Targets: doing less of the wrong thing is not doing the right thing

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Targets imposed from above have led to public services getting worse, says John Seddon.

How can we square the circle? The Audit Commission tells us CPA scores and best value performance indicators are improving, yet the public experience of public services is, so often, dire. Are citizens taking time to realise things have improved? Are their expectations rising? The truth is that targets from above have actually made services worse.

One might think it remarkable that, for example, a target to see people who want housing benefits within 15 minutes causes poor service and high costs. The target results in people having to visit their council a significant number of times to get the service. Patients are being told to book another appointment if they raise a second problem with their GP. You have to book one in 48 hours, if you can, and you cannot make an appointment for a later time that suits. Boxes ticked, targets met, but what of the customer experience?

Ministers equate activity with service. To focus on how quickly people are seen, or letters responded to, might appeal as a political soundbite, but these and other arbitrary measures drive waste into public services.

Council call centres exhibit large volumes of “failure demand” – customer demand caused by a failure to do something or do it right for the customer. They also exhibit much waste (re-work, duplication, errors) in their service flows. Thus while an authority can get ticks in boxes for having a call centre and customer relationship management (CRM) system, the citizens’ experience is something else.

The mandated CRM system effectively institutionalises the waste (progress-chasing failure demand) and managers become preoccupied with managing the activity that has been created, blind to the fact that they are managing waste, for it remains invisible to them; instead managers focus on adherence to specifications and achievement of mandated targets which are, paradoxically, central to the performance problem.

To know that 80 per cent of things get done in eight weeks (a common target) is to know nothing about how long it takes from the customer’s point of view. It means some customers being refused or sent away to do something (both of which stop the clock on the target); it is not unusual for the customer’s end-to-end time to be in hundreds of days. The customer has had to make successive representations, visiting or writing many times. All this represents unnecessary cost. The targets are increasing end-to-end times and costs. It is a counter-intuitive thing.

Targets are arbitrary numbers driven down a hierarchy. They distort the system; they make performance worse, always. It is not a matter of finding the “right” target; this can only amount to doing the wrong thing righter. The right thing to do is to use measures that help understand and improve the work. The Local Government White Paper proposes to reduce the number of targets. It is to do less of the wrong thing, not the right thing.

The right thing would be to remove all targets and to limit the role of only one inspector to ask only one question of local authority managers: “What measures are you using to help you understand and improve the work?”

Replacing arbitrary measures with the requirement for managers to determine for themselves what measures they need to understand and improve their services places the locus of control where it should be – with those who have to change, not with the specifiers and inspectors. It is time to give up on compliance and focus on understanding and improvement.

John Seddon is visiting professor at Cardiff University’s Lean Enterprise Research Centre and MD of Vanguard Consulting