This brings me back to the good ol’ days when I worked for National Financial Services Corp. (Fidelity’s stepchild) needed to make an immediate name change to NFS LLC in 2000. Literally, I had to drop all of my current projects to implement these changes. I had to modify anything and everything from NFSC to NFS LLC.

And no, we’re not talking about changing letterheads and return addresses on envelopes. This change impacted hundreds of internal areas because all of the pamphlets, checks, tax forms, applications, letters, mainframe systems, corporate resolutions, statements, needed to reflect the new name. My department alone, was responsible to update all of the banking agreements or else those issued checks would bounce like tennis balls.

In my case, I managed the project from a treasury business systems angle to ensure our mainframe system supported this change. Once the edits were in place, I had to test the heck outta the system to make sure the name was changed, spelled properly, and showed up in the right places before the major install.

You’d be surprised how big this initiative this was and just to illustrate – a programmer banked in over 5 hours of ‘man’ time to modify the name AND center the new name on the check. That’s $1,250 right there.

No, it didn’t cost a mere $100K. I believe the firm allocated over $2MM for this firm-wide initiative alone. Departments responsible for letters and statements had a tougher time testing because those documents were generated from mass-production printers. So the guys down in the printing facility would continually mount and dismount these large rolls of paper (at least 6 ft wide) from the machinery – only to print 3 sheets of paper.

And like anything else, if you don’t test properly, it’ll come back to bite your butt big time.

Then, to discuss topics about Scotland – its culture, people and the gov’t, do you know how many people give me the ‘Hah?!’ look whenever I mention The Scottish Executive?

So, yeah it helps. To me, ‘executive’ sounds like something derived from the private sector.