Arrogant Manager Made Them De-Automate A Process On His First Day On The Job. It Cost Their Business Millions.

To be successful – both in life and in business – one must be able to roll with the punches. To see the gray areas in the world instead of focusing on the black and white.

Some people, unfortunately, are just not able to do this.

When OP first started his job he was part of a 15-person team that worked 24/7.

Was thinking to write about this for sometime. So here it is. Apologies for the long post.

This happened around 15yrs back. I used to lead a back office process for a Shared Service Centre which wholly owned by a major European Telco. The offshore unit was based of India.

One of the processes that we had was SIM activation which was a manual process. New SIM card activation used to come in an excel sheet which the team use to activate based on certain pre-requisite checks.

It was a 15 member team which worked 24/7.

Eventually, they came up with a way to automate enough of their work that only 3 people remained to accomplish the same outcomes.

We came up with an idea to automate and using macros was able to automate almost 85-90% of the process.

My stakeholder back in EU was happy and we were able to redeploy 12 members to different units outside my processes.

That is, until a new Compliance Head informed them they were breaking the “rules.”

Couple of months come our new Compliance Head.

As a part of his induction we showed him our process and he was quick to point out the automation and how it was not compliant since it was not made by IT.

Any one who has worked in corporate knows IT turnaround for simple automation.

He made us shut down the automation and manually restart the process. And we had to raise a request to IT to automate this. This was a Friday.

Doing it the “right way” cost the company customers, their reputation…and a lot of money.

During the weekend customer service received huge escalations and complaints. It was also not a good onboarding experience.

The stakeholder was not happy and raised an escalation with the Indian management team. The head of compliance blamed us for not following process. I had already briefed the stakeholder on what transpired and he was supportive.

After a week we got the IT team coming back to us stating that the entire automation would be done in a month’s time and it would cost us around £20K (using RPA). So the original free automation would now cost an extra 20K.

The stakeholder was really not happy with the experience and vowed to move the process to third-party.

Eventually within a year my entire process moved to third party who did the automation free of cost.

It was no skin off OP’s nose, but he was satisfied to learn of the new guy’s fate nonetheless.

While people got redeployed, it still cost the offshore unit £1 million which was the cost of my team every year.

I choose to join the third party where the process moved and while leaving dropped an email on how the impulsiveness of the Compliance Head cost us our reputation and loss of business.

He eventually got fired after 8 months.

I bet Reddit has some questions – but I bet they’re shaking their heads, too.

This person can see both sides. Kind of.

They think maybe OP should have run it up the chain.

The IT people in the comments think things aren’t so cut and dried.

These managers never wait long enough for making big changes.

Some think the IT people are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Fam… whenever it’s your first day on the job… don’t make any changes.

Good grief!

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were travelling for business.