Delivering Public Services That Work , livre ebook

Triarchy Press

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

95 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Case studies of The Vanguard Method being used to deliver radical change in the public sector

Sujets

Nouvelle-Zélande

Informations

Publié par	Triarchy Press
Date de parution	09 mars 2010
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781908009234
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0750€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: Case Studies
Delivering Public Services that Work Volume One
Edited by Peter Middleton
Foreword by John Seddon
First published in 2010 by: Triarchy Press Station Offices Axminster Devon. EX13 5PF United Kingdom
+44 (0)1297 631456 info@triarchypress.com www.triarchypress.com
Published as an ePub by Triarchy Press in 2011.
Peter Middleton 2010.
The right of Peter Middleton to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Heather Fallows ~ www.whitespacegallery.org.uk
eBook ISBN: 9781908009234
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Overview
What is Systems Thinking?
1. East Devon District Council: Housing Benefits Transformed
2. Stroud District Council Systems Thinking: Results in Housing Benefits
3. Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council: Implementing Systems Thinking in IT and HR
4. Systems Thinking in Planning and Roads
5. Altering the DNA of an Organisation: Embracing and Embedding Systems Thinking
6. Transforming Glasgow Housing Association: Common System, Common Sense
Bibliography
Glossary
F OREWORD
John Seddon
It is now ten years since I first became involved with the public sector. At that time I was critical of central government s attempts at change but found public sector managers too fearful to heed my criticisms and advice; that same fear obliged them to comply, to do as directed, regardless.
Things have changed. Many public sector managers are actively rejecting bad and unproven directives. There are now more than a hundred public sector organisations employing systems thinking and the number of public sector people who know the counter-intuitive truths exposed by this knowledge must count in tens of thousands.
It is timely to publish these case studies. The profound improvements evidenced give an indication of the good that can be achieved across all public services. I anticipate that this will be the first of a series, for many readers will be curious about how the ideas might be applied to other public services.
All of the case studies have followed the Vanguard Method, the method I developed with colleagues, a means by which service organisations can learn to move away from a command-and-control design and into a systems design. By normal standards this is an unusual approach to change. There are no cost-benefit analyses, no project plans and no predetermined deliverables ; instead the change starts with studying your service as a system. The consequence is thorough knowledge about the what and why of current performance and thus confidence that the actions taken to re-design the service will lead to improvement. The improvements achieved are always greater than would have been thought achievable through conventional planning and change management.
This method also puts tools in their place. Tools are solutions to problems. The first thing you want to know is what problems you have, and studying your service as a system reveals that the problems you actually have are not the ones you think you have. When you know your problem(s) you can then find or fashion a tool. This is also the way Taiichi Ohno (the man who created the Toyota System) taught - studying the way services work as systems reveals the counter-intuitive truths, challenges to convention that are more easily understood and accepted if you see them for yourself.
Failing to understand your problems before determining solutions also explains why so many tools-based interventions fail. Tragically Ohno s brilliance has been packaged and promulgated as a set of lean tools. I would suggest that if you are not in the business of producing cars at the rate of demand, the tools associated with solving the associated problems are unlikely to be of much help to you. Service organisations, as you will see, have different problems to solve and thus different tools to deploy or develop.
As public sector managers have set out to understand their organisations as systems they have learned how much of the centrally dictated requirements are part of the problem. While their natural fear of defying the centre has caused some to revert to what they know to be poor service designs, but which will attract good inspection reports, others have engaged in arguing with the centre. As the centre can t fire me I have been vociferous in my condemnation of many of the bad ideas promulgated, even coerced, into public services. In particular I have argued that the Audit Commission has been central to the dysfunctional regime.
My criticisms of the Audit Commission drew a riposte from one of its senior managers. He ignored the substantive issues and instead issued an ad-hominem attack. Amongst the eleven insults he said: Mr Seddon s clients will need to judge for themselves whether there is proof that his nostrums work. They will take into account his own cavalier way with the evidence.
You, the reader, must judge for yourself.
My thanks to the authors who have taken the time to write about their experiences and to Peter Middleton for taking these and editing them into a highly readable text.
John Seddon
O VERVIEW
The benefit you will obtain from this book is that you will gain insight into how to transform your organisation to achieve remarkable results.
This book presents evidence that there is a significantly better and cheaper way to manage public sector services than the present target driven approach. Systems thinking enables greatly improved services, lower costs and happier staff. It allows all but the most dysfunctional of government performance targets to be greatly exceeded.
The six case studies in this book will show you the way to achieve these results and give you examples. To obtain irrefutable proof you will need to experience the power of systems thinking for yourself. Allocate half a day and carry out the following free experiment:
1. Identify a service that you have access to. Preferably one that you perceive to be performing well.
2. Locate where this service interfaces with its customers. This is where customer phone calls, emails or visits are received. Listen to or observe 30 transactions. Write down, in their own words, why each customer contacted the organisation.
3. Write down how many of the contacts were unnecessary. Identify the failure demand which would be preventable with better systems. E.g. how many of the contacts are from customers who were progress chasing or asking for help with complex forms or procedures? Work out what percentage of the total demand is failure demand . This gives you a first indication of how much activity is preventable waste.
4. Take 10 of these customers and using the operation s records work out the total end-to-end elapsed time from when they first contacted the system to when they finally achieved their purpose. Note every interaction they had to go through. Phone them if possible to ensure you have recorded all the interactions. Put these 10 numbers into a graph to see how much they fluctuate.
5. Review the failure demand and end-to-end time data you have collected.
If you are disappointed or shocked by what you discover, read some of the books in the bibliography and try some more experiments. Your journey has begun!
W HAT IS S YSTEMS T HINKING ?
This book is made up of six case studies describing the application of systems thinking to management. Systems thinking emerged after the 2 nd World War and several variants have since developed. The systems thinking method described here was created by John Seddon (Seddon, 2005, 2008) as a framework to enable organisations to achieve higher performance. It is unique in that it was developed by working in partnership with both private and public sector organisations for over two decades. It is therefore grounded in how organisations actually work and can be changed.
Due to the remarkable results it makes possible, this proprietary material has been placed in the public domain. It is the scale of waste that this method can make visible, and then show how to remove, that makes it too important to be kept private. An approach to management that enhances the quality of life of employees and customers, while reducing costs, just demands a wider audience.
This book is for managers, directors and board members of public sector organisations: particularly those who have to achieve targets or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) while having their budgets cut. The implementations of systems thinking described by your colleagues in this book will show you a way forward.
The purpose of this book is to provide evidence that targets are causing vast amounts of waste in the public sector. Targets are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The evidence is that good management is not about setting targets and then monitoring compliance, but about working on improving the systems to enable staff to deliver improvements for their customers. The good news is that implementing systems thinking should enable you to exceed your targets, cut costs and raise staff morale.
You are not asked to take this variant of systems thinking on trust or simply to accept the accounts of its application in this book. The way forward is for you to undertake small experiments within your own organisation to validate it for yourself. The next step is then for you to learn enough to be able to transform the performance of larger and more significant operations.
The big differentiator with this systems thinking method is that it starts with obtaining knowledge about how your organisatio