Managing change

Haringey fails to list its "improvements"

Haringey Council shelters its improvers. 

A response has been received from Haringey's Leader, Councillor George Meehan. It has succeeded in raising more questions than it has answered. It says that in 2002 and then again in 2004 the Council ran an advert to attract interest in a number of project related pieces of work. "The recruitment was branded improvers so that we could bring together various roles that were required under a single advert". It goes to say  that "this approach was successful in attracting a good response and the Council was able to appoint to a variety of projects and associated support roles."

Now this was getting somewhere until the Councillor said," As a part of our evaluation of the exercise the Council received feedback on the various works and was satisfied that the investment in additional staff represented good value for money against the positive results achieved". 

Our concern was not about the recruitment and how it was funded. We were more interested in how the public sector could learn from Haringey's unique approach. How did these improvements impact on CPA? Were there any bottom line improvements in budgets? Was good practice recorded and hopefully emulated elsewhere in the Council? We will never know.

The Council is not planning a repeat of this exercise.

Haringey Council Leader responds

Haringey Council's New Search for "Improvers".

I have highlighted Haringey Council's Improvers project in the past. It consisted of an open invitation to people with vision and expertise to propose projects for improvement of Council services and subject to critical assessment of their proposals, they were promised resources to implement various schemes.

This was an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to managing public services. I have asked for information relating to the projects that were selected, the role and backgrounds of the experts that were appointed, and the outcomes, along with how the projects were supported to achieve tangible gains for the Council. I believe that this approach reflected the hallmarks of a potentially learning organisation and whose experience must be shared by other councils.

Public Eye also reports on innovative and exemplary approaches to service delivery.

I have asked for feedback again and this time the Council's Leader, Councillor George Meehan has responded. The Council is seeking information from its personnel department and will respond as soon as it has all the facts at its disposal. The Council Leader has agreed to send in a written reply.

Improving customer services

How Rotherham Aims to Improve Services through Community Involvement 

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council has developed a corporate consultation and community involvement (CCI) framework, which is at the heart of its approach to policy making, service delivery and community leadership, and is designed to ensure that active citizenship and democracy will underpin how Rotherham works.

Here we offer a summary using bullet points. The framework identifies why CCI is important and where new approaches are needed. The council says that the framework sets out its vision, aims and objectives and a range of actions to ensure that CCI is built into everything the council does.  It will

·               Help to align and coordinate activity

·               Identify key principles of CCI

·               Ensure that results of consultation are used effectively.

The CCI framework team has recommended that the council:

·               Strengthen mechanisms so that people who are participating can see their contribution is influencing decisions, policy and service development

·               Improve and make more transparent the planning and timing of CCI

·               Strengthen the links between CCI and decision making, ensuring that exercises relate to a decision that the council is intending to make and that can be influenced by the results of that activity.

·               Strengthen structures and procedures to share the results of CCI across programme areas and with customers and partners

·               Improve structures to ensure that those taking part in CCI are representative and inclusive

·               Enhance the performance and evaluation of CCI.

The CCI document has the potential to be extended to a joint partnership framework subject to approval.  The council has identified five priority areas for improvement, which are to:

·               Continue to improve the quality, effectiveness, and coordination of the CCI by the council

·               Raise awareness of the principles of effective CCI, and to ensure that staff and members have the training and support they need

·               Ensure that communities are involved in the planning and provision of services and policies to meet their needs

·               Ensure that CCI shapes and influences service and policies

·               Manage performance by improving satisfaction with CCI, and evaluating impact

While the planning assumptions and proposed impact of the CCI merit consideration, the challenge lies in who will oversee the evaluation and implementation of CCI projects across the council and what needs to be done to deliver the CCI framework. Implementation will demand substantially more resources than are available at present.  Will the council achieve more success if it chooses to integrate CCI into all service department planning routines as opposed to using a task force to manage the processes of change? Which option is more feasible?

Source: http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk/idk/aio/5093240 

Is your chief executive a change champion?

Key Requirements for Change - the change maker!

The writer has come to the following conclusions based on his work as programme director and change management specialist. The skills of managing and delivering complex change to meet service, customer and market needs are best acquired in the following context:

      Are you working as a change agent in high pressure environments where the chief executives and their service directors learn to understand and respect behavioural science based techniques conducive to change management. For jargon free description this simply means ,"people management".

Future chief executives have to understand that change management relies on using ‘process change' tools. This expertise has to be proven and not just the hallmark of good advertising copy when recruiting others. It is critical in the definition and implementation of major change programmes based on a “From Strategy to Delivery” a continuum that has to be designed and extensively tested. The outcome has to be been seen in terms of impact on services and engagement of proactive staff creating ownership of the results.

The key to practical results is the ability to enthuse managers, secure their commitment and to empower them to take full responsibility for the implementation process. This has been achieved where all change management projects have long-term viability and impact, with the chief executive acting as change champion, mentor, critical friend and support, making this type of person a very rare breed indeed!

Does your chief executive fulfil these functions?

Planning for the Impact of Innovation

In the UK, The Audit Commission has published many reports and Best Value recommendations relating to the group of services known as Environmental Services. The reports mostly point towards creating new and innovative pathways to get better returns on investment. A ‘weak’ or ‘fair’ service with promising prospects can only be converted into an excellent service through a combination of the following:

a)                 By encouraging and supporting service managers to work on core delivery processes within the current framework and adhering to short-term performance indicators;

b)                 By generating new strategic leverages aimed at stretching the service through a continuously responsive framework and investing in capacity development

c)                  By ensuring the most optimal financial and non-financial returns on investment

d)                 By developing three year Business Plans for each service component and developing Outline Business Cases to attract external funding.

Broadly speaking, it is the chief executive that has the task combining the above approaches to address the key priorities in all services under public scrutiny. These priorities can be actioned in conjunction with directors and line managers by

a)     revisiting and addressing all Audit Commission recommendations for upgrading services under this portfolio. Key action will include better targeting of services at culturally diverse customers and securing engagement

b)     reviewing the operation of the one-stop shop in conjunction with other departments to improve customer access to services

c)      extensively reviewing the communication strategies for the management of all services in Environmental block.

Why Public Services Fail - Part 2

Chief Executives may not have confronted the causes of failure of their environmental services directors

The Environmental Services ‘block’ consists of services dealing with the group of most demanding public interfacing and high volume services. It appears to be the most difficult one for Councils to manage. There is very little consensus on the best options to pursue.  The principal challenges are determined by the nature of these services, as follows:

1.      Environmental Services are more capital intensive than other Council services and where they are provided by in-house teams, they tend to be under capitalised owing to stringent control on capital investment and lack of funding in general caused by poor justification of the business case for managing these portfolio services.

2.      Where the services are outsourced, contractors tend to negotiate high service charges in order to protect their margins. They also want contracts of increasing durations with more contingency clauses to protect their business against risks. Councils are known to fail to carry out basic 'input-output analysis - what is going into the service and what is coming out.

3.      Many Councils do not prepare outline business cases (OBCs) to justify investment in the service capacity. The availability of public money is taken for granted. The cost of capital has never been understood by the level of management at which crucial decisions are made.

4.      The services suffer from skill shortages on the one hand but are heads of services are also known to be protective of their traditional resourcing practices; non-specialists can also perform many technical jobs, they claim.

5.      Outsourced contracts are increasingly performance based but Councils have not prioritised investment in information strategies (IS). Consequently the application of information technology can be flawed. The IT service may also be under-funded and in the end the best that managers can offer is a scatter-gun approach.

Options for Service Improvement

Environmental Services Directors can exercise several types of innovative management options for trying to improve performance. In practice councils prefer to appoint a pair of safe hands to run these multifunctional departments using traditional ‘linear functions’ where the service head is expected to bring in content based skills, with emphasis on delivery through traditional structures, with a resulting bias towards ‘more of the same’. This is generally based on an annual operating cycle with short or failing time frames for research and implementation. As far as performance improvement is concerned, this approach is unlikely to take services from ‘fair’ to ‘excellent’ rating unless radical changes are made, along with cohesive argument for investment to deal with chronic under-capacity.

Opportunities for service improvement are missed where councils fail to run these services as fully orchestrated and crosscutting service portfolios that are motivated by challenge, innovation, investment in processes, business continuity and performance management to meet both predetermined outputs and outcomes.

Councils have to respond to emerging opportunities but also need to develop deliberate strategies for change which result in improving capacity to deliver in the short term and greater capability to address growing demand for the future. These strategies are focused on a three-year Business Planning cycle.

Councils fail to combine optimal approaches to change management to suit the business needs of the services. This, where undertaken, should provide a bias towards crosscutting portfolio development wherever possible. It highlights the need for the design and delivery of leadership development to facilitate change management, consisting of challenging conventional wisdom and service delivery models through Best Value preparation and implementation but at the same time leading and preparing departments to develop strategies for change and to meet judgement criteria for improving services under CPA regimes. The most effective combination of strategy will follow when the current departmental managers’ ‘tacit’ knowledge is built into the strategy.

In most cases line managers know what is good for the service but they cannot relate to strategies and improvement planning scenarios when service directors and the chief executives starve them of oxygen of enterprise and innovation.

The Value of Portfolio Skills

Ideally, chief executives and environmental service directors should have a track record of achieving turnarounds and managing change through a number of change management roles covering large scale and dedicated programmes of management consisting of the mastery of process management skills in a high capital-intensive context. This is easier said than done.

Chief executives may have to take risks and recruit more entreprenurial executive directors. Better still, chief executives would do well to become 'change champions' and manage the process of change from their own offices.

Why Public Services Fail in the UK- Part 1

Chief Executives 'over-delegate' the challenge of change

Public Services fail where many council chief executives hand over the responsibility for change management to second or third tier management. A cursory look at the appointment columns of any national newspaper will show that many chief executives do recognise the need for change. Their senior service directors are then called upon to prepare the 'strategies' for change. The directors, in turn, put the pressure for change on 'heads of services'. This is a band of jobs in the UK public sector which is the least understood, the most unrecognised and least supported.

No where is this phenomenon more visible than in the case of 'Environmental Services'.  It is also acknowledged that Environmental Services are the main service block which have tended to reduce the levels of final judgements of CPA. Councils are trying to address the causes of unacceptable results in the form of ‘weak’ judgements. These services are the most sensitive far as as customers are concerned. The service group consists of:

·         Waste Management and Recycling, including street cleansing, maintenance, waste collection and recycling, civic amenity sites

·         Parks and Gardens

·         Parking Management and Enforcement.

The customer expects the following benefits from these services:

1.      Bins to be cleared without spillages on scheduled days and at the right time

2.      Parks and gardens to be maintained and grass to be cut regularly

3.      Streets to be cleaned on a regular basis

4.      Street lights to be maintained at correct levels of illumination to prevent crime

5.      Roads and footpaths to be maintained to correct specifications

6.      Councils to be effective in their arrangements for providing customer service, dealing with complaints and responding to requests for service

7.      Service departments to consult with them and communicate their service plans and objectives on a regular basis.

8.      Streets to be clear of traffic and congestion caused by poor parking practices.

9.      Parking services to be customer friendly.

Critical Limiting Factors

The task facing many Chief Executives today is how to design, implement and supervise a programme of change, which will help to carry out a major shift in the performance following CPA. A case for strategic investment will be required to justify increases in capability for the present as well as to increase the capacity for the future. It is interesting how many times managers in the public sector just work to short-term targets suggesting interest in short-term outcomes.

Chief executives invariably fail as a result of the following:

1.      Failure to appoint a project champion. This person needs to have power and influence and authority to influence change and to secure a firm handle for the implementation process to start. It is not recognised that the chief executives themselves are the best person for this task.

2.      Failure to secure ‘buy-in’ or commitment at all levels of the service block. This is easier said than done. Commitment cannot be secured unless the change agent is able to harness motivation of the staff involved by acting as a catalyst in the change management process and influence the processes of change and leave the decisions on the content and context to line managers and their seniors, leading to a consensus creation up to corporate levels.

3.      Failure to understand the organisational environment and to work within a shared framework. An example of a framework, which has worked for the author, is provided on the next page.

4.      Failure to define and describe the strategic aspects of the change in simple terms. A good business planning process starts with aspirational statements which take different planning and delivery cycles into account. A rolling planning scenario of 1 plus 3 years is essential. A reliance on one-year service planning cycles is defended by supporters of zero-based budgeting but short change management cycles result in wasted effort.

5.      Failure to define and collect accurate benchmarking data and performance indicators. This exercise is critical if performance management is to be embedded into the operational cycles.

6.      Failure to integrate service improvement and change management process into the operational routines of the service. Most interim managers are left to pursue best value or CPA orientated actions on their own. Line managers see the process as an imposition and often refuse to take part. Consequently any slippage or failure is attributed to the interim. This can create negative connotations for the programme of change.

7.      Failure to build teams and to reward success. Strong and well-managed teams generate success and seek ownership of the programme and its outcomes. Investment in team building is a priority and successful deployment of techniques of team consolidation are needed throughout the programme.

8.      Failure to develop crosscutting agenda and to benefit from economies of scale. Difficulties in spotting opportunities for improvement in interfacing and interdependent services leads to loss of productivity.

9.      Failure to develop a customer-centric focus for the change programme. Customer service management has more to with delivery of benefits to the customer and less to do with features of the service. Emphasis on service features confuses the delivery teams as well as the customers.

10.  Failure to communicate programme objectives and success to the rest of the organisation. Creative and well-managed change results in providing cumulative benefits to all services, for example by improving corporate service support to delivery teams.

Where a combination of the above failures take place, chief executives are driven to impose

regimes which favour crisis management at a time when the organisation may be desperately

seeking consensus management.

Managing Change - Understanding Key Expectations

The Challenge of Change

In the United Kingdom, there was a major stimulus for change which started about five years ago. However, many people did not see it as an opportunity for change. Many public service directors were resentful of the change that was seen to be 'imposed' by the Government sponsored Audit Commission's Best Value Inspection Service. Many political policy makers saw it as an intrusion and rejected it on grounds of cost and inconvenience. Whatever the objections, Best Value and its corresponding follow up programmes have seen many interesting examples of significant improvement in public services. In some cases, service directors may have missed the opportunities for securing internal support from staff and political leadership by producing poor or unhelpful submissions for assessment. More about this later.

The following posts reflect the outcomes of extended interim management assignments and lessons learned from over 15 inspections. Client confidentiality has been protected and no references can be made to specific councils owing to contractual obligations.

Cambridge YPS - key questions must be answered

Last week's Guardian Newspaper reported on the planned closure of the Cambridge YPS.

I spoke to Dr Srinath today for the first time and was very impressed with his plans and his ambition to save the Cambridge Young Peoples Service.(YPS). It provided further evidence to me on how this exemplary practitioner and his staff have put client interest first and chosen to take an entrepreneurial route to ensure the continuation of the service. There are major challenges ahead for them.

Dr Srinath and his colleagues, but not the PCT, seemed to have considered all the key issues- why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to restart the same service model in the future; how key staff may be lost; how short-term thinking by the PCTs may jeopardise long-term sustainability.

However, there are also questions for the PCT to respond to. To its credit, it has published a “Turnaround Plan”. It would be useful to know

q       When was the plan was published, how long was the consultation period?

q       Is it credible?

q       Does it deal with the PCTs’ problems conclusively?

The website of the PCT (www.cambcity-pct.nhs.uk) says:

“Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire PCTs are spending more money than allocated by the Department of Health and this is not sustainable”.

q       Clients will want to know how long has this been going on for and why were the ‘danger signals’ not recognised by the PCT well in advance of the current crisis?

q       Customers and other stakeholders will also seek reassurance that similar “shot-in-the arm” cost reduction will not take place again in the future. In other words, are the imperatives described in the Turnaround Plan sustainable within the time scales that it has identified? Or will the PCT axe more services at a later stage once the viability of its Plan is further challenged?

Public Eye is interested in exploring the following issues:

q       What criteria were used to select the services that are going to be supported and to deselect the others that have been abandoned?

q       What is the proportion of planned savings compared to the total budget of the PCTs? Do these include infrastructure costs as well?

q       What is the real cost of abandoning the services that are going to be discontinued? How much public money had been invested in these services?

q       What reasonable steps could have been taken to save the public funding invested in these services?

Public Eye hopes that the PCTs will be able to provide some answers.

Haringey Council's Improvers

Public Eye is still looking into bringing news relating to the success or otherwise of Haringey Council's IMPROVERS project. We hope to bring you further news in due course.

The council took a series of unusual but innovative steps in inviting professional consultants and senior interim managers to propose performance improvement projects for Haringey Council to consider. They were then going to be offered senior roles in the council.

Did the council benefit in any way? Are there any useful case histories of success that we may be able to bring to this forum?

Cambridge Young People's Service -YPS

Mary O'Hara, writing in today's Society Guardian (Wednesday July 12, 2006) reports on efforts being made by staff at the Cambridge YPS which is earmarked for closure.

The consultant psychiatrist Shankarnarayan Srinath and his staff have decided that they will raise the money to save the YPS service from closing. YPS staff are reported to have accepted the decision by Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire PCT that they are unlikely to reverse the decision. The YPS is reported to have until September 30 to raise at least £170,000 a target that Srinath and his staff accept to be a difficult one.

There used to be an adage that said that if you like the service you provide, would you buy it? Raising £170,000 is not the real problem. How will the YPS secure a short-term survival strategy for say, at least three years. No one will be able to buy the YPS if it is not up for sale but Srinath and his staff could always consider going it alone, legal and proprietary safeguards permitting.

Public Eye is keen to investigate whether YPS staff will be able to cope with the phenomenal change that is being imposed on them.