Friday 24 July 2009

Well two weeks on holiday certainly flies by. Back yesterday and thankfully not too many emails thanks to Jane and my service directors who had everything under control. I had a great holiday at home and spent the whole time watching test matches, playing cricket with my two young sons, fishing, and building amazing structures out of Lego, interspersed with several trips to various toy shops! The perfect antidote to a hectic six months in local government and no airports!

I'm spending all day today with Sue Redmond, Corporate Director for Department of Community Services (DCS) and our teams examining our method for business transformation. We are looking at the work she has led in DCS adult social care - the FOCUS programme with our partners Charteris - and also the work we have led in house with Deborah Farrow's team - particularly in highways, revenues & benefits and numerous other services.

We will be comparing and contrasting the method of change to explore the two similar approaches to identify how we learn and improve our work in this critical area. This will be vitally important as we move forward as an organisation because as local government funding becomes constrained we will be under pressure to do more for less. That is to maintain and indeed develop better more customer focused services at reduced cost. This sounds impossible but it's not.

In all of our lean or systems thinking interventions, we have improved performance (by more than 100% in adult care) whilst reducing our costs. This is achieved by designing the service around the customer and their requirements from us. This is a fundamental change of thinking for local government that tends to (but not always) design its services around the professional delivering those services. This always results in higher costs as customers requiring a service have to navigate their way through complex procedures and policies before getting the support they need. We will need to take this approach on every one of our services over the next three years.

If you don't believe any of this here's a challenge for you. Spend a couple of hours in the Customer Contact Centre as I do on a regular basis. Listen to the customer calls coming in and find our how many you think might be avoidable - that is the customer is calling us for a second (or more) time, or calling because they don't understand a letter we have written to them, or that we've missed a bin collection for them. You discover that we have levels of avoidable contact of 30-90% in all of our services. Think of the improvement in customer satisfaction if we could eliminate this. Think of the cost we could save too. We should all spend more time listening to customers... there's the challenge for all of us.

Thanks for reading. It's great to be back!

Carlton