Authority #1

East Anglia

13 Areas of improvement 
Corporate core service

50 day intervention

£2M Savings Year 1     |    £5M Savings Year 2

1. Anti-Social Behaviour
Linking County, Districts, Police and NHS together to improve collaboration. 
6-10 week report lead-time reduced to 'next day'. 
20% County Wide ASB reduction in year 1. 
3 year £7M Cost reduction plan identified and instigated.

2. Passenger Transport
Improve available ICT to link to client needs.
18% route quantity reduction
Average length and time of routes reduced
12% cost reduction equated to £600,000.

3. Social Care
Removing internal barriers created by contract
Data 'Deep Dive' identified £3M annual savings
Over-payments (paid up to 8 years after care had finished) identified and stopped.
Identification of highest cost demographic reversed action prioritisation

4. NEET's
Addressing dissatisfaction of those 'Not in Employment, Education or Training'
Stopped agency targets driving people into 'tick-box' solutions of no benefit to the individual
Rural poverty improved in combination with Passenger Transport activities
'Award Winning' New NEET design was implemented across the whole county

5. Direct Payments
£600,000 over-payment was recovered by one person ... and they had just been made redundant!
'Tell us once' system implemented, stopping payments to those who had passed away.
Systems simplified to improve services and capacity seeing financial controls improved.
£600K over-payments stopped.

6. Freedom of Information
25 people were dealing with an equivalent 9FTE work-load.
Lack of work created boredom; delays were high. The back-log was extensive
Change had been started, but resistance had set in as people tried to protect their positions
Changes were made, back-log was cleared and 3.5FTE's allocated to the task.

7. Management Information
3 top tiers of management spent 32% of their time converting data to information!
A 1/2 day workshop was run to identify this with the top 3 tiers of management
A 'Meaningful information hub' was created
30% reduction in top tier staff and salaries realised

8. High demand families
Multi-agency approach addressing 3 extended families was not linking efficiently.
A mapping exercise followed by a 'Benefits realisation' template approach quickly identified a 3-phase action plan to link all agencies efficiently and effectively.
£900,000 costs identified, significant improvement to Quality of Life and £400K savings made.

9. Falls Prevention
A falls prevention initiative was underway following a £7M identified saving opportunity
An imposed change to measurement saw inaccurate statistical information drive the wrong actions.
Measurement method was changed and 'Hot Spot' / 'High Cost' areas were identified immediately.
Actions were subsequently aligned with intent and the identified savings were realised in practice. 

10. Empowering Scrutiny
Council Scrutiny Sessions were high cost, low impact.
Root cause was 'Fear' provoking defensive / blame based behaviours seeing 'reality' masked.
Highlighting the 'Cultural' issues and implementing Visual management reporting systems reduced this and 'facts' were subsequently addressed with appropriate energy and speed.

11. Multi-agency data sharing
Partnership was a name given to a 'Master-Servant' relationship massively inhibiting inter-agency potential. Perception ruled while facts were scarce. 
A system was developed allowing Social Care, NHS, Police and others to utilise GIS Address Data to highlight hot-spots & patterns, flagging 'danger cases' in real time.
This is the key to avoiding 'headline' incidents like Baby P and other such tragedies in the future.

12. De-treacling the council
Reducing budgets and increasing demand required some 'organisational soul searching' but introspection was rare. Key areas, Risk Management, OD, Training and Audit all had performance criteria which required diametrically opposed actions; forcing many departments to pull in different directions. Irrespective of 'training quality', the culture stopped any improvement. A new 'Risk and Innovation' strategy was developed to challenge beliefs in the executive leadership team thus removing the hidden barriers to innovation which had become a 'systematic' symptom of mind-set.

13. Accelerating transformation
With individual views of development, Lean and Prince2 project teams often found themselves competing to pull in different directions. A new 'Middle ground' project charter was developed seeing 90% congruence to both previous plans. Within 3 weeks both teams 'merged' with 100% sign-up to 'THEIR' 'Ways of Working' (WoW) as a single coherent team. The previous estimate for this transition was 8 months.
SUMMARY - Our challenge was to enable a fast moving council to become far more 'change ready', utilising an array of methods in harmony. The Transformation team gelled very quickly, all listening to one another, leaning on each other for new ways of working. The information storms and linkages within the council and with their partners accelerated massively, not only having far more information, but far more effective information.  New strategies were created to reduce bureaucracy and increase leadership. Costs of over £5M per annum directly reduced as a result of fifty days work, with several times that identified as realistically possible in following years.