The situation
A government shared services centre with over 700 people on 6 sites provides HR, pensions and payroll administration for 39 government departments and 52 public service organisations: 124,000 people in all. Its service levels were good, but it had to show it could take on more work with the same resources.
It had already piloted Lean Six Sigma, but struggled to make it relevant to the teams’ day-to-day work.
The approach
We worked to three objectives: bring the daily workload under control, with better operations management tools and data; build the teams’ understanding of Lean, so they could tackle the causes of low-value work; and give every team the skills to solve problems close to where they start.
The programme ran over 12 to 14 weeks, with two 2-hour sessions a week with each operations team and five milestones:
- A model of each team’s demand and capacity in ServiceForce, now CollabForce365 (milestones one and two).
- Daily allocation of work by skill, against reasonable expectations the team agreed (milestone three).
- Using that data to cut work that adds no value (milestone four).
- Improvement across teams, as the base for end-to-end process ownership (milestone five).
The measured result
The target was a 15% improvement in effective capacity.
- Daily work in process down 37%.
- Effective capacity up 22%, while work volume rose 7%.
- The teams found further improvements beyond the gains already made, using their new skills and the ServiceForce data.
- A Lean operational excellence management system now embeds daily work management in continuous improvement.
- These and similar results helped Expertivity win Lean Service Provider of the Year 2019.
What the client said
We tried applying Lean on our own but struggled to make it relevant to our day-to-day work. Deploying ServiceForce, Expertivity’s Lean Management System, transformed our ability to execute our work and provided a platform for continuous improvement.
Government shared services centre