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Break down silo working

A systemic approach of learning about customer interactions and value across the service
Demands into a service are the starting point of interactions with customers. Without the demand, there is no customer, and there is no service. When we look at the point of entry of these demands, and follow that through the front line, to the back office, we can then get a good idea how effective and efficient that flow is. We can see this, not from the perspective of the organisation, but from the perspective of the customer. This knowledge will then allow us to re-design the service from a true customers perspective that is based on that demand. Breaking down the barriers that create silo working. 
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This section is a continuation of the previous Value & Failure demand article

An Example of systemic design in the public sector

Below is an account into my work as a service designer through a real example. From the first days with a public sector client in England, using a Service Design methodology to help a local council solve its problems. The journey starts with having had some discussions with the senior leaders, about their issues and their desire to move into new directions for their leadership outlook, behaviours, service workflows, and staff. The problem to solve is  “We don’t think that all of what we are doing is very good, and we can do it with less resource, and use our staff in better ways”
This is about systemic service design.
Where do we start? The answer has to be at the beginning, where the demand comes in.

Stage 1. Starting at the Beginning — The Demand

I now begin to add the flow of what occurs when the call is made. 
PO passed on, PB passed back, or R resolved.
The reason that we do this is so that we can design our waste, and design with a focus of a perfect service, where we would want all our demands to be resolved there and then.

Resolve
Get resolution at the point of transaction right, and we have the possibility of an efficient and successful flow through the organisation, and a happy customer. We want to be resolving the demand at the time they call, and we want to ensure that the organisation involves the least number of persons to answers to the question (Ideally just one person)
Where we have to pull for some support to answer the demand, we should ask ourselves why we are involving two people to answer one demand?

Pass Back & Pass on
We dont know the answer, and we pass it back, or pass the call on, and we could create lots of waste work for ourselves, and make the customer experience a poor one. Not a smooth flow according to what the customer expects.

Sometimes the demand calls for a further transaction, and thats fine. But we should ask ourselves what value have we created at the front end when passing it on. What is the point of the front end if we’re not creating value there?

Methodology — 'Managing Demand' is often method that an organisation, that is internally driven, often behaves. And  those organisations design to change or re-direct demand in the way that suits them. This causes customer dissatisfaction and increases work. So, this approach we are describing here, is not about ‘managing demand’, it is the opposite. This is about understanding demand, so that we then know how best we can action it from an outside-in perspective.

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety is an important concept; that if a service is to be able to deal successfully with the diversity of demand types that its gets, then it needs to have an equivalent range of responses which is designed to deal with that level of diversity.
Old way of looking at demands
Systemic approach
Understand the demand as isolated data
Understand the demand end to end
Categorise the demand by groups.
Understand what matters, outside-in
Internal perspective
Customers perspective

Characteristics of demands that affect the design of now calls should be routed

The characteristics below can be used to analyse demands and understand the best way to deal with them.

Variety of types - How many different demands are coming into the service? The more variety, the most difficult it is for staff to learn how to deal with all of them all at the point of transaction.
Example: - the number of different types of questions people ask in a tourist office.
The greater the variety, the greater the range of training a employee needs to answer the demands. If it is too great then consider splitting up call handlers into specialisms. The solution may be to direct calls into the serivice itself.

Variation - how varied are the demands from a standard? The more variation requires greater flexibility of the process.
Example: people who are in need of housing have often got very different characteristics that have caused this situation, and therefore need very different types of support to resolve.  Designing a service to house people in need needs all those characteristics to be taken into consideration individually. 
The greater the variation, the greater the decision-making ability is required for call handlers.

Level of expertise to respond - In some cases, it requires specific expertise and experience to answer queries. If the expertise is difficult to learn, or it frequently changes (perhaps due to legislation changes), then staff will find it increasingly difficult to learn how to respond.
The deeper the expertise, the more specialist the call handler needs to be. The result may be to direct calls into the serivice itself.

Complexity - the level of complexity of demands requires significant interaction, and that complexity may result in incomplete understanding of the issue. Often, this type of demand requires face to face contact, and more than one interaction to fully understand the problem.
Example: I cannot pay my rent due to my family circumstances, and I need help.
Complexity often needs a one to one contact to get to the bottom of the problems. And requires delegated decision-making that varies from a standard solution.

Clarity of the demand - some demand requests are not clear, as the customer may have prior knowledge of how they should engage to extract the desired outcome. Or, some demands are simply unclear, and require someone who has expertise to engage in specific ways to understand the true nature of the call.
Example: The demand;  "I need someone to help me get dressed in the morning". Actually, the problem to solve is that I am unable to bend down because I have a bad back, therefore I need help physiotherapy
It will require an enquiry with the person to further deterimine the cause of the problem, and its solution.

Impact - the impact that the resolution, or failure of the resolution of the demand has on the customer should be a factor with how that call is dealt with.
Example: I am homeless and have nowhere to sleep tonight.
A high impact will usualy require a very rapid response, and perhaps a process that ensures that is occurs.

Listening to demand, is a great way to engage with front line staff

An additional private sector example...

This is a contact centre for a mobile phone operator. We will go through the high level steps, that actually took many weeks, to show how demand analysis fits in with the redesign of the service.
The designer was called in to 'make the contact centre more efficient'
The demands that were coming is were listened to from a person-centred perspective, and it showed that 42% of the demands in were caused by the organisation not doing something right (failure demands).
demand analysis example
Summary of demands, from the website, calls, email, and high street shops.

Also, the staff were not very happy and the managers had problems dealing with the negative behaviour from staff.
A team of front line staff and a manager was created to do the detailed Discovery and  experiment, led by the designer.

1. They understood the demands coming into the contact centre. And the team learned that the staff were being measured by their call length, and how that affected staff because it did not allow them to create a good outcome in resolving demands. Note here that we looked at demands coming in, and also the response by the contact centre staff.  

To achieve ‘green’ the resource desk must be able to report that 80% of inbound calls are being answered by agents within 20 seconds.

2. The team created an experiment where they banished the call length measure and allowed staff to take as much time on the call as was needed.
3.They went into the back office and made some changes to the way the service letters were written. They changed much of the text of the website. The failure demands dropped in frequency.
4. The team discovered that a small percentage of callers were in need of support to pay their call charges. They were struggling with debt. This type of demand was given to a special team, who worked in a very different way than the other call handlers.
5. The experiment turned into a prototype, and a small team worked in the new way permanently. Everyone could visit and measure their outcomes. The team designed to work across departments,  and had no rigid call procedures to restrict them.
6. The managers learned that their measures created the behaviour that pushed staff for shorter call times, was actually creating additional failure demands. So the managers dropped their old measures, and worked with staff to improve the workflow and created new measures.
7. Demands volume dropped in the prototype, and the senior managers agreed to make this the normal way of working across the organisation. The original purpose of the customer, was developed into the purpose for each and every department and all stakeholders. Therefore each part of the organisation became synchronised with each other, and departmental arguments reduced. The senior managers learned to view their organisation end to end, and developed their mid-managers to take responsibility across the service; regardless of which department they were in. Recogning that it was the interaction between departments that was missing from their previous thinking. This was a major mind-set shift for all managers, and they realsied that the original problems they thought were from the staff, were actually from poor design.
8. The Digital changes were made after the service design changes had been made. If this had not occured, the new Digital system would have simply designed in the poor back office processes. The demands to help people in debt were never digitalised, as the way to solve these probems was by person to person contact, building up trust.
systemic design
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human learning systems
  • What we do
    • Organisation assessment
    • Reinventing work & systemic design
    • Relational public services >
      • Implementing liberated relational working
      • Human Learning Systems
    • Systemic design and systems thinking
  • Blog
  • Projects
  • Portfolio & case studies
    • About John
  • Courses & workshops
    • Liberated relational public services workshop
    • Systemic design workshop
    • Health ICB system leaders workshop
  • Contact me
  • Resources
    • Systemic design triple diamond framework
    • Example of systemic change and design
    • The roots of this work