Going with the flow

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

A recruit from the private sector finds that public services suffer from being too focused on the professionals and IT systems. The most dramatic efficiencies are achieved when the customer is put first, David Allaby reports

How much more efficient can the public sector get? It is a question that does not exercise Carlton Brand for long. Efficiency and service transformation projects are barely beginning to sketch in the outline of a bigger picture of public sector performance that will see genuine innovation and customer focus eclipse much of what has so far been achieved by force of government target. And this time people will be able to recognise the benefits.

Brand has a doctorate in engineering and 20 years experience in the car industry, including time in Japan. He has spent four years in local government and now in his second job – as director of resources at Wiltshire County Council – he sees real potential to take public services to a new level.

He is currently re-engineering Wiltshire’s adult social care services. "We have no results as yet, but we have identified masses of waste, replication of tasks and very long end-to-end times from the customers’ view," he says. "When someone turns up needing help it takes a long time to get it to their satisfaction. But that’s not just a Wiltshire problem – it’s typical across the industry."

Despite his academic, technical and management background, Brand is remarkably plain speaking and is direct in confronting the mythology, waste and waffle that comes with most analyses of public sector systems. Put simply, public services have to be designed around the customer, not the professional who runs the service. Efficiency is about managing the flow of work.

"One of the things that strikes me about local government, and I suspect the public sector generally, is just how functionally professionalised it is," he says. "Groups of planners sitting in a place, social workers in another place, accountants sit somewhere else, lawyers somewhere else. They don’t work as a complete system. Work is not understood end to end. It’s a series of events that get passed between departments and that builds in masses and masses of waste and delay for customers. There’s a lack of a customer perspective and the inspection regimes have aided and abetted that view. Some arbitrary targets are so removed from customer purpose and so long in terms of their expectations. For example, housing benefits have just moved from 36 days to 30 days as a target to process new claims. This is ridiculous when you look at the work involved. It takes somewhere between 40 and 90 minutes to do the job, so why is the target 30 days?"

His views on customer focus and innovation in service design resonate with those of Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell among others. But Brand’s first-hand experience of the Toyota Production System (TPS) – the roots of Lean thinking – is making inroads on public service delivery of which auditors, inspectors and Whitehall mandarins could only dream.

TPS produces cars on demand and stresses the removal of all causes of delay in the system – and that includes restrictive IT. Brand is prepared to challenge the gurus over service transformation led by IT. "It fundamentally does not deliver," he says. "Toyota learned that 50 years ago. Their plant has relatively low levels of technology compared to the West, but their output and efficiency is the best and you have to ask ‘why?’ IT is appropriate when you have a system working as efficiently as it can. You automate bits of the system when you understand it, but to build transformation round it doesn’t work."

In his short life as a local authority director he has seen homelessness service provision reduced from an average of 200 days to less than 70 days; planning times down from 43 days to less than 30 including the 21-day statutory consultation period; building control down from 13 days to less than five days; waste collection from commercial outlets reduced from 13 days to half a day; domestic bin provision down from 57 days to between two and four days…and more.

Is the workforce prepared for such a shake-up? "Initially reaction is usually one of disbelief that it will have any effect," says Brand. "There’s also resistance in terms of change – that’s a rational reaction. When you cut through that and start looking at the current system and its capability and the variation over time, it becomes clear very quickly how bad it currently is.

"Staff are often very shocked. Because there is this culture of having averages or mean times for doing things, like planning applications. When you study variations and realise that the mean might be 45 days or 50 days but actually it could take up to 80 or 90 days, that shocks people into recognising this is broken.

"Then you start getting some good engagement, and this is where leadership is key. You have to have political and officer leadership at the most senior level, chief exec level, to empower people to be innovative and really push the boundaries. There is nothing out of scope, nothing we can’t do. We can challenge everything. Once you cut people free and they get on with it, the performance improvements are astounding.

"There is no service where this does not work and achieve major improvements. The difference between manufacturing and a public service, which people ignore at their peril, is in manufacturing you must standardise and when you do, costs fall. In the public sector, we have infinite variety coming through the front door. You have to design your systems to absorb that variety. You cannot standardise your response or try to manage the process through service level agreements (SLA) or contracts, things like that. You just get loads of waste and costs rise. People try to institutionalise a service into an SLA or a contract, and rationally try to reduce costs because they need to, but it does not make the service more efficient."

Wiltshire’s blue badge disability parking permits received the Lean treatment last year to stimulate council members’ interest. Brand’s team took that service from being one that could take up to 55 days to deliver to one that is now a one-day or next-day service.

"The de facto purpose of the blue badge service was to stop people claiming permits fraudulently," he says. "When you actually studied the demand coming in, one by one, it was obvious we had virtually no fraud here. That may not be the case in some cities but this is why you can’t take a Lean intervention in one area and replicate it elsewhere. You can take the process anywhere, but the redesign of the service will be different. Things were passed around between people in the call centre, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, everyone putting in their two penn’orth but no one wanting to make a decision. The process took ages. We eliminated the professionals from the task and got the contact centre people to take over the work. We have a conversation with customers. We ring them up, we don’t have an application form, we don’t write letters other than to customers to get their signature for the badge. With training input from occupational therapists and doctors in terms of what questions to ask, we now just talk to customers.

"You can also develop a rapport with someone where you might suggest other services that might be of use to them. So, there’s more value to the transaction – and a better experience for the customer. That’s efficient and there’s no outsourcing. In Wiltshire we have everything in house. We just need to embrace the private sector way of thinking but with one big advantage – we don’t need to turn a profit."