Performance Improvement category winner
Graham Ramsden/BT Global Services

If you are going into the jungle, Graham Ramsden is the man you would want to go with. That is the judges’ opinion of the 40-year-old Yorkshireman. Ramsden, who has a background in improving call centres, is not an obvious choice for an expedition into the wild but the panel’s remarks reflect its confidence in him.

“We really felt we would trust him with our most prized project,” says judge Alyson Gerner, who is also commercial deputy director at the Department for Children, Schools and Families. “If he were working on it, you know you would go home happy in the evening.”

Such confidence has paid off for BT, where Ramsden, a managing consultant, has spent most of his career. BT put him in charge of improving the performance of its contract with one of the large banks, which had become frustrated with the amount of time the IT network was unavailable to its staff in branches, call centres and the head office.

Without changing the people or equipment, the project achieved a 90 per cent improvement in availability, boosting productivity by tens of millions of pounds and prompting the bank to renew the contract, worth hundreds of millions of pounds, to BT.

Gerner points out that he introduced the changes in a way that was sympathetic to the people in the organisation. “He seemed to really understand the complexities of working with people,” she says. “He had a good eye on the endgame but you felt that he was determined there would not be too many casualties.”

The conditions have to be right to ensure such success. Ramsden, who fancies himself as a gardener, says no matter how good a strategy is, like a garden, it never survives the first contact with reality. “You will find that particular plants do not grow as fast as you would like or the weather is unpredictable. It is the same with performance improvement; you draw up a plan but people don’t want to work in a particular way or use a particular tool and you have to adapt to that. Then you have to keep adapting.”

There are principles to follow, however. The first is to make sure you really understand the problem.

Advisers also need to agree about the outcome they are aiming for and how to measure it; developing a way to calculate the man hours lost when the network was unavailable was key to the bank project.

Finally, consultants also need imagination. Ramsden, for instance, introduced “forensic reviews” on the contract so that every time there was a major incident, the senior people would meet to pick it apart minute by minute and see what could have been done to prevent it. It is an idea he picked up from a television programme on air crash investigations.

And the same applies whether dealing with the process in a single contact centre, multimillion-pound contracts, or, perhaps, a whole division of an organisation.

So, does this mean that by the time he is finished we will have learnt to love call centres? “Perhaps,” he laughs. “but I think that's a heck of a challenge.”

Times Recommends

• Inspirational leadership
• How to get a new job
• The reluctant CEO