Building a strong Eurosystem team

During the last few months, I have made it a top priority to build a strong sense of team spirit and develop synergies between the teams at the ECB and the 4CB. Of course, being able to draw on such a wide diversity of experience and skills from across the Eurosystem has already been very beneficial for T2S. In particular, the depth of experience of the 4CB gained from preparing for and building the infrastructure for TARGET2 has proved invaluable. But at the same time, with the T2S team located in several different countries, there is also the risk that the team may not function as effectively as it would if it were together in a single location.

In order to foster the sense of a “T2S community” in the Eurosystem, we organised a team-building exercise at the managerial level and promoted interaction at the expert level. But, until recently, coordination between the ECB and the 4CB experts was still mainly via comments on documents which were then sent by e-mail, the process being channelled through special “liaison officers”.The ECB’s T2S team and the 4CB team realised that closer personal contacts would make it easier to solve business issues.We have therefore reinforced direct contact, in particular at expert level, in order to strengthen the common vision of T2S and stronger incentives to strive for excellence.

So far, the closely-knit group of experts from the ECB’s T2S team and the 4CB team has been focusing on ironing out the remaining wrinkles in the General Functional Specifications which will be finalised in the coming weeks. I am happy to report that this new set-up has so far proved to be very successful. It has fostered frank discussion between the various experts, increased mutual understanding and trust, and made it much easier and quicker to resolve issues. By making such meetings a regular feature, even in the latter stages of T2S, I am confident we are on the way to building an outstanding Eurosystem team.