Let a thousand flowers bloom!

"Our approach is largely driven by the ‘Accumulation of Marginal Gains’ in the same way as the British Cycling team… in other words we’ve found it far more productive to save £10k on 10 small, easy, straight forward steps than a single £100k project. The later we find involves more complexity and therefore risk. As a good example we spent many thousands of pounds of man hours to remove 30-40 hours of calls/ week from a service and relocate them to (cheaper) contact centre staff. I doubt this has a pay back time of less than 5 years but in those days we didn’t measure the costs accurately enough. Learning from this we removed a further 50% of calls by making the letters easier for customers to read. Similarly we’ve reviewed the use of our websites with real customers and determined that the most cost effective way to encourage greater uptake is not developing new services but simply making sure the existing site is clear enough to use and we take all opportunities to publicise it!

Some more information can be seen on our case study (http://www.southeastiep.gov.uk/case3.asp?PageRef=118&CaseStudyRef=73)."

Thank you to Alasdair Robertson   Head of Business Improvement Maidstone Borough Council for this - and more (see later postings) - contribution. He can be contacted on AlasdairRobertson@maidstone.gov.uk

This blog is not alone!!