Organisational development staff at Nottingham City Council wanted access to help with business improvement techniques, and were able to implement some new change management approaches through using the Improvement Tools.

1) What prompted you/your organisation to use the Improvement Tools?

We have been looking for a website that provided an insight in to the various business improvement techniques used in public sector that were not supplier-owned sites, and Improvement Network did this.

2) What particular tool/s did you first look at and why?

We were very interested in the whole systems thinking and lean thinking methodologies and there use in the public sector service environment, without specific customer types. Many techniques and methodologies tend towards the retail sector where customers have more choice thus chase the best deal. However in the public sector many of our customers do not have choices, and just need help eg: a housing benefits applicant.

3) Did you adapt any case study/guidance/Improvement Tool to suit your particular workplace situation? If so, how?

It was clear that there are many approaches and definitions to lean/systems thinking. The Improvement Tools showed us that the approach or methodology was not as important, and than there was a need to embrace the whole world of change management.

4) What have been the short-term benefits so far, and what do you anticipate the longer-term benefits will be for you and your staff from using the Improvement Network?

We have adopted a benefits scorecard to measure the impact of our changes. This identifies quantifiable indicators for:

• customer satisfaction
• employee satisfaction
• financial efficiencies
• performance indicators

Our first year of improvements is showing signs of benefits in all four sectors. What we aim to do is the monitor these benefits more and provide further feedback for the Improvement Network.

5) Do you intend to measure impact?

In the same way we are measuring our benefits we are measuring our impacts.

The impacts and benefits will involve monitoring the balance scorecard approach using Managing Successful Programme's (MSP) benefit types. This helps us to make sure that we get a holistic picture of the effects on change. Benefits are inputted at the start as assumptions but others are entered as the changes are implemented.

We are not going into too much detail on managing benefits or risks, as inevitably the effects of change produce issues never thought of: thus difficult to plan. The main point is to identify and track them to see the true impact of change.

6) Have you recommended other staff to visit the Improvement Network website and/subscribe to access the free Improvement Tools for their own personal development needs?

Yes, we are running a sub-regional project in Nottinghamshire on Lean Systems Thinking, and recommending that all partners look at the Improvement Network for information on the various techniques such as 6-sigma.

7) Are there other topic areas you plan to look at? If so, which ones and why?

We are very interested in operating models and business process architecture, which we seem to find little information on in the public sector. We are starting to see that the organisation needs to change to a new model to get other aspects of service improvement to happen.

8) How would you rate the overall comprehensiveness of the Improvement Network and/or Improvement Tools available?

Good. I find the site very useful and full of bite-size blocks of information to understand quickly what is what. Links to more examples, case studies, and perhaps an online wiki/blog function would improve the site's functionality.

Note: The responses to these questions were provided by Peter Whitehouse, an organisational development consultant at Nottingham City Council.

Further information

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