Create a Continuous Improvement Culture

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

A shared services operation supporting Local Government organisations with procurement, finance, I.T, legal and HR services with over 400 employees working across multiple sites in the UK.

The newly created organisation had inherited employees from different local government organisations and was operating in a much different structure to how the former services were delivered. There was an opportunity to create a new culture to embrace the new structure and focus on high quality end-to-end service delivery for all of their clients. 

Continuous Improvement (CI) was not commonly understood across teams and there was little evidence of teams visually illustrating service performance or carrying out problem solving activity. As many colleagues were new to the organisation, there initially was no shared understanding or vision of what the future looked like.

In order to support the creation of a new culture and philosophy for the client, a variety of tactics were used to create the understanding, framework and capability to successfully achieve this.

• Reinvigoration supported the Senior Management Team to create a vision of what a Continuous Improvement Culture would look like for the organisation. This was communicated to all employees in a variety of mediums
• Design and implementation of a new CI management system. This allowed problems to be raised and solved using a proven methodology across multiple departments and at different levels of the hierarchy when required
• E-Learning for all employees was delivered on root cause problem solving to create an understanding of the methodology and tools
• Upskilling of problem solving facilitators was achieved so there was the ongoing full time resources to support the problem solving activities across the operations. These internal individuals attended problem solving sessions and supported groups to use the appropriate methodology and tools in order to get positive outcomes
• Design and creation of visual management boards for each operational team at each level of the hierarchy. These were simple and effective visual displays illustrating volumes and performance throughout the day. This focussed the teams on the customer outcomes of their service
• Daily huddles were introduced for teams to review planning, performance and improvement activity. These were 10-minute sessions carried out each morning.

• 100 problems were identified and solved in the first 10 weeks
• An average of 12% efficiency improvements were achieved since adoption of the CI management system
• The CI Management system was still fully operational after a year
• The client became fully self-sufficient, delivering all training in-house since finishing the engagement
• Staff engagement all very high levels

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