it, ensured that projects did not grind to a halt while everybody worked out their differences.

"People didn't go off to their huts and caves and sulk," Felstead says. "They were able to move on and keep on with business as usual. The commercial issues were put aside and moved into the forum, leaving us free to do the necessary change management."

Westpac and GE money had a mutually agreed-upon strategy, but they also had mutually agreed ways of measuring success. Chief among these were the quality and timeliness of the deliverables within the many individual project streams. But perhaps the most important indicator of success was more difficult to quantify: the fact that business kept operating without any outages.

"The fact that the day-to-day operations didn't suffer sometimes gets forgotten in all this," Westpac's McNamara says. "The fact that we transitioned from something that was intermingled with our infrastructure to something that was separate from that, and that it didn't impact the operational services of either organization in any substantial way over that period, is a key measure of success."