Dear diary

The Northern Housing Consortium has been piloting Vanguard Consulting’s “systems thinking” approach to efficiency with three organisations in the North. Systems thinking involves getting front-line staff, rather than managers, to look closely at the processes in place and decide how to eliminate waste and improve the service.

Vanguard claims this approach makes a “phenomenal” difference to landlords’ budgets – slashing costs while improving services – and on 14 June, they arrived at Preston council to put the theory into action.

The ODPM, which is putting a six-figure sum into the pilot, requested a review of the council’s account management team, whose 10 members work with tenants to resolve rent and housing benefit issues.

Six frontline officers volunteered to join the “check team”: Annette Kingston, housing quality officer; Sue Black, property officer; Rob Affleck, Michelle Williams and Karen O’Leary, all account management officers; and housing officer Lisa McDonald. They were joined by a member of the neighbourhoods team and a member of the allocations team. This is their diary …

Week one

The Vanguard team arrives on 14 June. We are apprehensive. “Hi,” they say. “We’re Andrew Maclean and Jo Gibson. Are you all familiar with the systems thinking approach?” We all look at each other and decide we ought to nod.

Luckily, they continue: “For those of you who aren’t, we’ll take this opportunity to explain a bit more.” The first step is to forget everything you’ve been taught. Then, you look at the service you provide from the outside – from the customer’s point of view – spotting any obstacles as well as any parts of the system that work smoothly.

Quite often, systems are designed to suit the officer doing the job, not the tenant, and the managers make the decisions. Vanguard reckons this is wrong and that it’s the frontline staff who know how a process can be improved. The key is that we must be prepared to change the way we think.

So, we spend all of the first week analysing phone calls from customers, assessing them as “waste” or “value”. For example, if a tenant phones to say they are in arrears and to ask for advice about how to clear them, that has value. But if they call with a query for the second time or to get some information they should already have, that’s waste. We ask: did the council do something that it shouldn’t have done that led to the call? We also look at how long various types of rent payments had taken to hit tenants’ accounts over the past year.

At the end of the week, we’re not feeling very positive. The team’s comments range from: “No one listened before, why should they now?”and “What a load of rubbish”, to “Who’ll do our work while we’re doing this?” and “Some interesting bits, but where’s it all leading?”

Week two

Things get a lot more interesting, as we get past the theory. Systems thinking doesn’t really make sense until you do it.

We start looking elsewhere in the housing department at what other teams do that affects rent collection, following the leads that surfaced in our first week. We also map out all the processes – “work flows” – that a customer has to go through to use the service and what happens behind the scenes on a big diagram.

We visit tenants in their homes to find out what they think of the service. It’s not the sort of thing we usually ask them and it’s interesting to see how their views fit into what we are finding out already.

We’re starting to get an idea of what the approach is all about, picking up on large amounts of waste and realising how very limited a service we provided to our customers. For example, we are surprised by how long it can take for payments for new tenants to reach their rent accounts.

Week three

Another eye-opening five days. We go further afield, mapping the flow of work in other council departments that affect rent collection, even visiting the Post Office to discuss giro card payments with the postmaster – not an approach we’ve taken before.

We soon realise how “standalone” each department is, working to their own targets and deadlines. Everyone’s working for their department rather than for the benefit of the customer.

For example, the neighbourhoods department is responsible for arranging meetings with tenants after they’ve been allocated somewhere to live. But these meetings, where tenants are told how to pay their rent and what to do if they can’t pay, can take 30-45 minutes. Since the team must meet a tough target to deal with antisocial behaviour, they can be a lower priority. But if tenants don’t know how to pay their rent, the account management team will suffer.

Week four

There’s only one week to go until we present our findings to our managers, so we’re working with Maclean and Gibson to find the best way to demonstrate what we’ve found. A lot of the bad feeling has evaporated and we’re very optimistic that we are going the right way to provide a more efficient service.

If our managers agree the system needs to change, the check team will become the redesign team and we can start making the improvements we’ve seen are needed.

With the Vanguard approach, you’re not allowed to make incremental changes as you monitor the service, because you couldn’t gauge the effects. Instead, changes are introduced one by one and their results are monitored.

Week five

We present our findings to our bosses: Tom Miskell and Marlene Bailey, the two interim directors of housing; Dave Warlow, the assistant director and John Power, head of quality, who sponsored the project.

They are astounded by the obstacles front-line staff have to overcome to do their jobs and by the complexity of the system. All our hard work has been worthwhile and we will be going ahead with the redesign phase.

The last five weeks have been extremely demanding but extremely productive. We know precisely where the issues are and how customer unfriendly our systems can be. Staff have worked very hard to deliver the current service but, by removing the identified waste, our service to customers will improve.

Rent accounts are always balanced over the weekend, so any problems are waiting for the account management team on Monday mornings. Hopefully, the improvements we’re planning will make Mondays a lot more pleasant.