Mats Bengtsson

My Job

Mats Bengtsson mib over the years

My current job

I have retired from my permanent employment. With that, I left Capgemini which formally was my major employer for most of my working time after completing school. After leaving Capgemini, I have started a consultant company (Mats MIB Consulting AB) which has only one resource, me, accepting assignments.

My previous roles

Before Capgemini, I worked for a number of years at ABB, where I started as "elevingenjör". The ABB employment was a special chance ABB gave to a few people every year, which included a full year of training, work at 3 to 4 different departments, and a half year work abroad. In ABB, I became a project Manager. I moved from ABB to what is now Capgemini where I was formally in the same company for many years. I became an employee in Capgemini when Capgemini Logik bought Programator where I was hired at the time. When that happened, I had been employed by, or involved in, different Companies related to Programator (Programator, Programator Teknik, Grapple, Maxcimator). My plan was to never stay in any company for longer then 3-5 years. Yet, I stayed around 35 years within Capgemini group. During the time in Capgemini, I had a lot of different roles, spanning very different kind of responsibilities, before becoming a full time external consultant:

  • Within an office
    • Assembler real time process designer/programmer/tester
    • 4G developer and information visualizer
    • Project Manager
    • Account Manager
    • Office Manager
  • Within two offices
    • Quality manager
  • Within a branch of 6 offices
    • Branch Quality manager
    • IT-architect
    • Administration Manager
    • IT Owner
    • Branch Delivery Manager
  • For a number of teams
    • Team Manager
  • Within Sweden
    • Compensation Manager
    • Development Manager
  • Within Nordic
    • Operations Manager
    • Service desk Manager
    • Business Process Information Manager
    • Sales
    • Delivery
    • Knowledge Management
    • HR
    • Architect
    • Directory Manager
    • COO
  • Within Northern Europe and Asia
    • Telephony Manager
    • Directory Manager
    • Supplier Manager
    • Process Manager 
  • Within Capgemini group
    • Architecture Board member
    • Method development
  • As project manager
    • Transforming and outsourcing financial & administrative processes within Nordic. Including defining new strategy, roles, responsibilities and processes. The major part of finance and administration was outsourced from four Nordic countries to Poland. To achieve that, a new unit was built to handle the new processes using 55 employees. The contract included a further move of tasks to India.
    • Switching telephony from Telephony vendors in each country in Europe to utilizing our own network and Cisco call managers for calling, including transferring mobile phone calls to most suitable outgoing country.
  • As operations manager
    • Rolling out 3200 new PCs to all employees in Nordic (28 offices)
    • Transforming all operations from an old outsourcing contract to a new Nordic contract with the vendor being in India, cooperating with some on-site resources from another vendor. This included building a new unit and its processes for 27 employees.
    • Transforming service desk from a Swedish vendor to a new Nordic contract with the vendor being in India. This together with similar changes for SAN and backup handling previously done by another vendor, increased India staff now being 33 persons for operations and service desk.
    • Transforming service desk and operations for all IT-services in Northern Europe to a new contract with the vendors being in Poland and India, with the collective staffing from two places.
    • .
    • .
    • .

Major learnings from my roles

All roles have had one thing in common: My work is often as a Change Driver, Change Suggester and Change Manager. Changing the processes, changing the organization, changing the environment.

The culture of Capgemini, was not very hierarchical, it was not just to say "Just ... Do It", instead, I had to get enough people to believe in the routes I believed in, in order to make it all happen. That kind of work is very stimulating, trying to listen and understand enough people to understand what direction the company should take. Understand what services it could benefit from, how the processes could work. Then trying to describe and broadcast that message and vision so enough have the same picture and vision on the best forward route for us.

Independent of who makes the decision (I or those higher up in organization):

  • When the belief is shared enough, and the path is visualized, then the change is easier to decide upon.
  • The steps needed have to be discussed, visualized and accepted by many to reach final acceptance.
  • It is essential that there is enough freedom for others to exploit different roads that do not point in the thus defined main direction. Without the company spreading the efforts in too many directions too early to achieve success.

One major learning I have gotten from experience:

  • To achieve the really fantastic results, the change likely has to be viewed on a broad scale, taking a grip across areas previously not handled in a single initiative.
  • There may be many things that are important, and if well handled can be improved. But improving existing areas often limits the gain (efficiency, cost saving, ...) to something like 5-15%.
  • On a higher scale it is harder to paint the picture, it is harder to achieve the goal, but the effect can often be between 30-50%.

The way to achieve success at these "cross multiple area" levels often requires both a high level picture as well as a lot of detailed parts (strategy, roles, responsibilities as well as process and routines and instructions and reports). Common for success in such attempts is transparency, information sharing, and an empowered decision maker. Collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, visualizing and spreading the information needed is a major task. A major interest of mine is around information handling through tools.

I have been lucky to be allowed to do all I have done

To sum it all up: I really enjoy doing a lot of things, and have had the fortune to be allowed to do a lot of different things. I have been successful, partly because I am interested in so many things that I really engage myself with a lot of energy, partly because I have had the luck to team up with many energetic and interested/interesting people. My interest in a lot of things and people and culture was just as obvious in my youth, where I studied to become both a Master of Science at the same time as studying to a Master of Economy, and at spare time read magazines and books on religion, history, philosophy, culture, psychology, ... I became a Master of Science, but never finished the master of economy (I only missed one short half year course, but did not feel it important to finish them). I later got to participate in Capgemini International Business School, and have worked with a lot of CFOs, likely what I miss is more the formal grade.

I frequently miss having the time to sit down and do more "hands-on" work. I guess if I took the time, I would most likely miss doing the kind of things I already do but then would not have the time for. Examples of side interests I have spent some time on is:

Headlines

Never trade stocks without having tested your system. In fact, most trading systems are not profitable if tested over many stocks. Full story...

Do not invest in heating equipment without having compared the alternatives, not only to current situation, but also to each other. Full story...

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