It’s common for sitcoms and sketch shows to send-up office life. It has become a popular genre, spawning ‘The Office’, ‘The Smoking Room’, ‘the IT Crowd’ and numerous sketches including Little Britain’s ‘Computer says No.’ A favourite target to parody in particular are help desks that don’t help and support services that don’t support. For these sitcoms to function at any level, they must tap into our collective shared experiences within the workplace. The experience of such support services as IT and HR can often be negative. This should worry leaders within organisations, because support services are part of the beating heart of each business. Getting it wrong could mean your people do not have the basic tools to do the job or are not being paid properly. They are costly dysfunctions. When Stockport Council introduced systems thinking as a trial, they began with their support services. They anticipated improvements. It’s the scale of transformation that has changed how they think about management has astounded them.
Phil Badley, Service Director at Stockport Council, said that he had wanted to introduce systems thinking for some time. When the opportunity arose, he decided to approach it tactically, beginning with a showcase in support services. He said it was, a way to display to the organisation what a change in thinking could achieve in terms of performance. It was also the part that touched every department. He began with ICT (internet and communications team), in the IT helpdesk, where he knew there were problems (something he had experienced as a customer). He also knew that the workers were not at fault as ‘they were all working hard.’
The intervention team began by gathering knowledge and understanding about how the service currently performed. They quickly came to understand that the true performance of the system was running at 17% one-stop capability. That is, of those people who contacted the helpdesk, only 17% could be dealt with immediately. The remainder were passed on to colleagues with more specialist skills to be dealt with later.
This meant that the true end-to-end time for all callers with general service requests was an average of 11 days, but could take as long 50 days. The wait for requests for equipment was an average of 45 days, sometimes rising to 115 days. The ICT workers were astonished to find this out. As they studied their system they found that how they had been thinking about work had led them to create a system that sorted, batched, queued and chopped the work up. This thinking had led to a work design that severely damaged overall end-to-end performance. They were looking good against their call targets (average handling time and job closure), and at the same time the service that they were providing was poor.
Redesign of the service, based upon a thorough understanding of demand and using new systems thinking principles and methods has meant that true one-stop capability is now being measured at 85%. End-to-end times for services users are now an average of 2 days. The longest that customers have to wait is 10 days. That’s quite an amazing transformation in service! Phil however, is impressed that the ICT team aren’t satisfied with this performance. ‘They keep on experimenting and trying to find ways to reduce the waiting time for customers to get their problems resolved 100% one-stop, or even preventing the problems occurring in the first place.’
On the HR and payroll intervention, Phil is more sanguine. It was one of the functions that he had been managing previously and it had been performing well in terms of benchmarking (and other organisations were interested in emulating them because of this data). As he says, ‘I knew it had some issues around technology, what I didn’t realise was that there was a lot more besides.’ It is a different system from the ‘break-fix’ archetype of the IT helpdesk. Sharon Loggenberg, resourcing manager at Stockport and part of the intervention team, says that we were always ‘juggling a lot of work and doing a lot of activity, and looking back now it is hard to put a finger on, well what was all of that activity?’ Certainly they were ISO accredited, and were seen as role models within their sub-region. Sharon continues, ‘as one of the leading authorities in the greater Manchester area, actually I thought that you wouldn’t find very much’, however ‘eyes were opened as we went through the check process.’
What Sharon and her team learned was that whilst the 15,000 pieces of demand, generated lots of activity, with documents being passed on, the reality of performance was that nothing was being dealt with in one-stop. 0%! The end-to-end time for new starters was an average of 114 days (and sometimes as high as 234 days). These were unexpected discoveries because it had appeared efficient in terms of the benchmarking data. Phil confirmed this view when he says that HR and payroll had been developed along a business route where there were effective reporting mechanisms and weekly and monthly meetings. He smiles and says that he quickly learned that this was just feeding the organisational machine the data it demanded. What they found was a service that created a great deal of activity, including dealing with complaints (about 40% of their time), contact from people chasing for things to be done and things going wrong. Sharon describes it as dealing with volume. In the old system Sharon learned that her team had ‘never been allowed to think.’ She admits that she used to say to them that was what she wanted them to do, but they had ‘never really been allowed to do that.’ It is different now in the newly redesigned service and her team have told her that if they ever went back to the old way of doing things they would have to leave. These comments indicate that both performance and satisfaction are linked to the design of system within which people work.
In the redesigned system, Sharon says that the phone ‘hardly ever rings.’ The team no longer has to deal with the failure generated by how the work had been designed. Now she says the ‘work is done, it’s done one-stop, and it is done quickly and efficiently’. Shared says that this doesn’t mean that they are perfect and things can sometimes still go wrong. The difference now of course, is that they learn from those mistakes in a systematic way. The team now operate with a simple set of principles and a deep understanding of their system. Help for problems that they can’t solve is pulled from the managers. Performance is now running at around 85% one-stop capability (with close to 100% right first time delivery). That is 0% to 85%!
Phil has been carrying out simple surveys of morale in those new teams (using the Buckingham method of 10 questions) and are they achieving significant morale gains in terms of engagement and motivation. Simple surveys of customers making contact with the IT help-desk have registered a huge before and after transformation in how they rate their performance. What a showcase! For Stockport’s council employees, the computer now says Yes!
Contact: howard.clark@vanguardconsult.co.uk
