Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.
Mark 12:17 NIV
When the greater empire of Network Services in ICL finally took over all the expertise on networking from every business unit, I was moved from my comfortable place which was the Local Government team and it was a real shock to the system because I felt like I was being taken away from a team where I felt I belonged. I recall being a complete pain to my new managers and I have since been told that they had me down as a trouble maker which was quite understandable. I did’t really have any tangible gripe, it is just that I reacted badly not having a choice. In retrospect, it was just a re-structure and it would have been better just getting on with the job.
For all practical purposes, it was business as usual for my colleagues and I. Because our new roles involved us working with our former colleagues in Local Government, on a day to day basis, nothing much changed initially.
I remember working with Sheffield City Council (only about 30 miles from where I lived) on on a new consolidated network and associated integrated network management system. I had many trips to a building in Sheffield city centre, an extension to the Victorian town hall known as the “Egg Box” because this is what it looked like. It was a 1970s building made of grey concrete in the so-called “Burtalist” style and housed the Council’s IT department and main computer hall hosing the ICL mainframe. In those days, Sheffield was an all-out ICL customer and came to us for all its computer needs. The network was no exception so I had the opportunity to work out the design of what would be built with the Council’s network manager with no sight nor sound of any competition.
What we were designing included a state-of-the-art the latest network management system. If you imagine the mission control room of NASA, or even the Star Ship Enterprise, with a big screen on the wall showing all the relevant information, you might get an idea of what we were trying to achieve. The idea is that there would be a big screen that would show a diagram of the network and highlight any areas where there is a problem win real time. The diagram would then help the engineers see the impact of what is going wrong and what they need to do to fix things. In recent years, I haven’t seen the “big screen” approach which is a pity because I think it gives a vital insight to when anything goes wrong.
This whole project was a big deal and the design took many months. . When I knew we had all the right people agreeing to sign the deal at the customer, the salesman was out (on holiday or something like that) so I asked his secretary to print me out the contract and went myself to close the deal and get the signatures. While I didn’t get the salesman’s commission for the deal, it did get me noticed in the right way by my new managers and I think they started to think of me as one of the good guys.
One of the more interesting attributes of this new organisation (Network Services), is that it was geared up to do business in a way that was new for the company.
ICL’s background was a product company. Everything it sold, even services, had a product code, each of which was defined in a legally vetted product description. The contract was a list of products, quantities and prices together with a set of standard terms and conditions which basically said that what you were buying were those products, as defined in the product descriptions at the prices stated and nothing else. This was designed to be in the interests of ICL by removing any guarantee on “fitness for purpose” or promise of business outcome. The contract stated that it was up to the customer to read the product descriptions and satisfy itself that they were suitable to do the job for which they were being purchased. I think it was beginning to reach the stage that these types of one-way contracts that put all the cards in the hand of the supplier were on the way out. The practice of being able to have a monopoly relationship with a customer was also in decline (for understandable reasons) and my job would become much more orientated around competitive bids.
We started using new types of contracts designed for customers which didn’t care or want to care about the list of products, so long as it delivered what they wanted. You would agree a timetable, acceptance criteria and even more significantly, a contract bespoke to the job in hand.
This new way of working meant that you could also include things that weren’t standard ICL products such as third party components because you didn’t need “product descriptions” but an overall solutions description defining exactly what your solution would do for the customer.
This was of course a good deal more risky for ICL and so the process of getting sign-off, the “Business Approval Procedure” (BAP) was rather more onerous. You had always needed to run some kind of approval process for most significant deals, a standard form to check that you weren’t signing up the company to things that were too risky and getting approval for any timescales you were agreeing to for example. However, the BAP for these new systems contracts was another matter and you needed to get commercial, finance and project approval of the whole offer. The great thing about the Network Services team of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was that they were geared up to do this and get deals passed. I remember on one occasion working late on a bid which was due out the following morning. The whole management team stayed on to help and made themselves available for the sign off later that evening.
For a while the team was based out of Reading but then migrated to Stevenage, the building where I was originally recruited to ICL. This building had been refurbished but the spiral staircase (which I mentioned in Chapter 3) was still there. I remember spending many nights in hotels in those towns because the teams were co-located and had to work that way because the modern tools of audio and video conferencing weren’t available to us then. I maintain to this day that teams work so much more effectively face to face and during that time, I felt part of a high-performing team to the extent I didn’t mind the nights spent away from home.
I used to frequent the Novotel Stevenage, maybe 2-3 days a week. Once I phoned up to book a room and was told none were available, but I could be put on a waiting list. After I put the phone down, I was immediately called back by the reception manager who was very apologetic saying “Mr Mann, of course we have a room for YOU!”. Most of the receptionists got to recognise my voice.
Over time, me reputation and status in the organisation increased. I was once asked to chair a “Business Improvement Group” (BIG) addressing how we could better qualify the type of business we invested in bidding for (so for example we chose deals that we could win and then make money out of). I am not sure how useful the output of my group but later I was told that my group was the only one that had delivered anything at all and that had again got the attention of management in a good way. When my boss had to take an extended time of work for an operation, I was asked to stand in for him and this led to me becoming part of the NS management team. My job was to manage the team of consultants assigned to various accounts or groups of accounts (customers), the Account Consultancy Team and this was in addition to me carrying out the role myself.
Richard Mann 