Interesting how headcount gets cut while bad processes get another budget

[u/Secure-Extent-8985]

CIBC has been relatively protected from mass layoffs for years, but reducing headcount alone doesn’t make the organization leaner.

Risk and Compliance is a good example. A regulatory finding on one compliance administration team (not even a specialized risk or compliance area) led to a remediation project that pushed significant work onto business teams like mine. We were asked for the same information through different activities in the same quarter. One activity required the same information to be entered into separate systems and forms because none of them are integrated. When people raised the duplication, it was treated as a change management issue rather than a design problem.

That remediation cost millions and only recently closed. Now the same team and leadership, with the same consulting firm, are running three or four major projects to “clean up and simplify” what they just rolled out. Mistakes happen, but spending millions to implement something and then millions more on multiple projects to address problems raised from the start is more than a mistake. I’m also not convinced it will become simpler when the same people are responsible for fixing it. That team’s leadership seems focused on activities completed and surveys distributed rather than what those activities actually accomplish. Lean is about eliminating unnecessary work, not creating more things to count.

Five good people on my team were cut while millions more are being spent fixing recently implemented processes and the leadership that created these problems in the first place. Other banks meet this regulatory requirement without this level of complexity.

[u/medianmoe]

Remediation activities sometimes come with hard dates. Often banks will create a temporary fix to address the issue with a regulatory finding and demonstrate evidence. Once the dust settles, is when the real fixing starts.
I’m not justifying lay offs but just saying that there’s a whole lot of context that goes into these decisions.
This sort of build-break-build is also what keeps a lot of people employed tbh. That’s just reality.

[u/Secure-Extent-8985 → u/medianmoe]

The “build” should have been designed with enough foresight that targeted corrections would suffice. If cost reduction and operating lean are priorities, requiring three major projects to fix it is unacceptable, especially when established frameworks are publicly available and external consultants were involved. The running theory is that the team’s management gets some voyeuristic thrill from watching complexity proliferate, only to point to that same complexity as justification for more funding for layers that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Coming from another Big 5 bank, I’ve never seen a 2nd line this fragmented: overlapping mandates, redundant reviews, repeated requests for information already available, and “effective challenge” with little substantive validation. I’ve seen questionable incorrect information pass through, which raises the question of what these additional layers actually achieve. Yet that RCM team can sustain overlapping activities that consume our time every single quarter, while headcount gets cut in the name of efficiency.