What is the purpose of these guys? Is it to just maintain PowerPoints and host meetings (where they actually don't understand the subject matter much at all, just track/ask for updates).
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In my experience, you'll find some that are truly essential members of the organization and some who leach, but this is true for all roles in the project management and strategic planning families. Those who understand the needs of the business and go above and beyond to serve are worth their weight in gold. Others are great examples of the bloat we see every day in ALL roles. Lots of this is caused by leadership who would rather assign someone to create a PPT to justify their team's existence than expend the good will needed to fight for what's right for the company, customers, and employees. Fight an uphill battle to make real change? Seems hard. Have someone create a presentation about how we completed some BS sacred cow project for an exec? Easy peasy.
Please... We had a BIC consultant on our team and all the person did was set up meetings for our boss (who managed under 5 people), take notes during meetings for our boss, collect input from us to inclusion into weekly powerpoint deck that nobody ready, and sent out team meeting invites. Oh, the person also uploaded stuff to sharepoint when the boss emailed them and said "please add this to our sharepoint site"
i used to do this job. on the serv side, its centralized due to all the bs the lobs were doing with their own procedures, etc. they did call them analysts at one point(when i did it) and then that transitioned into BIC and bus support consultants. im in legal and we have to, by law, document, right? so they serve a purpose but the problem is that when u centralize them to use them as oversight (when u already have audits, etc) then you cause another issue bc they don’t understand operations. some dumbo will say thats great bc they have to make sure the training/PP/letters/procedures (whatever they r working on) have to be suited for a newbie. honestly that is a problem. if you have someone that worked at taco bell being hired to do escrows or any other financial service, what are you thinking? this is what drives me nuts. our managers are so bad at hiring and figuring out who is good at what and where they should be placed. either way, half of those bics could be moved around or let go and we would be fine. i had one on a call that couldnt figure out track changes or how to make people presenters. if your job is to facilitate then you need to understand how to facilitate!! half the call is awkward and fumbly.
In addition to everything that's been said, BICs also frequently have bad breath.
In Wealth, they do nothing. They present data and come up with ridiculous projects for the sales side. There is also one that does nothing because of connections to other Senior Managers. Yep, gets paid for no work.
I think most of them come up as tellers. This is the new transition job to engineering managers. Previously it was teller > project manager > technology manager
Walk a day in the BIC life and then come back and opine if glorified assistant. The BICs I know barely have time to eat lunch between calls and work an inordinate amount of hours supporting our front line. There are people in every role that give 150% and those that don’t. Why pick out one job family to pick on because of your poor or misinformed experience? Shame on you for your narrow mindedness.
My personal favorite job title here is “Business Support Functional Consultant”
@zzy+1750WEFn definitely agree. "Building" powerpoints had me in stitches when I read it.
I'd love to get a 50% raise just to put together powerpoints that I present to management. It would be much easier and lower stress than the real work I do.
@ OP - clearly someone forget to give you a gold star today
They submit ART requests for me, so who am i to complain!
@ikc op here–my role has a much higher compensation range than BIC. Typically, that's what I find, that BICs are project gatekeepers for higher level contributors. I'm glad you're seemingly doing more than that, but clearly by the responses in this thread it's not just me that feels this way.
"I BUILD PowerPoint presentations from scratch and more often than not from minimal to no information provided. I also frequently PRESENT the information due to my skillset and subject matter expertise regarding the content being presented."
So as previously stated, glorified secretary.
I have seen BIC’s just schedule meetings and create follow up items and task list. Which the individual contributor still has to be do anyway or could be done in jira. The other thing I see they do is schedule meetings and chase you for trainings and timesheets.
I'm a BIC and while I certainly can't speak for other BICs in the "firm", I will tell you I am far more than a glorified secretary, AA, or EA. I BUILD PowerPoint presentations from scratch and more often than not from minimal to no information provided. I also frequently PRESENT the information due to my skillset and subject matter expertise regarding the content being presented. As @123456789 so eloquently stated "BICs provide expert opinions, analysis, and recommendations...they're fixers, serving as objective troubleshooters, and providing strategies to prevent problems and improve performance." I couldn't have said it better...thank you, @123456789! I fill the roles of consultant, strategist, project manager, researcher, and implementation consultant (to name a few), so to the @Anonymous who started this thread, I say don't be so quick to offer an opinion regarding a subject you obviously know NOTHING about...also, I recommend you not put all of us BICs into one bucket because I for one, along with many others, make significant contributions as opposed to just tracking/asking for updates.
Well, one BIC I used to work with started her career on the Sales side as an inbound sales banker. And another BIC I worked with on the Service side started as a teller, moved to the call center in the legacy Consumer service org, and then became a BIC.
I was always impressed how well they knew the VL, CIV, SVP and other tools phone bankers had to use. More importantly, they really tried hard to stop management from doing things that would negatively impact the bankers. Sorry you don’t have good experience with BICs, but there are good ones out there.
Hi - BIC here. I became a BIC around 2014 once they started centralizing PM jobs and I was a SME within my LOB and essentially a fixer. I’ve made my career pretty much cleaning up after ppl, making ppl look good, and holding ppl accountable by getting to the root cause of an issue and then providing a plan to correct - then executing that plan. I’ve been called a generalist - and often step in when a leader/manager or product owner can’t. I don’t like the job function name but there are also many other job functions which titles don’t make any sense and job descriptions are complete bs. I think op probably applied to be a BIC and got denied and now they are bitter.
BICs provide expert opinions, analysis, and recommendations to Wells Fargo leaders or individual groups, based on their own expertise. They're fixers, serving as objective troubleshooters, and providing strategies to prevent problems and improve performance.
Raise your hand and speak with management if there is an unqualified BIC.
They're glorified secretaries.
depends some do a great deal and some don't do much I've even come across some that perform an almost production like role it truly depends on how they are deployed in my current group they seem to be like jr PMs
BICs are not the promoted. In many, many cases, they had very responsible jobs in the bank. When job families were reduced from nearly 500 down to under 100, they forced all the round pegs into the new square holes, which will make it very easy now to say the bank has too many BICs and fire them. It’s a legal way to fire risk, older, any kind of seemingly safe group, suffering no expensive buyouts or condemnation. Can’t sue for being fired in a group of hundreds of BICs.
I think it must depend on what group you work in. I’m in risk and their are 8 BIC that I can think of offhand in my group. Yes we do busy work, but it’s important work and what we do doesn’t align with a Financial Crimes associate title, for example. Attending/responding to Compliance Reviews, Audits, OCC Exams, we have to know all the processes of our group because we are leading projects, responding and leading changes for policies, etc. so please don’t think that everyone that is a BIC is a glorified exec assist.
As someone in a contact center, where are they getting BICs that used to do our job? Every single BIC I’ve had to deal with just reads off a PowerPoint and tries to act like they know everything about a job they’ve never done. All while answering every question with an unhelpful business buzzword or phrase. It’s absolutely infuriating how much they get paid to do nothing.
In some areas of the bank the BIC represents some type of subject matter expert, for example, when there is a project in the contact center. You don’t take a phone banker out of the queue when you need input on some process or system change, instead you have a BIC who often used to do that job.
In other areas of the bank, they duplicate the PM role, and others, they do basically nothing.
@pmv except these guys don't do any analytics. I think they are exactly what someone else mentioned, glorified assistants.
BIC's are nothing more than glorified executive assistants that do busy work.
These seem like positions that have been created just to promote some preferred internal candidates. The job requirements are all very generic with one or two qualifiers that can be used to negate 90% of would-be applicants.
I mean, how hard can it be to look at spreadsheets and analytics of something and tell a manger what's happening at the macro level?
Consultant - noun, con-sul-tant, a person who borrows your watch to tell you the time, then bills you for it.
OP here–forgot to say, I've also seen contractors hired to seemingly do no more than this as well.