Global Development Centres boost creativity

Around the world

BT’s global development centre programme is all about bringing the right people, skills, technology and attitudes altogether into a small number of prime locations. It’s an approach that’s designed to support the company’s operational model, enable fluid customer engagement across continents, reduce costs and increase employee job satisfaction.

Over the years, BT has undergone a transformational journey characterised by acquisitions, a need to progressively reorganise itself to meet changing business needs, the launching of operations in new territories, and the modification or expansion of its product and service portfolio in line with customer requirements.

As a result of this ongoing evolution, many employees and teams of employees working on the same projects and programmes have frequently found themselves spread far and wide throughout the organisation – often, given the global footprint of the business, across continents.

This was certainly the case for BT’s Innovate & Design division which recognised that many of its people were not ideally located for the work they were performing, or for the people with whom they interacted with on a day-to-day basis.

Improved performance

“We had some teams with people in 20 or more locations,” says Alan Bateman, director of next generation engineering in BT Design & Innovate. “We felt that this fragmented situation was not ideally matched to our desire to

accelerate agility and improve performance, and that’s where our GDC (global development centre) approach originally stemmed from,” he explains.

BT’s global development centre programme was developed with the objective of re-shaping teams to benefit from co-location.

Says Alan Bateman: “GDCs are about putting people into buildings where they are more likely to work with a colleague or, where this is not possible, locating them in two or three buildings where we can link them together using our technology.”

“We looked at other IT companies’ approaches first. Some were quite radically different, wacky even, and some were less so, being much more conservative. We tried to combine the best elements from what we saw in a way that was right for our company and its culture and characteristics. We also designed them in a very holistic way looking at all the physical and environmental, ergonomic and human dimensions.”

And collaborative technology is a key feature of BT’s global development centres as Alan Bateman explains: “Using the technology, such as telepresence kit, and the facilities like shared online white boards and videoconferencing cameras built into the workspaces, teams can work collaboratively with colleagues they are co-located with and those based on the other side of the world.”

BT is developing five GDCs worldwide: Ipswich (Adastral Park), Pune (India), Europe, Dalian (China) and Dallas (USA), and more are planned. A small number of other satellite sites will be linked to these five main centres.

The buildings have been ergonomically designed to encourage productive and collaborative behaviour among employees. This ranges from using large round tables instead of square ones, having open stand-up meeting spaces right at the centre of the area and building in state-of-the art technology to support international collaboration with BT customers, colleagues and suppliers around the world.

Attention to detail has been a prime principle. Lessons have been learned from these earlier 2008 phases and the later GDC developments have incorporated ‘fine tuning’ in their layout and the physical kit used. More than 1,200 BT and affiliated developers are now working in the GDCs worldwide.

Specific benefits

The GDC approach is designed to deliver some specific benefits to BT. For example, the improved satisfaction of BT customers is set to follow improvements in product and service design, development and build enabled by GDC working environments. The GDCs will also foster business efficiency as product and service development costs will be reduced through this innovative way of working.

Importantly, employees’ satisfaction will increase as well. “We’ve already noticed how people working from our GDCs are thriving in the campus atmosphere,” says Alan Bateman. “Visitors immediately notice a dynamism about the place when they come to the Ipswich GDC. There’s much more conversation and discussion, much more active group problem solving. What’s more, we notice that our people are so much more productive when they are actively engaged with direct colleagues and customers.”

There’s also a tangible green benefit. “People working together means less travel, less energy consumption because fewer buildings are kept open for just a handful of people to work in, and generally, we calculate, a reduction in carbon emissions,” says Alan Bateman.

Finally, GDCs have a clear role to play in making BT’s operating model work as effectively as possible and managing the end-to-end ‘innovation to implementation’ lifecycle.

Hot-housing

“BT’s operating model is about having our customers and suppliers all engaged together at every stage of the development process. For example, it enables continuous hot-housing with customers,” says Alan Bateman. “It’s very difficult to do that when people are in multiple locations. To do it successfully you need to have people all sitting together around a table or a virtual table.”

A number of BT’s customers have successfully participated in the collaboration enabled by the GDCs. For example, customer service agents from two well-known communications provider organisations have taken part in an initiative designed to share best-practice around customer fault handling – all hosted through BT’s Ipswich GDC. Other major customers impressed by the GDC approach include a German motor manufacturer and a Korean state telecoms firm.

“In our modern, virtual, internet-connected world, it’s easy to forget that physical workplace locations still matter,” concludes Alan Bateman. “Our global development centres prove that they do − being co-located does allow people to work together better and faster. And because you just can’t have everyone all in the same place all the time, you’ve also got to use technology cleverly to connect teams from different GDCs together.”

“But to encourage people to work more effectively, you have to do other things too, such as exploiting agile development processes, implementing more connected and efficient development workflow models, encouraging new work behaviours and so on. Our GDCs are actually a part of BT’s much bigger transformation strategy.”

BT and London 2012

BT is the Official Communications Services Partner and a Sustainability Partner for the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games.