HSBC Team

HSBC Team Interim Progress Report

Tasks Accomplished

Since the team has been assigned, a number of meetings had been organized such as team kick off meeting, first client meeting, client project partner meeting, regular meetings for engagement plan and interview guides preparation, including meeting for interviews preparation. Apart from meetings, documents, such as engagement plan and interview guides for two out of three interviews, had already been submitted to professor for feedback before submitted to client to align our understanding and preparation to move forward.

The group processed to organize an interview with two main groups of people involving with the problem for data collection.

Tasks Remaining

§ Diagnosis Phase Interview with management level person maybe needed to see the possibility of the solutions

§ Action Phase Data diagnosis and recommendations generation

§ Presentations and Reports

Actual Progress VS Original Engagement Plan

The overall progress is in good condition even though the team is behind original schedule by one week due to client’s availability and Spring Festival holiday.

Challenges

Challenges occur throughout different phases the team moving towards such as the time issue, problem focus, number of sample for data collection, and facts found during data collection phase.

Overcome Challenges

Different actions had been executed to overcome the team’s challenges. Some had been solved while some is still in progress.

Appendix

(I) Interview Guide

• Analysts

• Salespersons

(II) Data collected from interviews;

§ Analysts

§ Salespersons

(III) Summary of findings

Consulting Team

Teerakan KASEMCHAIPIPAT tkasemcha2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Rui ZHANG rzhang38-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Beibei LING bling2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Zhiming RONG zmrong2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Siyue CHEN siyuechen3-c@my.cityu.edu.hk Zhenzi LUO zhenziluo2-c@my.cityu.edu.hk

HSBC Team 2

What has already accomplished?

1. Team Kickoff Meeting 20Jan2015 The purpose of this meeting is to get to meet and be familiar with each other among team members, select communication representative for the group to align all the communication tasks, including the discussion on preliminary information received from professor on the client and problem before meeting with client.

2. First Client Meeting 23Jan2015

Together with Professor Paul Hempel, the team has been introduced to the client, project point of contact, and client’s project partner. In this meeting, the team received the overall idea and information of the project.

3. Engagement Plan Preparation 26Jan2015

After the first client meeting, team meetings had been set up to align the understanding of client’s problem, data needed to analyze the recommendations, time frame of the project, and commitment of the consulting team to the project. All information and plan are prepared for project engagement plan to be revised by professor before sending out to client.

4. Client’s Project Partner Meeting 04Feb2015

As our client, HSBC, is working on a technology system with Bloomberg to implement a platform to enhance the information flowing efficiency on HSBC research feedback, the team has an opportunity to visit Bloomberg office to learn about the overall Bloomberg terminal system and also specifically on the developing Note Taking Platform that HSBC is interesting to implement. From this visit, we found out more regarding the project that helps us to scope down our focus and be more specific on what we should do on this project.

5. Engagement Plan Revision and Submission 05Feb2015 After visiting Bloomberg, the team had discussed the new findings with Professor Paul and among the team itself to revise the engagement plan to be specific on the direction that the team will proceed.

6. Interview Guide Preparation and Submission 06Feb2015

According to our engagement plan, the team would like to proceed collecting data by interview people who involve in the project problem. The team had prepared interview guides for two out of three interviews planned; for HSBC Analysts and Salespersons.

The Interview guides had been reviewed by Professor Paul before forwarding to the client where the team had requested for the interview session approval at the same time.

*Please see Appendix I for Interview Guide

HSBC Team 3

7. HSBC Analysts and Salespersons Interview 27Feb2015

The organization of interview has been started by the beginning of week 6 with the confirmation of the two interview sessions on Friday 27th February, 2015 at HSBC Main Building. Three Analysts and Four Salespersons had been confirmed to participate with 15 minutes slot for each.

8. Information Revision Team Meeting 28Feb2015

The meeting was held after the interview with two purposes; to review and conclude all the information from the interviews, and to revise the prepared interim progress report.

* Please see Appendix II for the summary data from the interviews

9. Interim Progress Report Revision and Submission 29Feb2015 At this current stage, the team is revising project progress report to be submitted by the end of Week 7.

What remains to be completed?

Diagnosis Phase

1. Management Interview

The team is planning to conduct another interview with supervisor or management level of HSBC equity team (Client) in order to know the efforts and resources that will be available to improve the engagement level and efficiency of salespeople around research feedback. The area of interest is in terms of compensation system, performance appraisal, and trainings.

Action Phase

1. Data Diagnosis

Diagnose the possible reasons of low employee engagement and employee attitudes toward current feedback collecting system.

2. Analysis

Analyze the findings for effective recommendations. The analysis will take into account the difference in opinions and values toward feedback task between the analysts and salespeople that affects the quality of feedback.

Project Presentation and Reports 1. Interim Progress Report Week 7 2. Class Presentation Week 12 3. Executive Summary Week 12 4. Presentation Slides Week 12 5. Client Presentation Week 13 6. Full Consulting Report 30 Apr 2015

HSBC Team 4

Comparison between Actual Progress and original Engagement Plan Original Engagement Plan

Activities Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 2 Diagnosis

2.3 Conduct Analyst interview 2.4 Conduct Salesperson interview 2.5 Conduct Management interview 2.6 Diagnosis based on current data 2.7 Interim Progress Report

Actual Progress

Activities Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 2 Diagnosis

2.3 Conduct analyst interview 2.4 Conduct salesperson interview 2.5 Conduct management interview 2.6 Diagnosis based on current data 2.7 Interim Progress Report

Originally the team planned to accomplish the three interviews; Analysts, Salespeople, and Management, during Week 5 and 6. The plan to talk to the analysts first is to know how they interact with Salespeople who appear to sell their research paper (products) to clients in return of the trading orders. We also want to identify what kind of feedback is needed to be benefit for research improvement. By talking to the Analysts first, the information we got will help us to modify the questions prepared for the Salespeople to investigate their behaviors and attitudes. The Management interview is aimed at getting the information on Sales compensation system, performance appraisal, and related area to investigate the possibilities of solutions that will be actually implementable once recommended.

Due to uncontrollable factors, which will be mentioned in details in challenges part, the interview sessions for Analysts and Salespersons had been confirmed by the end of Week 6 on the same date, running from Analysts to Salespersons continuously in the same meeting room with expected half an hour break between the two sessions, but ten minutes in actual situation.

Currently our team had collected and summarized the information from the Analysts and Salespersons interviews. Our team is planning the management interview to be conducted by the end of Week 7.

HSBC Team 5

Challenges 1. Change in research focus

We originally planned to focus on two aspects of client’s problem; technical (system) and people (employee engagement). After Bloomberg’s visit, the focus of problem has been changed as there is little we can do to redesign the technical system; instead we will focus on people in performing the task.

2. One week behind the schedule

As mentioned in the previous part, the confirmation for interviews has been delayed from Week 5 to Week 6 where our team can only completed the interview with the Analysts and the Sales. This is due to the uncontrollable causes such as the organization for interviews and Spring Festival holiday.

3. Small sample size

Due to the fact that there are only 12 Salespersons in HSBC Hong Kong office, it is not effective for our team to engage in surveys.

4. Unexpected findings from Interviews

There are several facts we found during the interviews that we need to pay more attention

4.1 Feedback collecting is not a priority task for salespeople. 4.2 No real alignment between the Analysts and Salespeople in terms of quality feedback. 4.3 Employees want to rely their works on advanced system. Cost issue can be a roadblock. 4.4 Salespeople see no benefit in providing feedback because they normally cannot see any changes after sending feedback to analysts

Actions to overcome challenges

1. Change in research focus We will focus on employee feelings and attitudes toward research feedback task.

2. One week behind the schedule

Emails have been exchanged to organize the first two interviews and team meeting to review all the data received was organized immediately to keep up the progress to the original schedule.

3. Small sample size Interview is the best method to collect data from focus group.

4. Unexpected findings from Interviews

We need to consider the relationship between the findings if they affect the employee engagement level and quality of the feedback in any case. Solving these issues may help to solve the main problem indirectly.

HSBC Team 6

Appendix I

Interview Guide (1)

Interviewee

Analyst

Topic

Identify the needed type of information. Distinguish what is useful information and what is not. Specify the form and preciseness of information that will benefit to their work.

Sample questions

1. Do you normally get feedback for your research papers?

2. Is the feedback you got helpful?

3. What kind of feedback you think will be more useful?

(Why they buy/ why they not buy; we may scope down salespersons’ works to get specific information from clients)

4. How do you usually get those feedbacks?

(Face to face/ email/ phone/ note taking platform/ or others)

5. What do you think if you have a system that salespeople can put feedback in and you can log in to see the feedback of your paper?

HSBC Team 7

Interview Guide (2)

Interviewee

Salesperson

Topic

Diagnose their information sharing behaviors, the types of information they share and get from clients.

Sample questions

1. Can you describe your daily work?

2. How do you interact with your clients? How do you feel about this process?

3. What kind of methods that you use to store the client feedback you got? (Note it down/ email) How do you feel about that?

4. How do you use the feedbacks?

5. Do you know the Bloomberg Note Taking Platform? Will you use it?

6. On average, how long does it take for you to collect and record the feedbacks?

7. Do you have any comments or expectations?

HSBC Team 8

Appendix II

Data Collection (1) Interviewee

Analyst

1. Do you normally get feedback for your research papers? Yes

2. Is the feedback you got helpful? Depends. There is a problem of the quality. What is the standard?

3. What kind of feedback you think will be more useful? - What client interest, In what way that they interest (Buyer, Seller, Holder, Shopper), What do they think about the research (Agree or Disagree) - Feedback from other clients (Globally clients) - Client services feedback (Which client should they call, Who is really important) - How many clients actually make the trade according to their published research - The key things that client interesting in the report (To be able to follow up)

4. How do you usually get those feedbacks?(Face to face/email/phone/note taking platform) Heavily by emails (Two opinions on this) - Too many email per day (hundreds in quantity, cannot go through everything) - Email goes to everyone who involves, so why change

5. What do you think if you have a system that salespeople can put feedback in and you can log in to see the feedback of your paper? - Analysts seem to be open-minded - They want salespeople to start input the information in the system so they can get information. If sales do not use it, so they cannot use it. Current client management system, Climax, no sales use it. - More simple system than Climax(the current client information management) is needed.

HSBC Team 9

Data Collection (2) Interviewee

Salesperson

1. Can you describe your daily work? There will be a morning meeting that including Salespeople and Analysts on the selected research paper.

2. How do you interact with your clients? How do you feel about this process? - It is something that cannot be controlled - Information received is all depend on clients - Salespeople will judge on which client is important and what should be the thing that each client interesting in - Salespeople will also judge on which feedback should be given out (It is the confidentiality between sales and client)

3. What kind of methods that you use to store the client feedback you got? (Note it down/email) How do you feel about that? - We contact clients by phone, email, face to face meeting (less), Bloomberg Chat - Some sales note what they talked to clients on paper, some just remember it but not noting as it is confidential information - At the end of the day, one salesperson will take turn everyday to gather feedbacks from every salespersons, put them on an email and send it out to relevant people

4. How do you use the feedbacks? - Once the feedbacks had been send out each day, it is not my concern anymore - There is no added value to me or my work - There is nothing change after I send my feedback

5. Do you know the Bloomberg Note Taking Platform? Will you use it? - They all heard about it with limited information - None of them test the system before

6. On average, how long does it take for you to collect and record the feedbacks? - Few minutes

7. Do you have any comments or expectations? - There should be a guideline for what is relevant for standard of quality feedback - The guideline should be globally standard - Analysts and Sales should talk about this

HSBC Team 10

Appendix III

Summary of Findings 1. There is no standard of quality feedback

2. There are different values between the Analysts and Salespeople

- Long term and short term services

- Globally and individual benefits

- Analysts would like Salespeople to give more information in terms of research points to client, not just choosing only what they think it is important as clients may be interesting in other points as well

3. The Communication between Analysts and Salespeople

- Analysts sometimes do not respond to sales’ feedback given

- Analysts want feedback but they do not like to be told on what to do

4. They do not understand each other

- They have different set of priority clients. Sales think they know clients better as they contact each other. Analysts think they know clients better as they do research on companies.

- They have different perspectives of each other workload. For example, Sales give a big list of client for Analysts to contact. As Analysts cannot do it all so they pick the clients that is most priority to them.