'The Toss of a Coin', Chapter 9 / 2

Moving to Board Headquarters in London

The Head of Productivity Services at the BRB, Alan Englert, had been keen to replicate the Western Region model on other Regions and when he was appointed to head the Staff Management College at the Grove, Watford, I was asked to move to the Board to replace him and fashion the five Regions’ Management Services resources into a powerful internal management consultancy organisation, reporting directly to a Board Member, James Urquhart.

Another department, the Board’s Strategic Planning and Research organisation, had upped its profile by appointing a former General Manager, Geoff Myers, as its Head and Jim Urquhart wanted the same for his emergent Consultancy Services unit. I know he was seeking to interest people like Jim O’Brien, then General Manager of the London Midland Region, but most potential candidates were cautious as the advisory nature of the structure was feared to be a career risk taking a high flying manager out of the direct line of personal line responsibility.

The appointment of a Director was therefore delayed and as the Manager, I was asked to get on with the job of recruiting suitable people in the Regions to head up the restyled organisations. I was given General Management support and we appointed a powerful team, which included Paul Watkinson on the LMR, Mick Newsome on the Eastern Region and Paul Winder on the Western. We held a series of meetings to ensure that we had a common vision and then the Regional Management Services Managers set about recruiting appropriate people for the new roles, retaining some of the best Work Study and Organisation & Methods practitioners who were felt to have the capacity for development.

At Headquarters I started recruiting some senior consultants from the functions – Operations, Marketing, Engineering – at the same level as George Tidy who was very experienced in the whole Work Study and incentives philosophy and Geoff Goldstone continuing his campaign to bring management into the technological age. Jim Urquhart also wanted a senior officer to measure the impact of efforts to improve productivity and to devise key performance indicators to identify good practice, targets for measurable improvement and the ability to compare like activities – which led some managers to fear that they were to be judged by a ‘league table’ approach.

This ‘policeman’ role did not sit easily with the consultancy ‘advisory’ role and when eventually a Director was appointed, the Productivity Manager, John Craik, was shifted to report to the Director leaving the consultancy wing reporting through me. By the time a Director had been recruited from private industry the organisation had been formed and key people appointed which meant that the new man, Michael Ferrand, who’d been a senior IT man in an American owned company, had had no influence in shaping the organisation he was to head.

I shall always remember my introduction to Michael – we met on the morning of his appointment in his office - and his first words to me 'Can you show me your Procedure Manuals?’ I hadn’t a clue what he meant, revealing the wide culture clash between a nationalised industry in which the managers knew one another and had worked together for years, developing an informal but highly effective structure based on the knowledge of, and trust in each other and private industry – especially American owned ones – where formal management systems were necessary because of the frequent movement of managers in and out of the company.

Michael’s expectations and priorities were at odds with the railway culture from the word go and I know he had a hard time developing sound relationships especially with the five powerful Regional General Managers. He didn’t help himself by being overly concerned with what many railwaymen saw as peripheral status issues – his office equipment and furniture, chauffeur provision. He and I went to many London based meetings jointly in the early days as he picked up the key parts of the job, and jokingly we often separated, Michael insisting on taking the chauffeur driven car whilst I plumped for the quicker underground invariably arriving at our destination first. This was not just about scoring points off Michael – I still had a tendency to be car sick if driven, especially if I tried to read anything while we were being driven and Michael would want to open papers and discuss them with me en route which caused such problems to arise.

Michael Ferrand wanted to build on his own expertise in the IT area and he and Hilton Craig, who led the BR IT development unit, were soon vying for the leadership of BR’s pilot studies in these areas and choice of equipment. This left me to carry on building the teams on the Regions and establishing good relationships with Regional General Management – essential if we were to be effective.

One consequence of the competing drive to introduce new technology was that I found myself the guinea pig to have the first word processor to be used in general administration. It was believed that the extra capacity and productivity of the new equipment would enable my secretary to take on additional managers, certainly one, perhaps even two. Events soon proved this a major mistake. Certainly my secretary’s productivity improved, but so did mine as I took advantage of her new capacity for work. In consequence, my secretary found her activity on my behalf increased threefold and this was proved invaluable during a major BR Board/Trade Union exercise mounted in 1979, which became known as ‘The Challenge of the Eighties’.

In the late seventies government policy had been to restrict the annual pay increases in the public sector, with general rises above inflation to be funded only by demonstrable productivity improvements. This led to annual increasingly bitter arguments between management and trade unions over decimal point percentages until in some exasperation, Sidney Weighall, the General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), challenged management to ‘think big’ and put on the table substantial productivity improvements they wished to see in exchange for a significant general pay rise – aiming at 10-20% improvements on both sides. Peter Parker, the Railways Board Chairman, took up the challenge and Cliff Rose, by then the Board Member for Personnel, took charge of the studies and subsequent negotiations. Five management teams were to be set up mirroring those of the trade union groupings – Operations (Signalling), Operations (Train Crews), Operations (Terminals), Engineering and Administration.

The BR Consultancy Services senior staff were heavily involved in the Working Groups for each theme and were given the task of identifying potential productivity improvements in their area and costing them ready for negotiations with the unions. We were set the target of identifying a 20% reduction in costs without any significant reduction in the business. There was to be a co-ordinating group and I was charged with acting as secretary and organiser of this group bringing together the daily results from each team and identifying any duplication or possible complementary savings.

This is where my word processor paid off. Every evening I would receive the day’s deliberations from each Working Party and would add anything new to the existing lists modifying changes that had occurred. Of course, it was easy to build on the work already done without having to retype everything and at 9am every morning the five team leaders found a complete up-to-date list of all identified schemes and an estimate of cost savings against each. We had just a fortnight of intensive work and I can well remember the last night when the final document was drawn up – some 40 or 50 pages of typed proposals. At 3am Cliff Rose and another couple of us could be found photocopying the completed document and laying the pages in piles round the boardroom large table, then circling the table gathering a sheet from each pile to provide a separate booklet for each manager and each trade union representative engaged in the exercise.

The results formed the basis of a significant number of productivity agreements in the early 1980s – single-manning of modern diesel and electric traction units, flexible train crew rostering, one man operation of suburban and local passenger services, removal of ticket platform barrier staff and encompassing ticket examination on train within the guard’s duties where guards were to be retained. These were the biggest and most controversial of the many ideas put forward and eventually agreed. It caused a row between the two major trade unions because the idea came from the NUR but the most significant job cuts would come from train crews who were ASLEF members.

There was some disappointment that no great productivity improvements had been identified in administration, but the team felt there was scope for challenging the necessity for some of the work, rather than trying to do it all more efficiently through investment in technology which did not release sufficient savings to fund the investment and offer a large pay increase to clerical workers. Therefore in 1981 we embarked on what was known as the ‘Discretionary Cost Analysis’ where every single clerical unit had to work with Consultancy Services to identify and quantify all work carried out and rank it in order of importance. Then the sections concerned had to justify why the bottom 20% was required at all – or if needed, whether there were other simpler ways of achieving the same end.

I worked closely with Leslie Soane, General Manager of the Scottish Region, on this and one of the key findings was the amount of duplication between the departments in different tiers or levels of the whole organisation. We began to look at the options of eliminating at least one tier and hotly fought debates took place about whether the Regions or Divisions should be abolished. There was even a school of thought that wanted to eliminate both and, with stronger functional lines, go straight from Board to depot or area level. This would come about as the new Chairman, Robert Reid, began to push the concept of business management strongly, but the railway was not ready for this yet and the Regional General Managers fought a fierce battle to retain their organisational structures.

The Discretionary Cost Analysis teams had done their work by this time and the organisational structure debate took place under the aegis of Jim Urquhart with my Consultancy Services organisation well to the fore. I can remember before one crucial meeting on this with the General Managers, which Jim Urquhart chaired, Michael Ferrand was due to make the presentation. However, Michael’s relationship with the General Managers was not good and as I had done most of the work behind the paper we were presenting, I was asked to take over ten minutes before the start of the meeting. This mollified the GMs to some extent as I had a good working understanding with the two General Managers that were most vociferous in their opposition, Frank Paterson of the Eastern Region and Leslie Lloyd (Western), but I did feel as though I was taking a particularly difficult trade union meeting. The die was cast and the Divisional structure was doomed – part of which process I found I now had to implement in my next job.