Switch Over

From January, Zarin Patel, group finance director at the BBC, will have been in her role for four years – during which the BBC will have changed dramatically.

‘Currently, we have a new licence settlement, substantially different from the previous one. There is the introduction of the public value assessment and the market impact assessment done independently by Ofcom, the regulator. There are now significant changes to the way the organisation is run and managed, both in terms of content and in the way that the BBC and its services are governed. Digital convergence, for example, is becoming a reality – we’ve moved TV online with the iPlayer. There have been huge changes.’

Patel has a considerable roster of responsibilities. There are the typical CFO functions: ensuring strong financial control, maximising net income both from the licence fee and commercial exploitation of the BBC’s properties through BBC Worldwide, allocating resources across the BBC to ensure value for money and delivery of the service licence obligations and public purposes set out for the BBC in its charter.

Add to that a remit that includes procurement, production management, the BBC’s scheme helping disadvantaged groups switch to digital, the investment side of the pension scheme and membership of 16 boards and committees, and you have one exceptionally busy CFO.

Challenging role

A principal test faced by Patel is leading the finance function through this period of substantial change. For example, this change has embraced a pioneering use of outsourcing and offshoring – currently with outsourcing provider Steria.

But while achieving a successful transformation in terms of exporting processes and systems is significant, equally important to Patel is the management of the finance team. It is a process that has taught Patel a number of valuable lessons.

‘When we started this change programme, most people told us what we were trying to do would take six years. Although we said that we would try and do it in three, the original estimation was right,’ she says.

‘You are changing processes, reshaping the team, and making a lot of people redundant. When you are doing that, you are not focusing as much on effectiveness of outcomes and whether you are developing your people to become better decision makers. We thought we could do the two things in parallel, but in hindsight, we took too much on.’

It was big learning process, says Patel. From a staff of about 670, finance is down to 320 people. These are split between a shared services operation in Cardiff where about 200 people deal with in-house transaction processing, business and financial accounting. A further 120 people are sat closer to the business, next to the editorial directors. Then there is Patel and her team at the BBC Centre.

In and outsourcing

Today, all transactions and rule-based processing is done by outsource providers Steria, whilst all that Patel calls the ‘valueadd’ processes are done within the BBC.

‘Quite a lot of the value-add is done from Cardiff and that has taken a while to mature and for people to understand,’ says Patel.

‘When you’re sitting with the business you see and hear a lot of things. When you’re fairly distant from it, you have to work harder to create those links. If you are sitting as a business accountant in Cardiff and the business you are supporting is radio in Broadcasting House in London, for example, it requires a lot of understanding of the business at a distance.

‘So we are experimenting with slightly different models, more people from Cardiff are now sitting in London.’

Refreshing roles

Patel has also tried to ensure there is constant change, so that the people remaining in finance are changing roles, changing divisions, doing different tasks and building a more complete knowledge and expertise of the business.

‘We are thinking hard about how often people should change and at what level they should move around the organisation,’ says Patel. ‘Moving every two or three years is probably too frequent, because in the first year a person learns the job, in the second year they start making changes and in the third year things are beginning to work well, relationships are strong and people are making good decisions. You don’t want to stop that.’

Building careers

‘We have a mantra we are trying to build, which is "go and be great",’ says Patel. ‘And you can be great within the organisation or you can be great outside the organisation. Our job is to help build your career so that you have those options.’

But what does that career development of the finance team look like in practice? To begin with people at a more junior level, a financial accountant, for example, pulling together a division’s accounts, will get experience of at least two or three divisions.

For more senior personnel, such as a finance partner in a division, Patel wants them to get experience of bigger and more complex work, so they might be pulled into the corporate centre, into the commercial arm, or outside London into the regional arms.

This external experience outside their individual division is vital in the modern BBC, as it is with many other organisations. The BBC is today much more collaborative and connected than it used to be and people are more dependent on each other. Therefore, relationships and networks across the organisation are critical for success.

Career management is also conducted at a senior level. Patel runs a finance and business board in much the same way as a normal company board, and there is a strong HR team that helps shape the organisation’s design.

‘We do talent maps. For each of my people, I have a development plan for them,’ says Patel. ‘Where do they need to develop their skills sets? What are their career aspirations? To get to this next stage, what do they need to do?’

Recently, for example, Patel attended the Advanced Management Programme, Harvard Business School’s flagship executive education offering. While she was there, her successor carried out her job as finance director as part of his development plan. That gave her successor exposure to operating at executive level, at the board level and operating with the Trust, for example. So there is a very active development of the finance function’s talent pipeline.

Patel has also developed a business competency model which can be used to assess the skills that her finance team has.

‘A second aspect is that each manager will look at their talent map and assess whether a person is ready for a move now, or needs another year or different type of experience, before they’re ready to progress to the next role,’ says Patel.

‘Together with the person concerned, we try and assess what their career aspirations are, how they match the BBC’s needs, and what the development gap is – be it training or more varied experience. Then we actively move them.’

Since Patel’s return from Harvard, for example, she has engineered a job swap between two of her senior finance directors. Both had been in their roles for seven years, and Patel felt that their skills would erode if they spent another seven years in exactly the same job. Plus, a job swap helped the two directors revitalise their careers and get additional experience, skills and knowledge, potentially saving Patel from losing the talent the BBC has made a significant investment in.

Working with tighter budgets

Financial constraints mean that Patel has to be creative in the way she approaches leadership development. A good example is the organisation’s in-house peer-to-peer coaching. There is also an effort to encourage greater business and finance acumen amongst the general leadership team. The finance team obviously have a significant input into this. It goes beyond programmes designed to address managing a budget, for example, to more innovative approaches such as using the BBC’s business editor to lead the team through some of the implications of the current credit crunch.

Strategic thinking

Amidst the focus on her team, Patel hasn’t neglected to spend some time on her own career development, skills and knowledge improvement. The recent trip to Harvard Business School, for example, has helped to redefine her approach to the group finance director role a little.

‘My job for the director general is to help him think and to dispassionately assess risk. To do that I can’t be so involved in the day-to-day details. Fortunately, because I have such a credible and highly experienced team, I can let them take on more, thus creating more time for me to think strategically and look ahead to the future.’