A measured approach

Early last year Serco, the company that manages NPL on behalf of the Government, won an important new contract with the DTI. The head of NPLís biggest division, Engineering and Process Control, went off at short notice to run it, leaving the organisation with a big hole.

ìWe knew it could take up to six months to fill that hole, and after my less-than-successful attempt to fill it for a while – in addition to my day job – I realised we needed to bring someone in to run the division full time until we found a permanent replacement,î says NPL Managing Director Steve McQuillan.

He turned to Impact Executives for help. ìSerco has an agreement to work with Impact Executives, but our HR director had also worked with them in the past and rated them,î says McQuillan.

The person Impact Executives fielded was Mike Bartlett, an engineer with over 25 yearsí senior management experience, most of it at chief executive and director level in companies engaged in design, manufacturing and export. He took on the role of divisional director of Engineering and Process Control in March, with a seat on the executive board of NPL, initially for a period of three to six months. His remit was to build on the commercial income in the business, which specialises in science research, and improve the performance and management of the division by coaching the leaders.

Bartlett explains: ìEngineering and Process Control has a 25m turnover and 200 staff, and was not making the level of commercial income it hoped to achieve. My first task was to take control the performance and cost base, so I strengthened the fundamental concepts like business planning, risk analysis and full-year forecasting, while focusing the business development activities of Engineering and Process Control forwards, allowing the division to step up a gear.î

The bigger, more strategic task was to pursue further commercial opportunities: the business relied on the DTI for 60% of its funding, but that funding is being gradually reduced. Bartlett created business growth champions in the different science teams, matching them up with business development people so that together they could go out into the marketplace to identify and work out how to meet commercial needs.

His approach worked well. New planning and budgeting disciplines meant that the division finished the year in profit, and the senior team responded enthusiastically to the new market-facing positioning and the new management structure which focused, says Bartlett, on ìgetting the right people in the right jobs.î

Bartlett took on an additional role during the first six months of his assignment – helping establish as a separate business the knowledge transfer activities that had until then been part of Engineering and Process Control.

ìNPL understood the potential of the knowledge transfer business, but setting it up as a separate division gave it real focus. It should turn over around 7m this year, and that could triple over the next three or four years,î he explains.

In October, NPL appointed a new full-time managing director for Engineering and Process Control. But in the meantime the business development director for NPL had gone on maternity leave, and McQuillan asked Bartlett if he would step into that role until she returned in April.

ìThe great thing about Mike is that his wide experience means he can slot into any role in the organisation and be immediately effective, leaving me free to do my job,î says McQuillan. ìIt is not just a question of back-filling: he really moved the strategy and the business development activities of Engineering and Process Control forwards, allowing the division to step up a gear. And he is still proving his worth as executive director of the knowledge transfer business, helping them change their structure and strategy.î

Bartlett is also proving his worth in the business development role. ìI am focusing on refining our strategy and developing tactics for the key market sectors we should be operating in,î he says. ìAs part of that I will be helping to roll out what we did in Engineering and Process Control across the rest of the organisation, and reconciling the aims of the individual divisions with the central corporate aim.î

ìMike has allowed us to move forward far faster than we would otherwise have done,î says McQuillan.

Like all good interim managers, Bartlett is a strong people person, very flexible, versatile and adaptable – strengths exemplified in his willingness to fill, at short notice, the role of part-time Chief Executive of the Centre for Advanced Software Technology at Bangor University (also run by Serco) on a two-day-a-week basis until the end of February.

ìI relish the uncertainty and the opportunities involved in being an interim manager,î says Bartlett. ìYou get to know all sorts of interesting businesses and people. While every business, situation and culture is different, the problems tend to be the same. So you adapt your approach to what is essentially the same job time after time. It always works, which is very satisfying.î

Previously published in the Business Review, Impact Executives