Police crime service design

The Flow

The current way we do things
A sergeant decided to take a random demand, coming in to the call centre, and map out its journey. The purpose was to understand how well we, the Police, deal with demands.

So, we took a demand at the enquiry counter and mapped it out on the wall.

After analysis we found that:

• Passed throuth six people
• Took a total of 2.5 hours of work
• Two records were made on IT systems, and the records were updated several times
• There was no police outcome
• The driver had to be called several times
• The end to end time was three days

The redesign

We showed this flow to an inspector, and he was incredulous at the waste in the system. Despite the fact that he worked in it every day! This was the first time he had seen it presented this way, end to end.

The redesign flow was easy, and could be trialled immediately:

This is what the outcome was:

• Passed throuth two people
  
• Took a total of 25 minutes of time
• A simple record was made, only once
• There was no police outcome
• The driver did not have to be contacted again
• The end to end time was 50 minutes.

The learning

In this system, processes like this develop into such waste, due to the functional nature of each persons role in the flow of work. The solution from a managers perspective, was to understand that functionalising the flow actually introduced the cause why such waste was in the system. So, unless the functionalisation was addressed, no amount of changing of rules, procedures, or IT system would have created the new improved flow.