I thought I would share a few realizations after taking early retirement

Almost 16 months ago, I decided to leave a job I loved to try “new things”.  My Vanguard career started on 12/12/1982, and lasted over 32 years.  The decision to leave was a difficult one, I so loved the people, the culture and the purpose of the organization. 

I am pretty sure my decision to leave started to percolate around my 30th anniversary.  I began to wonder if I had become too comfortable in my situation.  After 30 years, you tend to develop a “doctorate” in how an organization works.   To use the often overused Vanguard sailing metaphor— I wondered if I was “sailing close to shore” because I was afraid the world might be flat.   So, on 04/13/2014, my 54th birthday, Vanguard and I worked a great plan to transition me from the organization.

Enough background.  This is not an advice post, it is a sharing experiences post.  If you are considering early retirement or late career change due to whatever situation, listed below are a few things I experienced, and a few insights I have gleaned from the experience:

1.       Separation anxiety is unavoidable, but goes away.  I had anxiety before I left, as well as the first day I woke without a badge.   I guess everyone deals with anxiety differently.  I stay busy.  I plan.  I make lists.  I decided to divide-up my next life phase into 6 month chunks.  The first 6 months I traveled, visited friends and family.  The next 6 months I started a 50/25/25 plan.  Half of my time was dedicated to family and travel; however, I also introduced home improvement projects and networking activities.  My current allocation is 50/50 work and fun, with a goal to end up working more.   

2.       People move on and it is a natural thing.  I am an ESTJ and love / need to interact with people.  I estimate that I knew the names and background of 2000 + crew members when I left.    Whenever we did the “Gallup 12 question” survey, I would boast that I had hundreds of best friends at work.   After a year away, it is clear to me how silly I was with that boast.  Working together 60 hours a week, for over 1500 weeks, you meet a lot of nice people, and develop friendly acquaintances—Friendship is different.  Just knowing someone’s name does not make someone a friend.  I have gone from having lunch with Vanguard folks on most days, to now just a couple of times per month.  It is not what I thought would happen, but it made me much more appreciative of those relationships where we did manage a friendship versus acquaintance.

3.       Work that seemed so important at that time seems less important to me today.    Goals and efforts around service adoption, project completion, and many other things were very important to me.  I would work lots of hours and have many an intense conversation.  I was often described like a dog with a bone.   I spent at least an hour a day reading financial services publications, and listening to Bloomberg in the car.  Now I read Philly.com, listen to sports radio, and never know what the market is doing.  If I only knew then what I know now…

4.       We are all replaceable.  We all say it.   I said it a zillion times; however, there is nothing like seeing it in action.  My departments and my projects went on without missing a beat.  Sure, the new leaders did it differently, some say for the worse, some say for the better, but the truth is everything got done. 

5.       Finding new work takes time, and the process is very rewarding.  Meeting new people, learning new industries, and solving new problems is exceptionally rewarding.  It turns out the world is not flat.  Non-profits, businesses, and government all have interesting problems to solve, with rewarding outcomes.  I am grateful have been blessed with enough resources to deprioritize a pay- check and prioritize working on meaningful things. 

Early retirement is a major gift for me!  I better prioritize friends and family, I only work on projects where someone cares about the outcome, and I have a much better appreciation of the daily simple things like walking the dogs.  Early retirement was challenging, but it did teach me a few important life lessons during the transition.

10 Things to consider when improving an organizations client experience

Ten important things to consider when improving an organization's client experience:

• Be data driven and not anecdotal about what to fix. Listening to the “loudest voices” rarely fixes the biggest opportunities.

• Using Net Promoter Score is a great way to segment clients and discover service opportunities issues for all three segments ( detractors, passive and promoters ).

• It is most effective when the client experience improvement efforts are continuous. While onetime “repair” projects can make an impact, an ongoing process allows data analysis to iterate improvements and show ongoing efficacy.

• There is always a rich ROI when repairing customer service defects that result in re-work. Cost of poor quality, and elimination of “egregious” customer service situations should be a first priority.

• There three major things drive your organization's client experience, and each of them will need thorough analysis:

  • Your client facing teams

  • Your systems (applications, web, phones, statements, kiosks, etc )

  • Your controls, rules, restrictions

• The best way to start an “improve our client experience project” is to process map the five most important client interactions; usually good places to start are registering for the web and moving money /paying invoices.

• Client experience work is fun but intense. It is like bringing a “B” grade up to an “A” grade, it feels good; however, the team and its culture need to be fully engaged. Making things better for clients almost always requires night and weekend testing, use of personal accounts, and sometimes tedious sampling to make sure improvements are effective.

• Look for jargon and remove all of it. Using “internal vocabulary” on client facing systems is almost always a mistake.

• Be ADA complaint on the web and printed material. Large fonts and good color contrast help aging clients. Older baby boomers are usually great clients to keep happy.

• Perform “negative testing” by entering incorrect fields and answers. Expecting customers to enter the correct answers on forms, IVRs and web sites is pollyannaish. Making sure customer facing systems handle incorrect client entries with great error messaging always improves client satisfaction and straight through processing.

Five (5) keys to insure better outcomes with technology projects

Unless you are of the Steve Jobs ilk, technology is not a strategy for most businesses and non-profits—it is an enabler. Technology is a very magical thing, and can transform almost any business or non-profit, but business outcomes need to drive technology spending. Making sure that every technology investment project focuses on the final business outcome is paramount. Of course, this seems so logical, almost condescending, but industry numbers show that a majority of technology projects fail to deliver expected business outcomes. There are a myriad of reasons technology projects fail; lack of staffing, IT infrastructure limitations and poor business strategy are a few common ones. The fact is, technology project management is difficult. When ever I am asked to manage a technology project, I focus on these 5 keys in order to insure good outcomes:

• Good business people. It is very common for project work to be perceived as a “burden” or “un-glamorous”. Front line business teams will many times say they do not have time for project work. The best business people are in key jobs making money and working with customers. Although pulling your best people is difficult, there is nothing worse when your customers and employees cannot use a system but “it is working as designed”. The process of building or customizing IT software is expensive and difficult, and compromises around requirements are made throughout each day. Your best people know when to hold the line, and when to compromise.

• Start the requirements process by simulating how the management team will utilize the system. Everyone has heard the phrase you can't manage what you can't measure. Yet reporting and outcomes are many times relegated toward the end of many project life cycles. Spending millions on a large system, and then not knowing if “things are working” happens a lot. If the team “using the system in the future” can envision the report / metrics they will need in the future, everything will “flow” from there.

• Immerse the project in client / user feedback. Every attempt needs to be made to allow clients and internal users to see the prototypes, and also be the first pilot users of the system. Even the best business people begin to develop “project speak”. Why things can't be done, using vernacular no one outside the project team understands, and compromising on things that might eventually cause problems.Getting client feedback and front line crew to review prototypes and to pilot the software before wide scale production, will find gaps and allow time for correction.

• Be agile. Agile is usually an adjective, but it is also a software development methodology. Regardless of methodology, being agile means adapting to change, delivering pieces rather than the entire project, and places a premium on continuous improvement. Getting software into production and then makes changes based on data and feedback is the best way to stay on budget and deliver a high quality project. If at all possible, never go to production with the “whole enchilada”. Never expose everything all at once to the entire user base.

• Do not let “non functional capabilities” surprise. This is especially important on client facing systems. Metrics and functionality are obvious business articulation responsibilities. Security, response time, availability, browser support, device support, printing, error messages / logic, etc etc. are not obvious tasks where business people focus. Many a system or project functionally work perfectly yet fail due to security flaws, unacceptable response time, and error messages that do not make sense. A good operational readiness test will check all the aforementioned before a system goes into production.

Fresh start at 54 years and 11 months

I worked for Vanguard since I was 22, and I love the place.  The premise, the people, the culture. The opportunities proffered to me were amazing.  Being on "the ground floor" when an organization starts has its perks. However, even though I love the place, and made a very fair wage, I knew I needed to make a career change.  How long is too long at one place?  I do not know the answer, but my personal answer was 31.5 years.

Starting fresh at 54.9 years of age is a little scary. It may be that my skills were a perfect match for Vanguard and no where else--worry does not have to be rational.  Regardless, I see myself working another 30 years,  time to get over any trepidation and find a few organizations trying to improve their customer experience.

I have always loved to write.  In my old position I was offered the opportunity to blog to over 4000 retail employees.  Sharing career experiences, good and bad, proved very cathartic.  Whenever I walked the hallways employees would stop me and comment on my blogs, usually positive, but also with constructive feedback.  Blogs are a beautiful thing.  Even though my audience may only be my wife and kids, I plan to use this to share career and life experiences.  Lacking my PHD and other credentials, it is not meant to be authoritative, only my journey and thoughts.  There is one lesson in life I am sure of, we can all learn from each other.