Delivering Public Services that Work

Volume 2

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• Publisher: Triarchy Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781908009685
• eBook ISBN: 9781908009708
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This latest collection of Case Studies spells out the kind of dramatic performance improvements that have been consistently achieved in the NHS, the emergency services and a wide range of local authority departments. It's a handbook for anyone faced with the apparently impossible task of improving service levels and dramatically cutting costs. The Case Studies demonstrate again and again just how much can be achieved in a relatively short time using a Systems Thinking approach - transforming the lives of service users for the better in the process.

PART ONE

1. THE NEW DEVELOPMENT CONTROL SERVICE IN RUGBY

“ABSOLUTELY BLOODY FANTASTIC”

Sean Kennedy, Change Officer, Rugby Borough Council

This case study illustrates the following:

• Flawed management thinking is the root cause of poor performance.
• Putting the staff who can solve people’s problems at the first point of contact improves service and reduces cost.
• Performance indicators do not reflect the true customer experience.
• Culture change comes free with the Vanguard Method.
• Costs fall when you improve your service.
• Improvement is not a one-off activity. It’s every day.
• IT should enable the process, not dictate it.

Background

Rugby Borough Council (RBC) is a rural area covering 357 square kilometres, encompassing the town of Rugby (population approximately 63,000), together with 41 parishes ranging in population from as few as 20 to nearly 3,000. The council has a total annual turnover, including housing, of about £55 million.

How we got started

Rugby Borough Council’s introduction to Vanguard came when one of our strategic directors attended a talk given by John Seddon in early 2008. Although initially sceptical and defensive about John Seddon’s approach, on the journey home our director had a revelation that perhaps Rugby Council too was suffering from the poor performance and hidden wastes that the Vanguard Method had exposed in other organisations. At the time, Rugby Council was going through a period of restructuring and improvement initiatives. The Vanguard Method seemed to have the potential to provide a framework for this activity.

Later that year we arranged for the senior leadership team and two members of Cabinet, the leader and his deputy, to attend a 3-day Fundamentals course with Vanguard. This was an opportunity for the key decision-makers at the council to experience first-hand the principles and techniques associated with the Vanguard Method. The 3-day course was very successful at challenging the thinking of all involved and helped to secure the buy-in needed to progress to a full intervention.

Development Control

An intervention in the department dealing with planning applications, Development Control (DC), was initiated in early November 2008 using the Check-Plan-Do framework. This work was led by Steve Maddocks of Vanguard Consulting. The team assigned to the review was made up of the DC manager, cross-departmental staff from each stage of the flow and the two RBC Change Officers who would be trained by Vanguard to lead future interventions.

Development Control was chosen as the first intervention for a number of reasons. Primarily it was chosen because the managers and staff were ready and had an appetite for improvement but there were also known problems in the provision of service as customers complained about the poor service they received.

Development Control is a service area very much in the public eye because it can create problems for politicians and prevent investment and regeneration in the borough if the system is broken. DC had suffered from a chain of interventions to improve customer service, based around 8- and 13-week targets set at a national level. For many years the council had been paid Planning Delivery Grants to meet these targets and alongside this was a payment for e-planning. The latter part of this payment led us to force an already broken system into an electronic format dictated by an off-the-shelf product. In addition to this, in 2005 incoming telephone calls to DC were taken away from the service and transferred to a corporate contact centre.

At the start of the review the Development Control team consisted of a Development and Enforcement Manager, a Development Team Leader, 3 Principal Planning Officers, 2 Senior Planning Officers, 4 Planning Officers, 2 Enforcement Officers, a Section 106 Officer, a Technical Support Team Leader and 7 Technical Support Officers.

Check

The purpose of Development Control in customer terms was agreed as follows:

To ensure that development is acceptable

Evidence gathered during ‘Check’, however, indicated that the service was actually run with a different implicit purpose:

Meet the 8- or 13-week target for minor and major applications

This was most clearly shown in the measures used, the flow of work and the way the service was managed.

How well were we meeting purpose?

Analysis of demand during ‘Check’ showed that at least 35% of the demands hitting the service were Failure Demands³. The most common demands recorded during ‘Check’ were:

Value (total 47%):

I would like to comment on an application, condition or conservation area appraisal	17%
I’d like to discuss my proposal / Do I need planning permission? (1st contact)	9%
Can I see / have historical planning information?	8%
Can I see plans / have information about a current application?	7%
Other	6%

Failure (total 35%):

Can I speak to…(2nd, 3rd, 4th… contact)	8%
I’d like to discuss my proposal / Do I need planning permission? (2nd or subsequent contact)	7%
I would like a progress update	6%
You’ve asked me for more information on my current application, here it is	4%
Here is my application (after multiple contacts prior to submission)	4%
I have already contacted you and I am still waiting for a response	4%
Other	2%

The remaining 18% of demand was deemed unclassifiable by the team.

A common finding of all our work with Vanguard has been that the performance indicators used by our services do not reflect the true customer experience.

In the case of DC, national indicators set by central government measure the percentage of applications decided within the 8-week target date (for so called ‘minor’ and ‘other’ applications) and within the 13-week target date (for ‘major’ applications). At the time of ‘Check’ our performance in these terms, while not outstanding, was certainly above the targets and there was no apparent cause for alarm. Using measures derived from the customer’s perspective, however, we uncovered a different story.

The measure charted here is the true end-to-end (E2E) time from the customer’s point of view, i.e. from the date of the initial application to the date when they could actually start building. The data shows individual cases selected randomly over a period of 3 years and tells us that the average time taken to process applications in a true end-to-end way during this period was a staggering 146 days, with an upper control limit (UCL) of 515 days. More enlightening perhaps was the recognition that the most common time taken (the mode) was exactly 56 days, which equates to the 8-week government target.

End-to-end time to process applications
Mean = 146 days Upper Control Limit (UCL) = 515 days

Customers had 4 ladders to climb but 15 snakes to slide down

When studying the flow of work through the planning system the team was surprised by the number of times the customer’s journey would loop back to repeat a previous stage. It was often a case of one step forward and three steps back.

The route through the process was so repetitive and loaded with pitfalls that the team actually decided to represent the customer journey as a large “snakes and ladders” board. Unfortunately for our customers there were only four ladders to climb but fifteen snakes to slide down!

Typical customer experience

From the evidence we had gathered in ‘Check’ it was easy to see from a customer’s point of view some of the problems associated with a typical journey through our planning service:

• If I come into reception outside of the ‘consultation period’ I’m told to go home and come back again after 3.30pm.
• When I see a planning officer in reception I am asked to go home and put everything I have already asked them in writing.
• I can’t telephone a planning officer directly; I have to phone a call centre that can’t help me. The call centre passes my message on and tells me to wait up to 48hrs for a response; this isn’t helpful especially when I don’t hear back from anyone even after 48hrs.
• It can take several weeks just for my planning application to be registered.
• If my application has not been decided and the 8-week deadline is approaching I am asked to withdraw it and resubmit a ‘free’ one.
• I am often not informed when my neighbour is planning to build something.
• Things take such a long time and it costs me and my client money.
• When I obtain planning permission it is only conditional and you still want me to submit additional details before I can commence building work.

Staff experience

Questionnaires were given to all the Development Control staff during ‘Check’ to help us understand what the system was like for the people working within it. A representative selection of answers is given below:

What’s it like to work here?

• “Friendly and knowledgeable staff but it can be chaotic and stressful to work here”
• “The team are great but the atmosphere is very stressful”
• “I have to jump from priority to priority”
• “Managers change their mind about what is a priority”
• “I am not free to make any decisions”
• “Unnecessary meetings waste my time”
• “Sometimes policies and procedures restrict process”

What does your manager focus on?

• “Manager is focused on planning committees”
• “Manager focuses on major applications”
• “Managers focus on requests from senior leaders”
• “Manager focuses on targets”
• “Manager focuses on checking and signing-off docs and committee reports”
• “Who is my boss?!”

How does your manager spend their time?

• “Managers spend their time in meetings”
• “All planning applications have to be signed off by senior managers”

How do you know if you’re doing a good job?

• “I know that I’m doing a good job if the work is done within the various time constraints”
• “If we get no complaints we assume we’ve done a good job”
• “I judge the performance of my team through how many applications they get through in a week and if the in-tray is empty”

Why was our system performing like this?

System conditions are the constraints inherent in the design of the work that cause waste. Through our work in Development Control we found the following key conditions were driving waste into our system.

• Government targets were used to manage and prioritise the work. This meant that focus was placed on applications that had yet to miss the target to the detriment of those that had already breached it. It also meant that planning officers followed two common practices used nationwide to ‘cheat’ the target. The first was to ‘deal with’ an application about to pass...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• The Vanguard Method
• Part One
• Part Two
• Afterword
• Glossary