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Vanguard News – May 2006
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In this issue:
Please write to the minister
The first step is unlearning
Instead of unlearning managers pursue the wrong things
When ‘lean’ is mean
Making numbers, not serving customers
NHS joins the tools bandwagon
The management factory ruins your health
The money is being spent on IT
More on ministerial targets
Pay for ‘performance’ in the police
Senior job in a Vanguard client
“Freedom from Command and Control” – coming soon on DVD
Date for your diary
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Please write to the minister
Mr Miliband, the minister for local government, has announced that ‘CPA’ –
the current public sector regulatory regime is to cease. His new idea is to
replace it with something that is more customer-focused. I imagine his
ministry’s walls are covered with flip charts surrounded by bright young
things working out how to translate the minister’s big ideas (‘citizens
design services’ ‘empowered communities’ and so on) into practical things to
do. Already the public sector press is full of doubts about whether this new
initiative, which the minister calls ‘double devolution’ will produce
substantive action.
The way it works is the minister consults with everyone, but of course many
of these people and institutions are part of the problem; certainly it is
difficult for many to envisage a world that is completely outside their
current frame of reference (you can’t solve today’s problems with the
thinking that created them).
I have written a letter of advice to the minister. It is an open letter. As
the minister thinks policy should be decided by counting heads, I want you
to make your voice heard, especially if you work in the public sector and
most especially if you are using the Vanguard Method. Please read the open
letter at: http://www.lean-service.com/9-miliband.asp
Then if you are moved to write to the minister (and I really hope you do)
his address is:
David Miliband MP
Minister of Communities and Local Government
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister
Eland House
Bressenden Place
London
SW1E 5DU
His e-mail: milibandd@parliament.uk
And he has a ‘blog’ (which is not very active) at:
http://www.odpm.gov.uk/cs/blogs/ministerial_blog/default.aspx
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The first step is unlearning
I had the pleasure of visiting two financial services clients where they
have made the change to a systems approach to the design and management of
work. No matter how many times I have experienced it before there is an
enormous pleasure in witnessing people engaged with their work, solving
problems, cooperating with each other and proud of their achievements. You
get a buzz just being there.
At the same time I received an e-mail from someone working in financial
services who had been doing some good things to connect team leaders with
the work, studying demand, helping people handle more demand at the point of
transaction and so on. But for her something was missing, the kinds of
changes I talk about just were not there. I asked if the measures had
changed; they had not.
We have found the pre-requisite to learning is unlearning; you have to get
knowledge about how the current system – and measures are central to it – is
undermining performance, something managers find challenging.
I think this is the reason some people have a problem with Vanguard. Life is
much easier when you think change can be achieved with a few tools. No
unlearning required.
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Instead of unlearning managers pursue the wrong things
A good example of managers chasing the wrong agenda came from a reader.
Managers of field engineers, who go out to customers to fix things, are
pre-occupied with engineer productivity. It has become very common for
managers to buy ‘work scheduling systems’, IT that allocates work to
engineers, the idea being this will improve productivity and response times.
The reader writes:
“I had an interesting conversation today with an engineer from [name
withheld to protect the guilty], the people who come out to fix your
boilers, kitchen appliances etc under a service contract. Today the engineer
fixed my washing machine problem and then he updated the job on his wireless
laptop and I mentioned what a handy bit of kit he had, which started a
conversation about a new system that his managers are introducing. It is a
mobile phone based job allocation system and it is based on a new piece of
software. The thinking behind the system appears to be 'the right engineer
in the right place at the right time'. The system will allocate a new job to
an engineer via mobile phone when they have finished the last one. This
sparked my interest and I asked the guy if this would be easier for him but
he said no. Engineers, he said, were up in arms about it saying that it
would not work. So I asked why. The reason was that the system seems to
update itself every 20 minutes so it could take that length of time for a
new job to come down the wire to you. It also appeared to the engineer to be
double his admin since he would now have to update the phone and the laptop
instead of taking all the jobs from the lap top first thing in the morning.
I put it to him that if he was working one job at a time wouldn't it be an
advantage for the customer, since he would be under no pressure to get to
the next job and take as long as required to get to the next job when the
last was finished? The engineer said no. From the engineer’s point of view
they did not trust that the system would be able to allocate the jobs out
and get them all done in a day. Knowing in advance what had to be done in a
day allowed the engineer the ability to order their day and to adapt if
things were not going to plan - phoning back to the office, calling up other
engineers to help out etc. The strength of feeling amongst the engineers was
pretty strong, so concerned were they about the ability of the system to
deliver, that they were all going to work to their contracted hours to
ensure that they were not penalised with extra work when the system could
not manage the days work in the time allowed.
We can't tell of course what the motivation of the management is.”
Oh I’m sure we can, they want more productivity out of their engineers. But
they won’t get it. Every such system Vanguard people have studied has had to
be removed because the IT ‘tampers’ with the performance, yes it actually
makes it worse (I gave an example of this phenomenon in my book). And the
reader was on he mark as to why. He wrote:
“Right engineer right job right time' sounds a little like slick spin on
what could otherwise be an allocation system run by a computer without human
intervention.”
The heart of the problem is no rules will ever be able to deal with the
variety offered by the customers’ demands, that needs people and that is why
all Vanguard interventions with such systems return to having the engineers
make decisions about the work, the results, because in a system design
engineers have control over much more, are always astonishing.
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When ‘lean’ is mean
Staff at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) held a one-day strike in
protest at being reduced to ‘robots’. Management had, with the help of
consultants, introduced what they described as ‘lean’ working methods;
instead of handling a variety of tasks workers were now organised to work in
discrete functions.
This kind of work specialisation is fundamentally the wrong thing to do. It
is not ‘lean’ at all, but you can see how it would appeal to managers –
define work as a number of discrete types, each type will then have it’s own
standard time, workers can then be ‘managed’. Hah!
Managers will be sitting in their offices paying attention to work queues,
backlogs, allocating workers to work types and giving workers grief for
deviations from standard times. The managers will be oblivious to the waste
created by the design. I will bet any money you like that following customer
demands through this kind of system will reveal a ‘spaghetti’ flow; as with
the example of the engineers above, these kinds of designs stop the system
absorbing variety, the key to service ‘lean’. But this is the kind of
nonsense that appeals to command-and-control thinkers. They think they are
doing ‘lean’ when they are actually perpetuating a worse command and
control, mass-production system.
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Making numbers, not serving customers
By coincidence I received a mail from one of HMRC’s customers:
“I recently left the UK, and having submitted the relevant forms to claim a
tax refund on the 2005 tax year, patiently waited for the monies to flow
freely though to my bank. Of course, it didn't happen. So having tried to
find an international email support contact (without any luck) I scribed a
letter to the UK office that handles international matters.
Foolishly, perhaps in a rush, I omitted my first two alpha characters from
my National Insurance numbers. In my letter I provided my telephone number
and email address in case of further contact. I received a letter two weeks
later pointing out my error and without an email or telephone contact on the
letter. So I concocted another letter and suffered snail mail service. In my
letter I raged asking why the IR couldn't use a basic IT system field search
facility to flag up my NI number, and asked why email couldn't have been
used to contact me quicker. Anyhow, due to snail mail and lack of the use of
gray matter, this dragged out the process far longer then needed.”
As we learned from the story above these people are being managed by
activity measurement. In such circumstances people do what they have to do
to meet their activity targets (write a letter) rather than solve a customer
problem. It matters little that solving the problem would take less time. As
the reader says:
“A few points regarding end user service: If the customer requests a tax
refund and fills in the salient tax forms, then give them the service they
require (i.e. a tax refund payment). If the customer provides faster more
efficient contact details....then use it.
Why do the civil servants have to make the end-to-end process so damned
difficult? Is it true that hat stands are provided to hang the brain at the
start of the working day, which is then collected on the way out?”
It would of course be cheaper (and better service) if the HMRC people could
just do that – provide the service the customer wants, but first managers
need to learn how to manage that kind of system, and the minister isn’t
helping in that regard. As with all government agencies ministers are
driving the ‘improvement’ agenda.
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NHS joins the tools bandwagon
An NHS reader writes:
“It is clear that the management factory eggheads remain firmly entrenched
by their latest, frightening, initiative ‘combining’ lean and six sigma! I
couldn’t think of anything more likely to exhaust, frustrate, bore and
defeat all well-intentioned folks in the NHS. And they think they are going
to involve our demoralised staff with this kind of complex, deluded,
overblown rubbish!”
He had sent me a document produced by some quango on ‘lean six sigma’; it
wouldn’t have gotten a pass grade from me. Another reader writes:
“Seeing Six Sigma promoted in the health Service makes my heart sink. Being
new to the NHS and an ex engineer I've seen what a mess Six Sigma makes of
normally good businesses. For a number of years I worked as a product
manager for a supplier to [name withheld] and saw them swallow the six-sigma
bait hook line and sinker. Simple cost saving ideas suddenly took ages to
bring in as they had to go through the sausage machine and the benefits were
held up as proving that six sigma worked. Er no it just delayed implementing
cost savings....”
I do hope the NHS people who are enthused with this nonsense take the time
to read “Watch out for the tool heads” available at:
http://www.lean-service.com/6-23.asp To promote manufacturing tools as
though they have general applicability won't help where the help is needed,
changing the system.
One lean ‘guru’ says ‘lean’ might help them achieve their 18-week target.
Fool. The target itself is a major system condition that will be causing
waste.
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The management factory ruins your health
The NHS is (again) in crisis. Cost overruns mean people are being made
redundant. Just like the private sector, who gets to go? The people who do
the work. It is no wonder the Secretary of State for Health got booed by the
nurses at their recent conference.
To cut costs the minister is also cutting the number of strategic health
authorities from 28 to 10. That might be at least doing less of a bad thing
but the upheaval and establishment of the new reporting structures will
place a burden on the place where the work is done. The minister hopes new
‘foundation hospitals’, which will work on the basis of payment by results,
will do the trick. But the truth is they are not paid by results, they are
paid by activity; another way of ensuring the system’s costs will go up
(again such cost management stops the system absorbing variety). And
finally, the minister is bringing us patient choice, which means being able
to go somewhere else if your hospital can’t fit you in. Is this a ‘choice’?
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The money is being spent on IT
The minister’s £6.2bn NHS computer system has hit a snag. Accenture is
blaming iSoft for delays in the delivery of software. While Accenture blames
iSoft a spokesman for the NHS suggested the fault lies with Accenture. He
was reported as saying he was 'surprised' by Accenture's decision to call
the delays to the project 'recent developments' given that iSoft warned
about them two months ago. He stressed that it is Accenture's responsibility
as 'prime contractor' to manage the delivery of services.
I have to say I told you so. [See Vanguard News November 2004] Getting IT
companies to work together is only one of the problems with this ‘solution’
when the rubber finally hits the road we will see the others I forecast.
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More on ministerial targets
Charles Clark, secretary of state for the Home Office has been in trouble
because his department has been letting foreign criminals out of jail
without deporting them. The news media are focussing on his failures to do
something about it when he first knew (last year) and not telling the Prime
Minister as soon as he should have. What the news media appears to have
ignored is the little-reported fact that workers in the Home Office had been
told NOT to deport these people, as they would be likely to claim asylum –
and that would jeopardise the Prime Minister’s target on asylum seekers.
And concerning the find of a dead swan infected with bird flu, a reader
writes:
“Ministers are considering bringing in targets to regulate the time between
reporting a dead bird and tests being completed. That'll do it! I will sleep
easy tonight.”
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Pay for ‘performance’ in the police
A police reader writes:
“Superintendents’ pay is performance-related, based on so-called performance
figures decided by government. The current basis is volume crime so every
Superintendent has a performance objective related to volume crime figures
for the force, never mind how tenuous the link or non-existent the influence
of a post. It was said at one planning meeting that to meet the targets (and
hence the performance pay figures) for volume crime, which includes things
like theft from vehicles, minor criminal damage, etc., the force would have
to pay less attention to serious crime as the effect of detecting serious
crime was barely noticeable on the overall figures.
Your comment about focussing on the rewards, not the work, is entirely
correct and you can see this reflected in the performance measures against
targets that are plastered over most police stations.”
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Senior job in a Vanguard client
Velux, a Vanguard client, asked me to post this advert in the newsletter. I
am happy to oblige.
'Systems thinkers looking for a new challenging position with a company
dedicated to exceptional customer service should take a look at this senior
appointment at VELUX. VELUX is a Vanguard methodology company who have
achieved some great results and are now looking for someone to take them to
the next level.'
Go to: http://www.velux.co.uk/AboutVelux/Jobs/
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“Freedom from Command and Control” – coming soon on DVD
Despite enormous technical issues last October’s ‘show’ is soon to become
available on DVD. As a newsletter subscriber I would like to offer you the
DVD at a pre-publication special price of £30 (includes shipping to
anywhere). The selling price will be £45. To buy at this price you need to
contact Polly: (office@vanguardconsult.co.uk)
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Date for your diary
October 17 and 18, Heythrop Park, Oxfordshire. I shall be presenting “The
Toyota System for service organisations”, a conference featuring Vanguard
clients across a variety of sectors, lots on the Vanguard Method and some
nice surprises.
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Thanks for reading!
John Seddon
john@vanguardconsult.co.uk
Author: 'Freedom from command and control: a better way to make the work
work' available from Vanguard (www.lean-service.com) and all leading book
suppliers. Available in the US from:
http://www.productivitypress.com/productdetails.cfm?SKU=3276
The only book that comes with a guarantee: If you tell me the book creates
no value for you I'll give you your money back.
Vanguard Consulting: Developers of the Vanguard Method, helping
organisations change from a command and control to a systems design. Beware
of imitators, as Vanguard has developed solutions for sectors others claim
to be able to provide the same service. If providers are not accredited to
the Vanguard Method you should not expect a Vanguard service.
***
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