In the second instalment of her merger diary, Janet Day explains why the management at Berwin Leighton Paisner flinch when they hear the words ‘green paper’
If I thought the month running up to Easter had been busy, I had seen nothing yet. If I thought all the tears had already been shed, there were buckets more to come. If I thought there were opportunities, I was wrong… there were problems. If I thought the devil was in the detail, I was right there at least.
When I last wrote we did not know how much we would look like one firm by 1 May. But we now know the outside world saw us pretty much as a seamlessly knit community, with one website, one e-mail convention, one document style and letter layout, one telephone number and one new corporate identity. If only the outside world knew of the number of seams there were internally.
I should share with you the night of 30 April and all of 1 May. For most of the IT team, the night of 30 April started midway through Friday 27 April, when various changes were made to the systems. We were still testing the templates while name changes, ID changes, wallpapers, screen savers, group mailing lists, departmental identities and exchange containers were changed or renamed. The team worked tirelessly through the weekend. By early Monday morning we were confidently on a roll – still hiding the corporate identity.
But do not think we were the only people working. The bags under the eyes of the marketing team rivalled those in IT and the meeting of the integration committee at 8am on 27 April was remarkably calm as exhaustion took away the ability to panic.
Monday evening (30 April) started the final stage of the changeover. Had you walked into either IT site, say at 9pm on Monday, you may have thought that it was 9am. People were whizzing around and, as each target was met, triumphant shouts echoed around the area.
Notepads, pens, pencils and mousemats arrived in good time. By 11pm even the rucksacks and briefcases carrying the new name were arriving at desks. As Monday slid into Tuesday, the team went home – energised by the thought of an international day of action the next day – and a party at the Hilton.
By 7am, half of the department were back. I knew we had all been home because everyone was wearing a different colour shirt. Hanging on the back of doors were posh frocks, DJs and yesterday’s suit (ah, maybe not all of us went home then).
As users arrived, we waited for issues – something we had missed, a system that refused to use its new IP address, an e-mail bouncing back or maybe just a plain old PC failing to boot up. There were no calls to the help desk beyond the normal. We looked at each other, concerned. Maybe people had not been able to get to work at all. I walked the floors – yes, everyone was there – but there were no calls.
Let me get back to the technology – and the run-up to the merger. After I had brought Fleet Street to a standstill for a week or so to get the input point to Paisner & Co’s headquarters at Bouverie House, everything stood still on the inter-site connection. Telephone calls, e-mails and constant bombarding from here produced not an iota of movement from the carrier offering the LAN 1000 service – they were simply not going to tell us when the connection would be live. Luckily, they eventually bored of this form of entertainment and the connection went in.
The telephone changeover was smoother, for no particular reason that I can discern. The new instruments and system arrived on time. This was a first in my experience and caught everyone unawares. The training on the replacement phone system went smoothly and the new facilities were generally liked.
The best thing has been the enthusiasm with which the switchboard team have embraced the challenge of answering the phone with “Berwinleightonpaisner”. So far, none of them has tried the anagram approach, but there is time yet…
Before I leave the topic of telephones, I should mention the monumental task of the telephone directory. You might think this is hardly a topic for the technology group, and you might be right. But the Berwin Leighton Paisner telephone directory is a work of art – the density of print rivals War and Peace.
So why does the IT director not get this sort of thing onto the intranet? We are doing so, but somehow people feel confident with a physical telephone directory in their hands. Ours is driven by a database, which drives a huge number of other services within the firm, and although covering a densely packed 80 pages, it contains more information about the merged practice than any other publication. I will treasure for a while the call from a secretary midway through the morning of 1 May. She asked for all 1,000 copies to be withdrawn, since she was still shown with her maiden name (she had married on 27 April and kept it a secret). Luckily for her, I was numb by then.
You may remember that last time I wrote I said that one of the most significant debates had been on the subject of window envelopes. I was wrong in thinking that this would be one of the most difficult. Much more difficult has been the absence of green copy paper – although letters printed on green or white look similar, they are, of course, clearly different.
So, how, with the myriad really significant tasks we had to consider, did the entire integration committee lose time on the subject of green copy paper? If you have a printer that has only three trays available for paper and you suddenly move to preprinted headed notepaper and continuation paper, you move the goalposts significantly. The printer cannot now carry the variety of other papers it carried – so you sacrifice something – and for us that has been green copy paper.
I could talk endlessly about green copy paper and the impact that its removal has had on the working lives of a significant proportion of the business. Suffice to say that management has lost its ability to quip about these things. Although I expect after reading this, they will take the opportunity to use something along the lines of ‘so a green policy does not please all’ or ‘we should have stayed green you know’.
The other issue dominating our lives has been who sits where. No matter who moves
to which building, someone, somewhere,
will always be put out. I know the theory is that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, but in the case of restacking buildings pleasing any of the people any of the time would be a positive advance. So, what did I learn from my second month of the merger?
