Ten years ago; Radstone Road was a well-constructed, quiet road at the Eastern edge of Brackley. It had a small soap-works at its southern end, leading into a quiet country C road at its northern end. It rarely experienced heavy traffic, other than on the Formula One weekends at the nearby Silverstone race track, with refuse lorries being the biggest, most frequent HGV usage, with about ten journeys a week.

Today the carriageway is totally shot, with a smear of slime everywhere when it’s wet, and dust-storms when it’s dry, carrying over 200 lorries a week.

With Northamptonshire County Council financially and morally bankrupt, what is the future for the people living on this road?

The Radstone Road ten years ago enjoyed the same quality of construction as similar roads in Brackley such as Humphries Drive and the Halse Road from Pavillions Road to the town limits. Now both those roads are virtually in perfect condition, while Radstone Road needs to be totally reconstructed, from back of path to back of path.

So how can three very similar roads, meeting similar traffic requirements, now be so different?

​The answer lies with planned changes to Brackley, looking towards required expansions, and at every stage, making incredibly bad, short term decisions.

When new housing was built either side of the Radstone Road about twenty-five years ago, the whole structure was rebuilt, with implied junctions, needing build-outs to slow down traffic, with priority to the estate roads on the eastern side.

Those build-outs are poorly signed, lit, designed and maintained, leading to regular accidents, invariably caused by people driving straight on southbound, colliding with cars driving round to the right northbound.
Ten years ago; the furthest north extent of Brackley on the Radstone Road, was John Clare Close to the East, and Oak Road to the West.
​
Then the ‘Radstone Fields’ development was planned, creating a new Roundabout and new infrastructure. 

Figure 1. Map of Brackley highlighting places of interest within this blog.
​

​
​

The formula one team to the south of Brackley has been incredibly successful in its last two manifestations as Brawn then Mercedes, repeatedly winning both the driver and team and team championships.

Shortly after the F1 HQ was built, they needed access to three large supply phase electricity, as they no longer wanted to rely on the nearby Leyton House wind tunnel.

The 132,000 KW power lines with a transformer station is positioned next to the Radstone Road, about half a mile north of the Brackley town limits. It was decided to take those cables the whole length of Radstone road, then down to the A43, then alongside it, to the Brackley side of the road.
​
Those cables were placed in an impressively deep trench, which at the time looked like it was very well reinstated. However, it is that trench which is the cause of virtually every defect in the carriageway, kerb and footways today.

Figure 2. Cross section of the trench, later found to be supplying Mercedes F1 HQ.

Prior to the work being carried out; the Radstone Road was in a virtually pristine condition. For a few years after the trench works, the carriageway and footways still were very good.
​
In hindsight, a far more effective and societally cheaper route for these cables would have been across the fields towards the A43, joining the road near the roundabout in the NE corner of the provided map. 

The decisions regarding the developments to the north and east of Brackley have teetered on several national initiatives, at one time there was a probable reopening of one of the railway lines with a freight depot near Brackley, cutting across the NE corner of the map, within 200m of the Radstone Road.

When that was abandoned the initial alignment for HS2 took it within 800m of the same line, but was later shifted further north, nearer to the hamlet of Radstone.

With this came the consultations for the local plan and Brackley Masterplan, which included several ridiculous ideas to move the only senior school, encouraging a melt-down in local traffic movements. 

However, none of these plans suggested the linkage of the A43 to the A422, creating a trunked ring road around Brackley, thereby defining the future scale of the town, and greatly reducing through traffic movements.
​
These plans did confirm previously defined expansion areas to the north and east which have been implemented and continues to expand, potentially unrestrained.

The expansion into ‘Radstone Fields’ has been probable for a very long time. When the Gas, Water, Sewerage, Drainage, Electrical, Phone and communications cables were originally installed along Radstone Road, it was 98% certain that further development was going to occur to the North.

However, all the supplies installed were for the planned immediate capacity, with virtually no spare capacity!
The difference in ‘pipe-size’ for 110% of now, to 200% of now, is about 30% greater diameter. The costs to install ‘now needs’ to ‘greatly increased needs’, would be around 25% more, for slightly wider trenches, and slightly bigger hardware.

Radstone Road has been dug up at least once, for virtually every one of these services and three times for gas, (due to incompetent workers who were unsupervised).
​
While the permissions for construction are mainly authorised by the County under the New Roads and Streetworks Act (NRSWA), they were either never, or rarely managed. Even when I sent County Engineers photographic evidence of the incorrect methods deployed while work was being carried out.

Northamptonshire Council are now heavily impacted by budget cuts, with the lowest central government support across the UK. However, years ago they were not supervising new works and NRSWA correctly, leading to failures of assets within five of the planned 25-year lifespans.

Roads initially built as an estate cul-de-sac, have been expanded into through routes, then made into bus routes. These are narrow roads, designed to take a few hundred HGV’s a year, now redefined to take hundreds a month.

The developers built them to lower standards of: thickness, materials and compaction than specified, then the county increased utilisation by heavier vehicles, such that the axle loadings expected in 25 years, would be exceeded in five!

On one occasion I asked why a four-phase traffic management system was in place. The county responded saying no road works were authorised but didn’t come on site to check this out. The contractor felt confident to open up two roads, with traffic lights, NOT expecting the County to care.

On another occasion I reported that both excavation and refilling were sub-standard. No one came out!

When the ‘Radstone Fields’ development started, Radstone Road was defined as the construction access route.

This was a road designed to take say two hundred cars a day, with no more than forty HGV’s a month, none of them over 26 Tonnes.

When this decision was taken, the Mercedes trench was already starting to fail, and until very recently about thirty lorries a day travelled north to the site full of building materials, often weighing up to 40 tonnes, and a similar number of spoil lorries headed south.
​
Each month the road took more very heavy traffic than it would have normally taken, (was designed to take) in ten years. 

Northamptonshire decided to enter into a PFI deal to replace all street lighting, to move from numerous sodium lights, to fewer LED ones.

This entailed digging up all the old columns, many of which were relatively new, most having a probable twenty-year lifespan when removed and thrown away, opening up trenches for the lighting cables, and installing new columns.

The environmental aspirations are entirely correct. Lower energy, less light pollution and longer lantern life. However, this simply accelerated the demise of the highway structure. With an interesting maze of openings near one another, often undertaken at the same times, with gas works on one side of the road and street lighting on the opposite footway. Cars and lorries struggled to get through, pedestrians couldn’t get through! Damage created by lorries parked on the footways during that work have never been repaired.

The PFI included new illuminated signage, these were clearly designed only on a map, with no site visits ever undertaken. Now a ‘Give Way in 100 yards’ sign is placed within the canopy of a chestnut tree, such that you can’t see the sign other than for four leafless months of winter.

Another ‘Give Way’ sign is placed just around the corner from the junction, behind an existing tree and high hedge. That sign is impossible to see from the required ‘Give Way’ road, and now is part of the problem for accidents.
​
There are numerous examples where opportunities for a single post with multiple uses has not been carried out, adding to both costs and clutter. Had the contract been professionally managed it would have been more effective in meeting traffic and pedestrian needs, and would have cost millions less across the County.

The second set of Gas works in the last five years involved laying a new local supply, mainly within the footway, right alongside the back of kerb.

The contractor cut the inner edge with a circular saw, then used a mini-excavator mounted on the path, to dig out the new trench. Storing the excess spoil half on the path, and half into private land, including hedges.

This methodology had two bad draw-backs, it ripped all the bedding and backing of the kerbs out, destabilising the kerbs completely. It also totally destroyed the hedges in place, which have never grown back.
​
To make matters worse, this trench is alongside the ‘Mercedes trench’ from nine years ago. That trench was already caving in due to insufficient compaction, this sister trench then loosened material to one side, accelerating the failure process.


Figure 3. Local distributor gas trench, alongside Mercedes trench, ripping out kerb bed and back.

Again; the Council officers were informed of this, and even sent pictures while the damage was being carried out. No one showed any interest, nor would they furnish contact details for their cowboy builders.

Within 18 months the trench was failing, the gas supplier resurfaced some, but have left the unsupported, irregular kerb unattended. Again; the Council were informed of the kerb issue, but didn’t act on it. This road was the preferred route to the development site, until very recently, despite the new distributor road, Poppyfields Way, being built. (But not on most supplier Sat Nav’s)

In general; the ancient farm hedges have been left in place either side of the highway. These hedges are mainly ‘owned’ by the householders, although some are clearly in the highway.

Most houses have brick walls or high fences to define the maintained part of their property, with the hedge being outside that area. Most householders don’t maintain the hedge.

The county doesn’t maintain the hedge, the Town Council maintain theirs; but not well.

The county also designed two build outs, to created inferred junctions, which have large shrubs and trees planted in them.

The County has never managed to cut back all shrubs in their ownership to ensure free pedestrian access along the paths.

At best they will cut these back, less than once a year, to the back of path. Within three months the path can be 100% obstructed.

This is a route that is inspected as ‘being fit for purpose’ every month, and yet this serious breach of health and safety is virtually never acted on.
​
The County and District (South Northants), should not design infrastructure, unless they can ensure it is maintained as fit-for-purpose!

The highway white lines in the Radstone Road have failed quickly due to increased usage and the rapidly failing sub-strata. Interestingly last February some thermoplastic relining was being carried out after 22:00 hrs in sub-zero weather.

I informed the county that this was that late in that weather, advising that it would fail, which it did within days. So now, more than a year later, those essential lining repairs are not in place.

That’s two reasons the county are aware of why a serious RTA will happen on this junction.

The council is now cash strapped, so will not repair even category A defects on this distributor / C Road for 40 days.
They then repair 98% of defects with asphalt suitable for a stable base course. This highway is failing fast. Those patches break out within days, so they patch the same areas repeatedly.
​
Taking 40 days to affect a repair has two significant issues, a) both the hole and risk get bigger over time and b) the council will be liable for any injury or accident that occurs in the meanwhile without legal cover.
When they repair, they usually only repair the hole originally reported, but will ignore the dozen or so others around the edges. Thus; significantly increasing the cost of repair per hole.

Radstone Road is inspected via two approaches, the first is course visual, where an inspector is driven along the highway quite slowly, recording all serious defects as they go on a monthly basis, the second is via a walked fine visual, for the ‘town length’ on a six-monthly basis.

A freedom of information request, gained these details for the whole of Brackley, in January 2018.

The course visual and the fine visual results are statistically impossible to both be correct.

The course visual inspections do not tie up with known repairs undertaken, such as repairing nine notifiable defects in September 2017.

The course visual inspections show exactly the same level of white line road marking quality, irrespective of what is in place.

There is a length of Radstone Road between Poppyfields Way and the next roundabout which is basically destroyed, that doesn’t yield a defect.

The reported defects from the fine visual reports, haven’t resulted in any necessary works to make the highway legal.

Trips in the path, or in adjacent kerbs are not recorded.

30mm deep slime areas on the footway, behind a kerb with a razor edge trip are not defected.

The failing trench, in places 125mm below original height are not defected.

The ineffective drainage system, leaving standing water whenever it rains, is not defected.

The road-signs buried in the depths of large existing trees, or behind hedges are not defected.

The road markings that scrubbed away within a week of being painted are not defected.
​
We have absolute PROOF that highway inspections to meet the legal requirements of a highway authority are NOT conducted by Northamptonshire County Council. 

Northamptonshire Council and South Northants Council have worked together to destroy the fabric of Radstone Road, damaging personal property, and reducing the value of housing, while causing dust and slime for secondary health issues.
​
The people of Brackley require the Councils to use their Section 151 monies obtained from these developments to reconstruct the whole length of Radstone Road from Northampton Road to the edge of town, to be no worse than it was ten years ago, prior to them conspiring by design, to destroy the highway. 

Chapter one sets the foundations and themes for the whole book, starting with the underlying principles from Visualising Transformation. (VT)

VT has a core principle within any major change or transformation, which is to design and implement better ways of working to achieve efficiencies, then add in effectiveness, designing alternate business areas to develop, utilising capacity and capabilities grown during the first phases.

Hence every part of the design has a CPAD (SeePad) cycle: with a ‘Check – Plan’ start, followed by ‘Appraise – Do’, linking WE Deming’s: System of Profound Knowledge, with ‘Study Act Plan Do’ and the Deming Chain Reactions.
Thus; VT always improves customer services and increases the organisation capacity to do work. The average achievement for ‘value added’ compared to intervention costs has been running at 70 to 1 in the service sector for major intervention.

VT-Achieving More for Less, has then built upon VT, bringing in new ways of thinking and visualising work, identifying the short falls of current organisation thinking, showing how ‘well-meaning’ initiatives to save money actually increases costs significantly.

The following are examples taken from chapter one:

“A highways authority reduced resources by two Highway Inspectors, to save £60,000 a year costs, to help support Social Care budgets.

In time; the highway quality reduced, with more potholes and trips forming, while the quality of new housing estate roads got worse for new adoptions.

A ‘Closed Loop Diagram’ showed how eventually claims increased with a worsening fabric, leading to increased payments. One unforeseen implication was the increase in personal injuries. Those injuries made the highways more dangerous, leading to fewer ‘at risk’ citizens going out. Eventually a £60,000 a year saving was adding £600,000 a year to social care support.”

There is now a £14B backlog of highway repairs, growing by £1B per annum. 60% of inner town highway failures are due to a trench or excavation being made in a sound highway, greatly accelerating failure. Thus, if better control of these works were possible, the down-hill decline of highways would be avoided by design.

A cross section of a trench shows the causes of that accelerated failure, linking the science to the management. If managers understood the root causes of issues, they wouldn’t ‘penny-pinch’ towards third world nation outcomes.

CPAD is further explained with examples of some quick wins. For instance; during ‘Check’ we demonstrated that not leaving lorries idling, would save a council £200,000 a year via a simple change of culture.

Another council was amazed to discover that 32% of senior management time was taken in manipulating ‘unreliable data’ into useful information. A ‘knowledge hub’ was created and the saving harvested.

True ‘Transformation’ comes from within, thus effective three-day training followed by useful, well-designed workshops are a key stepping stone to ownership.

During PLAN a workshop was running well, when a slide entitled ‘Hard to enforce TRO’s’, … ‘the room went ballistic’ Suddenly the whole service (Parking Enforcement) realised the sledgehammer effect of Visually Appealing Data. This one aspect soon led to the authority improving net income by £100,000 a month, with very little work needed.
The need to record and act on every opportunity and issue is managed via a constantly developing Benefits Realisation Plan (BRP), ensuring no ideas are lost, no issues forgotten.

APPRAISE has shown a 3 to 1 benefit compared to simply shaving off costs, (thereby reducing capacity).
PLAN merges all the investment from above, to create useful, meaningful action plans, bought into by the whole workforce, management and board.

CPAD is adaptive and always useful, for instance two teams were being merged, one Prince 2 practioners, the other being ‘System Thinkers’. Their boss thought it would take eight months to successfully agree a common way of working, however a four-page shared ‘Way of working’ based on VT took less than three weeks for a method that both groups thought was an improvement.


Tackling ASB using VT, a stalled Systems Thinking collaboration had not only run out of steam, but also ran out of sponsors. VT was applied to rethink the approach, focussing on three initial aspects; A Baseline of ‘As Is’, a Benefits Realisation Plan showing that savings could exceed perceived costs, and better ways of information generation / sharing to show how easy it was to produce ‘great and meaningful information’ for any local interest required.
The scheme leapt forward, barriers to change were overcome and a reduction of around 20% ASB was achieved across a whole county area.

Well-meaning structures to save corporate costs can sometimes lead to real costs increase!

“A deep-dive on a massive Social Care database showed that over £3M a year of needless costs and duplications were occurring every year. That deep-dive also yielded unknown budget pressures and improved ways to deploy front line staff efficiently.”

The deep-dive took eight working days. It created more information than a team of four auditors had achieved in four months.

Every VT intervention has saved costs, improved capacity, improved environmental outcomes, achieved better customer services and preserved employment. Over £100M saved, no needed redundancies.

Dave Gaster
January 2018.

Everything’s connected

I read an article recently discussing the merits of 50 mph speed restrictions within road works, as opposed to 60 mph, arguing that drivers on average would be less stressed in the higher speeds, so may be safer, and that got me thinking.

The Highways Agency are responsible for motorways and major highways in the UK, to be run economically, safely and to promote the well-being of those that use and maintain those roads.
I’m a Civil Engineer by training, a Highways Manager by initial experience, and a Transformation Specialist, anchored on W E Deming’s ‘Continual Improvement’ (CI) philosophy.

CI has two core components, a SoPK and Deming’s Chain Reaction, where SoPK embraces four core requirements: an Appreciation of a System, Knowledge about Variation, a Theory of Knowledge and a Knowledge of Psychology. Deming stated that: “The various segments of a system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.”

A highway network is incredibly complex, consisting of every combination possible from brand new / well maintained to extremely old / falling apart. From very well designed and built to very poorly designed and built.

In general; we use single status rules to run these assets, 70 mph on all dual carriageways, 60 mph on most other major highways and 50 mph where there are road works or hazards.

Are these generic concepts correct for all purposes? Why only think in tens? What’s wrong with 55 mph? If 70 mph is good for fine sunny days, is it good for icy cold nights? If the speed limit is 50 mph how many motorists comply with that with and without average speed cameras.

From a ‘Knowledge of Variation’ point of view, there will be differing statistical realities, for the same highway sections, at different times of the day, week and the year.

During commuter periods on Motorways, there tends to be far more vehicles per hour, travelling pretty fast, technically too close together, with most people being predictable about ‘road sense’. Overnight tends to have a greater ratio of HGV’s with cars travelling a little faster than average, with a few outlier very fast cars. The greatest risks coming from inattention due to tiredness.

During holidays and weekends, there will be the greatest variation of driver styles, with some occasional drivers being less predictable in their road-craft.

A Knowledge of Psychology is also interesting in these scenarios, for instance the relatively new highway laws regarding ‘lane hogging’ has produced two equally dangerous thinking patterns, the first is for people who believe their speedo is accurate, and once they are showing 70 mph they simply will not change lanes.
I’ve calibrated my speedo’s using sat nav equipment, my previous car would have a road speed of 64 mph when the speedo showed 70, where-as my current car is doing 68 when it shows 70. Too few people understand that a speedo is a guide, it’s not statistically reliable.

Then there’s the ‘lane-swervers’, driving at speeds in excess of 85 mph quite often, then moving from the outside lane, to middle to left hand lane, then back again, as they consciously comply with the ‘non-blocking’ requirements, despite being 20% above the speed limit.

Slow blockers cause a string of drivers to change lanes to get past, while reducing the capacity of the highway, while the high speed swervers are difficult to see and predict if changing lanes your-self.
To be able to drive safely, reliably, economically and environmentally soundly, requires slightly different driving styles in those different driving situations, prior to considering weather conditions.

Road designs.

The capacity of a system depends upon the sum of all the parts in a system, and how they interact at different times.
Understanding a complex system requires an appreciation of theories, modelling of options, and an appreciation of the impact of changes upon the psychology of the road users.

Take the M25 for instance: When the designs for the M25 were being completed, the transport modelling team I was working with were asked to test out the capacity to carry traffic. We modelled the proposed highways, against the existing transport network, and discovered that with no increase in overall traffic, many sections of the M25 would NOT be able to cope with demands that existed at that time.

The government refused to accept our calculations, and built the M25 as designed. The reason they wouldn’t accept our designs was because they had a flawed theory (or concept), which was the purpose of Motorways is for ‘long distance travel’ while other highways are for shorter distances.

Our predictions, showed that many vehicles would use the Motorways for relatively short runs, covering one to three junction lengths then return to more local roads. The net impact of increasing capacity would be to attract vehicles into those areas, up to taking the same net time to travel, enabling other vehicles to then utilise the slightly better options, leading to the same amount of vehicles being used a little more.

Had we been believed, many parts of the M25 would have been built as 4 lanes or more, which would have been massively cheaper than retrospectively increasing capacity, while that traffic is in flow.

The capacity of the majority of a system is greater than a few pinch points.

If you look at some local networks, such as the A43 south from Brackley, via the M40 to Bicester, onwards to the A34 towards Oxford.

The A43 and A34 are both two lane dual carriageways, the A43 has relatively few roundabouts, while the A34 has no roundabouts on the main through-way, as junctions are grade separated. These roads travel roughly North East to South West and have two lanes in each direction. They merge with the M40 which is nearer North West to South East, and is three lanes wide.

For about five miles the five lanes of traffic are merged onto three lanes of Motorway. The A roads are nearer full capacity than the motorway either side of this joint flow. However, five into three doesn’t go and that stretch of Motorway is always congested during peak hours, with a very high rate of accidents.

The A43 roundabout link to the M40 (junction 10) has been redesigned twice in recent years, to a system that had a high proportion of over-lapping right turners causing congestion two ways, to a complex design causing lost capacity south-bound. A simple approach that was grade separated would have enabled a far greater M40 access capacity, thereby attracting more traffic onto the A43 and M40.

In addition to carrying ‘five-lanes-worth’ of traffic on the M40 south from J10 (Brackley) to J9 (Bicester) on only three lanes, there’s the additional problem of the A43 roundabout over the M40. It simply hasn’t the capacity to take a very high proportion of right turn traffic.

Thus the inside lane of the M40 often tails back over two miles along the M40 towards J10, leaving at best two lanes for transport aiming onwards towards London. The queue capacity could be increased by lane widening, or the queue averted by a flyover link straight onto the A34, which has already the indignity of being near capacity.

On bad days the tail-back is much greater, leading to middle lane queuing, with only one lane available for straight through traffic towards London. On those days, the whole Motorway backs up.

The psychology of some drivers is to always seek to ‘beat the system’, so when the near side lane is backing up to get off at J9, some will stay in the middle lane until only a 100m from the junction, then slow down and merge into the slow lane. Thus running the risks of being either rear-ended in lanes one or two, or indeed running into the back of a vehicle in lane one.

Clearly a system which is not designed to optimise flow or capacity. Each part of the system is poorly designed, not considering the whole network.

There are a few junctions on the M40 where a 3 lane motorway reduces to 2 lanes between the exit slip and the entry slip roads. If 1/3rd of the traffic exits reliably at those junctions during peak-flows, then all is well. However, all too often only 10% goes off, leaving 90% of three lanes with only two lanes capacity. This is a real penny pinching stupidity, saving a little during construction, then costing millions in delays over the next 50 years!

Roadworks designs.

The M1 between J15a (Northampton) and J19 (A14 – M6) has been in a near state of permanent roadworks for the last four years. The first phase was to replace the previous Armco barriers with the now in-vogue triangular section reinforced concrete, followed by the introduction of ‘smart-motorways’ which will add another lane for most peak travel times, with overhead gantries for lane and speed management.

Hence about sixteen miles of both North and South-bound carriageways have had 50 mph restrictions, with lane widths reduced, and far more accidents and congestion than normal. So from ‘Economic, Health and Safety and Wellbeing’ (EHSW) points of view, is this optimal design, or one that feels right?

For instance, why was central reservation changed, Motorways re-opened and then Smart Motorways introduced? Would both together had been less costly from all four perspectives?  E-H-S-W.

Economically doing both at the same time would have had shared use of the highway management systems, probably taking only 66% of the time that doing them in series takes, with perhaps only 75% of the total cost to construct. Then add in the cost of delays on the economy and two separate is probably twice as dear as one combined.

Then: is three narrow lanes over 16 miles all in one go REALLY VfM, or an illusion of cheaper? Evidentially most of the system is waiting for work over that ’32 mile length’. At times there have been less than 3 people actually seen working over a 16 mile single run. Thus most of the signage and 95% of the slow narrow constraint, is of no value to the motorist at that time.

Would more radical temporary traffic management regimes work better? For instance, closing one side for 1/3rd of the length, say J16 to J18 . Have two lanes width of free-access high intensity works, with two narrow same direction flow, plus one lane of traffic contra-flowing the opposite direction.

End to end times are better, less congestion, less narrow lane driving, lower traffic management costs….

One aspect to cover is ‘a Theory of Knowledge’. Borrowing from Professor Russell Ackoff, there’s a hierarchy of Knowledge: Data, Information, Knowledge, Insight – Wisdom. I’ve utilised that to create D>I>K> Tactics.

If you have excellent ‘Knowledge’ of a system, then you can model and make predictions to underpin future state designs, not only of the final design method, but also how to achieve that.

To design the ‘future state’ of a Motorway, many, many aspects are weighed up in an Options Appraisal, starting from the current designs, land ownership, constraints etc., then the issues to overcome or the outcomes to be achieved.

Swapping the focus around to ‘Safety’, what if the purpose of the works were to transition from a peak traffic capacity of 10,500 vehicles per hour, to 13,500, with fewer accidents, and less congestion, with the works minimising risks to the workforce and travellers during work.

There’s a lot of ICT in all this: Computer Aided Design (CAD) for the construction designs and temporary works, Average Speed Cameras to control excessive drivers, Automatic Number Plate Recognition, (ANPR) to identify individual vehicles, including their legal speeds (i.e. Large Good Vehicles maximum = 56 mph normally not 70 mph), Urban Traffic Control (UTC) where traffic congestion is monitored and managed from.

All these data sources start to weave together a ‘rich picture’ of knowledge, including the abilities to automatically model current traffic demands, origin and destination demands, speeds per lane, percentages of traffic between speed X and Y, creating awareness of reality against legality.

However, what if we added some aspects together, perhaps utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the picture, to morph information together?

Consider the possibilities for both designing how features of the network will be used, and then the implications during different states of the construction.

Let’s say this was to create a ‘smart motorway’ using a split two lane – one lane contraflow.

Starting with lane awareness utilisation information, the number of ‘standard axles’ per day, year or 25 years could be calculated for each lane, demonstrating that the nearside lane needs to be far stronger than the off-side one.

Lane widths could be greater for the nearside, and narrower for the offside, reflecting vehicle types.

Transitions from lane to lane could be mapped, to give frequency activities which vary between ‘featureless lengths’ compared to those with junctions and services.

From real time traffic observations, mixed with accident and near miss information, the root causes of accidents could be modelled in differing traffic scenarios, such as peak flow, off-peak, over-night and ‘Sunday drivers’.

Risks change with use and demands.

In this way, not only could the designs have optimal costs / safety options designed in, but also fine tuned in many ways.

Then the build cycle could have differing factors of risk assessed, for that type / element of construction, at that time of week. Some temporary works will be far more effective overnight or at weekends, than at peak times, while some others are potentially cost / safety neutral.

Thus, instead of a one size fits all safety design, variable designs would be utilised at varying times of the week.
Put quite simply, a vehicle usage model, overlaying the CAD permanent and temporary works design, could be interfaced via AI to predict the least worst options for any scenario that can be thought of.

Then modelling of road-work traffic speeds could be applied, utilising known traffic characteristics, perhaps having stretches of highway with virtually no current works at 60 mph, while high intensity works could be reduced to 45 mph. Thus increasing average speeds, while reducing accidents.

During transitions, that is a change in temporary traffic management, there’s no reason why a 40 mph speed shouldn’t be applied, with say 55 mph reinstated once the risk has reduced.

Safety by design?

Considering all that ICT that is gathering data, creating information all the time, what if another function of AI were applied to vehicle movement monitoring?

We’ve all seen vehicles weaving due to either a distraction in the vehicle, or the driver nearly falling asleep, and yet there’s little we can do on Motorways other than give them a wide berth.

What if you used similar systems to Face Recognition or ‘Suspected terrorists’, that is you used the vehicle monitoring data to detect suspicious driving characteristics, the AI could probably differentiate between novice driver, sleepy driver and distracted.

If the ‘body language’ of the vehicle gives cause for concern for either their own safety or that of others, then overhead signs and road side signs, plus the transport police could be used to direct the driver off the highway at the first convenient opportunity.

The recent two lorry and one minibus catastrophe near Luton on the M1 would have probably have been avoided if this technology was in place.

Have you noticed new junction designs sometimes being set up, with more lanes and far higher capacities, with far lower congestion, being in place for a few weeks, then being altered to have less lanes, some hatched out areas, and then a return to greater congestion?

This is due to a two-stage design! 1) Design, build, normalise traffic; 2) Carry out safety audit, alter design.

I’ve seen some of these create over 800M2 of new carriageway, which then simply becomes hatched white line areas. That’s 800M2 of brand new carriageway built and paid for that will never get used.

If you integrated the CAD designs with some simple traffic flow models, then you could build what will get safely used, saving 800M2 of needless costs.

Better designs are not only safer to use and safer to build, but also sensible for the economy!

Thinking a little wider.

Traffic is often slowed around schools to 20 mph, thus a special cause required for 192 days a year, for 1½ hours a day, is put in place 24 / 7. That’s a requirement for 3.3% of the year, applied for the whole year. In Scotland, they have 20 mph ‘when the yellow lights are flashing’, the rest of the day is 30 mph or more!

Lastly, the Deming Chain Reaction: Improve quality, costs reduce…. More can be done!

Dave Gaster

October 2017

Totally unprepared?

The great storm that hit the East Anglia Coast on the morning of Friday 16th October 1987 was not forecast nor prepared for by the Suffolk Coastal District Council, which I was ‘Assistant Director Technical Services’ at the time.
We had quite sophisticated Emergency escalation preparations across the council, in terms of both civil and military emergencies, with a constant coast watch following the 1953 floods, worries about Sizewell following Chernobyl the year before and even reports of flying saucers over the woods near our various RAF stations.
The few days before the storm hit (which was force 12 on the Beaufort  scale, but technically not a Hurricane) we had had considerable rain fall, leading to many areas of potential inland flooding, with drainage crews working all hours to pump out our many areas of low lying land.

First awareness.

At around 4:30 in the morning I was woken up by the sounds of shifting tiles on my roof and a buffeting of the house, with a discernible shaking as the wind struck. However, being well used to being woken up by my two young sons, I had no problem going back to sleep.
We woke at around 6:30 to discover the extent of the problems, with mains electricity still on most of the time, despite our very rural location.
Despite the force of the winds that were in full force, I decided to set off for work some 14 miles away. The telephone lines were down, and mobile phones were a back-breaking rarity, with battery packs weighing in at 7 kilograms.
My wife was not impressed with me deciding to leave her in the grips of the storm, but I did ask my neighbour to keep an eye out in case there was later severe damage to the house.

Getting to work!

I lived in a lovely village called Debenham; some 14 miles away from the council depot I was aiming for in Ufford, being the main operation depot for Suffolk Coastal DC.
There were many fallen trees with telephone and power lines randomly across the roads. After a while I found myself behind a farmer with a couple of chain saws, so he and his colleague cut up the trees and a few drivers from a growing convoy pulled the trees out of the way. Risk assessment was basic, did it look safe? Yes, let’s do it!
Despite the continuing gales and the amount of debris, I believe I got to work in under 90 minutes, which was incredibly fast. On arrival at the depot, I wasn’t at all surprised to discover that the whole of my workforce was at work, not one single absentee.
The flat roof had been ripped off the building maintenance office and was strewn across the yard and a neighbouring field. The more traditional roof of the stores was also very badly damaged, with several areas missing entirely.
Most people were out and working, our phone lines with the main office in Woodbridge was working, with dozens of building maintenance works orders coming through the connected IT systems.

Work Planning:

All normal work was suspended, everyone was deployed looking at properties, seeking to make them safe and secure. Generally skilled tradesmen were pairing up with others, to enable maximum capability to react to the numbers of issues faced while being able to work safely, especially with the ongoing threats from the gales to bring down more debris.
The drainage team had been hardest hit in many ways, they had already been working long anti-social hours over the prior few days, and now power was unavailable to the majority of sewage pumping stations, which if left unmanaged, would create numerous floods and tens of thousands of households without the ability to flush their loos, or even worse, the back flooding to low lying estates.
We had one mobile generator to push sewage from station to station. Anglian water couldn’t be contacted to borrow another, and no hire firms had one big enough to hire to us. We were facing a very messy problem.
With forecasts of far more wind and rain, I organised a dozen operatives to be back at the depot for noon, hoping that the infamous ‘eye in the storm’ would give us a calm time to create temporary roofs for the offices and stores.
Oddly at noon, all was calm and we rigged some tarpaulins held down by railway sleepers and sand bags, hopefully strong enough to survive a second phase of storms.
My car was nearly out of fuel, and most petrol stations were closed due to lack of power, so I was issued with council fuel, but made a point of paying in full, straight away.

Headquarters.

The main council offices in Woodbridge were quite different to the depot, less than half the staff were at work, there were no ‘emergency meetings’ of Management Team to discuss the storms. Nothing from my Corporate Director, and the council Emergency and Safety Officer was no-where to be seen.
After some discussions with a few officers about what was happening on the ground, and liaison with the Housing Client officers about tomorrow’s plans (that being a Saturday), I returned to the depot to see how things were going.

Depot return:

My first port of call was the drainage manager’s office. Tim sat in his chair, head dropping, eye’s red and sore, from far too many hours continuous work. After a quick word with his Supervisor, who was far fresher. I ordered Tim home, to get some rest and be fit for work the next day. He tried to argue, but simply didn’t have the where-with-all to fight me.
An hour or so later Tim’s wife called me, totally incredulous that Tim was home, when the area was in such a state. She was so pleased he was home.
The near 24/7 service to keep those pumping stations from flooding was partly in shape, with crews literally shifting s**t from one place to another, with 17 stations with no power.
The Building Maintenance office was still in full swing, with Christmas lights being used in the absence of the previous roof lights. Roger and Albert were in seventh heaven, they were inveterate council officers, loving the ability to add value to such a crisis.
The Stores set up ran by John was starting to take shape, with surprisingly low stock damage, as the wind damage had largely been before the rain returned. We were ruing the sale of thousands of tiles that hadn’t moved in years only a fortnight before, now we were trying to buy them back.
At around 17:00 I drove home, before it got to dark, seeing forests that had been levelled as if dozens of bombs had hit them.

Saturday morning.

Having made sure my own house was broadly OK, I pleased my wife by saying I’d only got to work for a couple of hours, just to make sure everything was OK.
As I drove in I saw dozens of badly damaged houses and forests where the outside trees still stood, while all the inside ones had sheared off half way up the trunks. (I later learned this was because of vortices  creating a hammer effect on the inner trees). Many trees also had simply fell over with their roots in the air, where the muddy ground had liquefied with too much water followed by the vibrations from the storm.
Tim was in the depot looking half way fit for work. Their biggest problem was that a single generator simply wasn’t enough to keep the system flushed.
I went into the housing maintenance office and was amazed that Roger and Albert were there, but the phones were silent, and had been all morning. So; I drove over to HQ in Woodbridge to find a full Housing Client office, with no calls coming in. No other senior officers had come in, that is not the Chief Executive, nor the Corporate Directors or any Management Team. Saturday was a day of rest!
I asked why there were no calls, and they said no one was in to look after the switchboard. They knew the normal operators, so we looked up their names in the phone book, I got through to one and explained our problem and asked her if she would come in?
She replied, “Have you the authority to bring me in?” I thought about it and said, ‘No. But I think I can get it squared on Monday.”

“OK” She replied, “I’ll be in in ten minutes, thanks for the call.”
As soon as she was in we had a deluge of calls.
On return to the depot I learned that we had borrowed another generator from a local farmer who knew Tim, and we were in full swing of making sure the s**t didn’t hit the fan.
I finally got home around 3:30 and was greeted by my next door neighbour with a self-help proposition, we could use his ladder to refix his TV Aerial, then my own, we then did around thirty more before the light was fading too much for safe working.

Weeks later:

The drainage team eventually heard from Anglian Water about three weeks after the storm. Ours was the only district across their whole area that hadn’t had floods due to power cuts, they were inquisitive ‘how did we manage that?’
The housing maintenance team were assigned whole streets of inspect, record and repair options. We made safe and repaired more properties in the month after the storm than ever before by about a factor of three.
I met with the insurance loss adjuster and got the funding to repair and replace the depot roofs within a few days of the storm, then met with the Principle Accountant to utilise some emergency repair funds, which between them allowed us to raise the roof in stores, increasing stock capacity by 60%, with Roger taking delight in designing the layout and 3D space utilisation.
I don’t recall any special Department or Council Management Team discussions re lessons learned, or why had it gone so well? But maybe my memory is jaundiced after thirty years.
That was a ‘one in two hundred year storm’ taken as ‘business as usual’ by my wonderful team.
 
Dave Gaster
October 2017

Introduction: Politics or Quality was written in 2006 during the ‘Best Value’ era. As ever, Politics in the UK moves on at an ever-increasing speed, although rarely achieving anything more positive than the philosophies those concepts replaced. Now, via a single minded, long term austerity drive, that ideology fuels failure and inflation while exhausting a one-track pony towards achieving: far less for less.

When Dave wrote ‘Politics or Quality’ with its twin book of ‘Quality or Politics’, major Transformations were quite easy to start and see through. Since then, the term ‘Transformation’ has become massively over-used such that virtually every major organisation Corporate Leadership Team believe they are masters of a universe that they don’t even know exists.

The development of Continuous Improvement over the years enables more powerful and useful transformations, against a background of denuded services where the management have lost sight of what good design should be, and where costs and poor quality of service delivery are frequently escalating out of control, instead of being made more competitive via the constraints of austerity.

Virtually every profession has been ravaged over the last decade from a rapid boom period in the late noughties, to an almost decimation by the late teens of the 21st century. These impacts in Social Care, NHS (most clearly seen in A&E) and infrastructure management, including Potholes and Flooding all point to a system that simply doesn’t work.

​The Socialist Best Value scheme ripped apart their hated Compulsory Competitive Tendering fore-runner, but as a result lost all sight of commercial awareness and practice, followed by the Conservative Austerity measures, that ruthlessly decimate budgets, almost without care of consequences. Neither works! Neither has helped the public sector! Each in turn creates turmoil and survival by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

When we start an intervention, there’s always trepidation… ‘Can we make a positive difference?’, ‘Can we engage meaningfully with the right people’, ‘Do they really understand what they need?’. We never clone ideas from another place, but we are willing to build on and learn from previous experiences. Thus; we are able to hit the ground running, often to be slowed down by the organisations reluctance to engage, or more usually, because they are swamped by business as usual.

Oddly, the consequences of too many years of austerity is a system that is far easier to add value to, if only the domination of wrong minded, poorly advised subject matter experts, can be overcome. i.e. ICT departments who see hardware and software, but NOT purpose of systems, HR people who create ‘one size fits all’ rules, who have never run a big business, Finance staff who set up accounts structures that are useful to them, but not the services provided and Change Managers who want to define outcomes of a review before starting it, without understanding how a service actually works.

It is said that 70% of change projects fail to deliver! Post programme reviews always create Blame and Excuses: The workforce didn’t engage, management wouldn’t commit, their information was wrong, we weren’t permitted to do that, the targets weren’t realistic…

SSD have been permitted to work with dozens of large organisations on hundreds of projects and programmes, spanning incredibly diverse services and requirements via Lean and Systems Thinking using Visualising Transformation. Every one of those projects and programmes have exceeded expectations: Greater financial outcomes, achieved quicker than thought possible, with as many job gains as losses, with lower investment in new kit, able to get better over time.

Why is there a significant difference between Visualising Transformation (VT) and ‘Best Value’, ‘Austerity’ or ‘Prince 2’?  Well, VT is designed to be adaptive, starting from the reality of the circumstances of THAT service, making the good parts better, reducing the impacts of the bad parts and developing the capability of the organisation to grow in capacity and competence. We routinely achieve More for Less, which is why we have evolved from just VT to VT-Achieving More for Less (VT-AMfL), designing sustainable leadership into a whole system aware culture.

​Note: VT and VT-AMfL are progressive books available from this web-site.

​Introduction: This is a simple ‘bullet point’ blog, not criticising anyone in the ‘perfect system’ they have the misfortune to work in. There are many ‘heroes’ within the NHS and Social Care world, governed by well-meaning managers, board members and politicians, who between them have systemically destroyed most that was good.

​The following listing shows how a few well-meaning targets and concepts have gradually eroded a useful system and are now making that system virtually useless. It is based on the hospitalisation of an elderly relative with advancing Parkinson’s disease, a person who if properly supported is perfectly capable of a relatively good level of health and mobility.

Figure 1. Taken from the VT-CAUSAL training programme.

1. Austerity budget reductions create greater pressure to save costs
2. Care support contracts awarded by lowest cost after basic safeguarding conditions met
3. Bottom line prices, forces hidden reduction of services
4. 4 x 30 minutes care visits, gets diluted to less than 4 x 30 minutes
5. Time critical appointments, shift to possible on time
6. Constant failure reports to social care are hard to deal with, within reduced budget paradigm
   • Summer holiday cover becomes near impossible
   • Medications not administered, simply given to customer (perhaps NOT taken)
   • Times between medications…. Far too long, followed by far too close
   • Under-dose followed by overdose every day ….
   • Some appointments failed to carry out ….
   • Medication irregularities leads to swallowing / hydration problem
   • Hydration problem causes confusion and falls
   • Confusion and falls leads to A&E admittance
7. Austerity budget reductions create greater pressure to save costs
8. Four-hour target destroys sensibility in A&E
   • Diagnosis backwards from worst case
   • Tested, X-Rayed and Scanned for various problems
     • Drip eventually administered to address dehydration
     • Meds administered eventually to reduce Parkinson’s impact
9. Passed through to next ward
10. Need for hydration ignored
11. Food offered, virtually unable to eat
    • New drip inserted, agreed for 24 hours for full hydration
    • Being kept in over-night, for observation
12. Passed through to next ward
    • Drip not retained
    • Noisy ward, virtually impossible to sleep or rest
    • One quarter of meds not given due administration error (for three days)
    • Unable to eat or drink much, due to lack of meds
    • Gammon so tough, an ‘Iron-man’ would struggle to eat it
      • Lovely patient staff, seem very caring
13. No day lounge, Pay TV system no use for elderly confused. Thus zero mental stimulus
14. Low level lighting impossible to read in for poor sighted
    • Parkinson’s meds administered after given food, thus chew swallow action NOT helped
    • ¾ of all food not eaten due to lack of help, wrong set up!
    • Insufficient fluids taken  … Thus poor sleep, low hydration, poor nutrition …
      • Declared fit, BUT needing 24/7 social care for discharge
    • Walking about frowned on due to risks (Thus mobility reduces)
15. Impossible to sort 24/7 care,
16. Reviewed health position….
    • Hasn’t got COPD, A&E theory in error!
    • Thus 24/7 care NOT needed, was a staff nurse mistake
17. Release arranged on Wednesday for the following Monday…. Staff nurse sees this as OK!
18. Staff nurse states that hospital exit team go home at 17:00 and anyway not in today!
19. Staff nurse reluctantly arranges meet with exit team
    • Exit team carry out basic fitness to be discharged assessment (agreed for next day)
    • Sort out care in the community package (until noon Monday)
20. Next day relapse, thus has to stay in longer
21. Checking charts, virtually ate no breakfast or lunch!
22. No diagnosis of medical issues, simply confused and slightly hot
    • Relatives provide 1:1 care in the ward to help eat, drink, meds etc.
23. Some hospital food provided clearly after consume by dates!
    • Next day release arranged and achieved
24. Goes home, under nourished and dehydrated, still a little confused!
25. Slips out of bed the next morning paramedics called in by NHS carers
    • Paramedics spend ages trying to stabilise and enable supported living
    • Arrange community nurses
    • Arrange Occupational Therapy support
    • Arrange Physical Therapy support
26. Next night refuses to be undressed by black man, sleeps in chair in day clothes.
27. Still not drinking enough
28. Care team fail to arrive at Noon on Monday
    • NHS carers continue to deal with interim care
29. Care team swear that Hospital never called them
30. Care team fail to advise when care will resume (as had been agreed)
31. Social Care fail to answer phone
32. Social Care fail to answer Emails
33. Social Care fail to reply to voice-mails

The system makes the old and frail less capable, for-ever dependant on more care with less independence, the hospital is more like Commando training: Wrong meds, sleep deprivation, poor food and drink, while trying to get better! Every phase erodes the ability to be self-sufficient, locking in failure and greater costs!

Introduction: Total Transport positively and pragmatically brings together fragmented parts of the transport / lifestyles systems to create new Socio-Economic value. However, there needs to be significant steps towards and beyond the ‘Total Transport Authority theory[1]’ postulated by the Government in order to address the growing bus services rural deprivation.

Authorities seeking to achieve Total Transport (TT) are already aware that they cannot do this on their own, TT cannot be ‘outsourced’ or tendered for others to do for them. While it is possible to outsource many parts of TT, this cannot be done as a whole!

To make TT a reality, a group of organisations need to create a manageable awareness of all the people that need to move from place to place at different times during the week/ year, knowing what their needs are to be met, against what resources are there to meet those needs, such that there is a dynamic awareness of all these in real time.
​
To achieve this there must be total awareness of all mass and communal transport, regarding exactly what is where, what its’ commitments are, with financial implications, and how these resources can best meet upcoming demands. There are publicly accessible apps that show where every passenger airplane is in the sky, and every ship in the sea, able to show where it started and when, where it is now and where it is going with its ETA. Air-travel includes the complexity of height, developing this holistic awareness for land based public / private transport is complex, BUT not impossible!

Some complexities exist purely because we create them, for instance, the propensity of managing different types of transport as a series of silos’ with ownership of contracts and resources more important than function. For the concerned passengers, Transport generally isn’t made of these independent unique aspects, it’s a continuum, with opportunity and their experiences leading to transport choices. Highly congested routes may be in demand, but if a better route becomes available, that will take over. For instance , prior to the M25 being built, we did predict it would become congested by local traffic straight away, but the decision makers wouldn’t listen!

Most organisations are ‘Data rich – Information poor’, they have systems that may not be 100% appropriate, poorly used and not well maintained, that do not interface with others. Currently there are no Passenger Transport (PT) ICT systems that address all modes of transport, and even where one company may produce systems for most transport types, those systems from the same company cannot interface seamlessly.

Those ‘Information poor’ organisations then are influenced by ‘modern management’ concepts where ICT may provide platforms and systems to run, but DON’T ensure that data integrity, continuity and interchanges are successful. Procurement may advise on European Law and the economy of scale, but will never see the damage of designing services in parts, compared to designing the whole. Finance and Audit may insist on T’s and C’s to ensure they regulate every penny, while the pounds haemorrhage…

PT Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) then carry out their niche areas of design, for routes, patronage, inclusions and exclusions, ‘Knowing’ that these designs are best, but rarely testing whether other designs are far better, or discovering whether their assumptions are even correct. The combination of ‘poor information’, ‘assumptions’, ‘myopic VfM’ and ‘SME’s’ can lead to designs that neither meet the needs of the organisations nor the public, which with reducing budgets inevitably leads to reducing service offerings.

To illustrate that point I’ll show three examples, the first is from typical Home to School (H2S) Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) transport, the second is from H2S Mainstream Transport.

1) SEND transport is highly regulated, with councils transporting a few hundred to a couple of thousand passengers every day, both to schools within their boundaries, and to specialist services considerably further away. The psychology of working as an SME leads people to take narrower views of options over time, rather than wider. Thus (in general) the SEND SME KNOWS that they must: a) Arrange Transport for the allocated person, b) Meet all the requirements for safe-guarding, c) Achieve the best VfM in the short, medium and long term, d) Retain contracts that have two more years to run, e) Comply with Policy, f) Comply with regulations etc.
​
The information about the passenger will be initially supplied by a Social Care SEND SME, while some additional travel questions may be asked, the right to travel and their travel needs will be virtually written in stone. Often SME’s interpret Policy and Legislation in certain ways, which more often than not creates an over-servicing due to frequent complaints and appeals. Amazingly some councils have been seen to exceed Policy for 98% of passengers!

During the year (September to July) passengers tend to be added to (and taken off) routes as circumstances change. If the route designs near were perfect in August, (perhaps building in just-in-case capacity) they will be less than perfect immediately after. However, most designs are based on the ‘Economy of scale’ (as defined by Procurement and Finance SME’s) so every summer year one and two contracts are left intact, while all the major route changes focus on contracts that have come to their third year.
​
If you look at routes ‘one at a time’ then they tend to look OK, however, if you look at all routes going into a school at the same time, you tend to see a plate of spaghetti, with longer routes, taking strange detours, inter-twined with many other routes. Typically, 20% of routes can be culled, reducing costs by around 15%, while actually reducing the average time to travel to school.

​As-Is collection routes (like spaghetti)                               To-Be routing (one of three designs in an afternoon)

​ As Is route designs (Clump theory)                                To Be designs (String theory)
​
2) Most Mainstream transport is designed so that the bus arrives to school about 95% full, even if a few people don’t go to school that day. The SME mind-set is that the bus is 100% efficient. THIS IS NOT TRUE! A bus may have 76 seats available to be filled. In general, for H2S mainstream travel, that bus will set out from a depot, travel to the first pick-up location, start collecting passengers, arrive at the school, where everyone gets off, then return to the same depot. In terms of seat occupation miles, there tends to be less than 20% utilisation compared to possible. So the SME tells the decision makers these buses are 100% full, but actually they are less than 20% occupied! Interesting!

Actual loadings for Blue route, showing distance vs seat used.
​
3) Focussing on the Passenger needs: The H2S SEND SME will know they need supported transport, perhaps from the age of four through to eighteen. That’s a budget commitment of perhaps £300,000 for that one passenger. That SME knows that they MUST provide transport from home to school, to ensure that person gets to school safely, as is required by statutory guidance and policy! However: that guidance places the prime responsibility on the council to: “improve the physical well-being”, including “Independent Travel Training” for those customers.

Thus, if the independence of that passenger to live a ‘normal life’ was first and foremost, should we collect people from their door and take them in a single vehicle all the way to their school, or should we help develop their travel skills and life awareness from the outset? Chauffer driven door to door transport actually inhibits life skill development, leading to an increased probability that those children needing £300,000 worth of transport, will need far more social care support once at an adult age! That is, well-meaning SME’s create costs and dependence, rather than VfM and independence.

Similar ‘cotton wool wrapping’ happens for H2S Mainstream passengers, if they get on a (dedicated) school bus, it will pick them up near home, and take them all the way to school. No bus changes and no non-school passengers on board. And yet, if due to post-code circumstances a child gets a bus card to go to school, they may need to change buses and share with other passengers. Thus the design mind-sets get concreted in: Dedicated H2S must be: “One bus, no other passengers”. Why?

Returning to ‘effectiveness’ of route designs. The one bus rule can often lead to six different H2S buses driving through a small town, picking up a few people every so often, to go to schools in varying locations. How different would those services be if:

• The first bus collected people to take to a staging post (i.e. a bus stop)?
• Those buses could collect fee-paying passengers as well as H2S ones?
• Other buses regularly went along distributor roads servicing those bus stops?
• Routes were designed and coordinated as a ‘whole system’ with interchanges a core concept?

Rural routes would be stimulated, journey lengths would reduce, more public buses would become viable, fewer dedicated transport routes would be needed, flexibility (of when to travel) would increase, costs will reduce, (perhaps by 25% for the council, NHS and the public), congestion will reduce….

This is a sample of ideas and developments within a 70-page booklet called ‘Total Transport – From theory to practice’.
NOTE Visualising Transformation is a way of working that maximises the information to all people within the system, so as to be useful for their purposes. Enabling people to see what is happening and have knowledge as to how to use that information is at the heart of Lean and Systems Thinking.

VT-Achieving More for Less acknowledges that everything is connected, no one idea is unique or independent of others. We would love to hear your thoughts, or to deal with requests via daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk


[1] IPPR 2015 A new deal for town and rural bus services, August 2015. Luke Raikes, Will Straw & Clare Linton

“Achieving More for Less” is an interesting and complex outcome to address, especially when the idea is to transform an organisation to routinely achieve more for less, all of the time, enabling the whole organisation to Naturally work with itself, overcoming historic ‘Lean and Mean’ or recurring project failure scenarios. 

VT- Achieving More for Less (VT-AMfL) is relatively easy to address, via a sensible mix of ‘Lean and Systems Thinking’ methodologies specially designed for the Service and Public Sectors.
 
If your experience of change and transformation have so far been less than perfect, perhaps it’s because the methodology was either designed for a different situation or was not able to address everyone’s needs. VT-AMfL will be designed for you, and only for you.
 
Breaking the title down to its elements;
 
Achieving: This is reliability, always delivering (not just designing) a series of outcomes to meet and exceed requirements for a wide range of stakeholders across an organisation such that they are effective and as near optimal as is pragmatically possible.
 
More: Enhanced services which enable increased income, better customer experiences, increased employment, better use of assets, increased environmental alignment, improved engagement with: staff, customers and across services. --- Belief and trust for the decision makers in the systems that they are responsible for, information available to everyone in the system in the ways that adds value and meaning to them, speed in the development of ideas and their delivery. Creating more powerful capabilities to improve efficiencies and effectiveness in harmony.
 
- Cooperation and collaboration: both within the organisation and with others, including contractors, suppliers and parallel organisations, and finally capability to change faster confidently.
 
Less: Waste within the system and costs to deliver them, complaints and bureaucracy, time from need to delivery, sickness and unrest within the workforce, focus on the HR and Audit controls in case things go wrong, conflicts that lead to uncertainty.
 
Less - Potholes, Crime, Obesity, Accidents, Claims, Claim-chasers, Unemployment, Ill-health, Journey time, CO2…
 
Collectively AMfL is a customer centric, scientific way of working, which start from where you are, and what is needed to be delivered. It will embrace all that is good, and will modify/replace all that can be improved, in such a way to enable a rapid return on capital employed, enhancing everything within the system that helps make change easier.
 
Too good to be true? 
AMfL will appear too good to be true because the whole of society is used to failure, it’s what we expect from all organisations and a primary cause of people rarely wanting to either change or buy something that is totally new.
 
So why would we want to move away from the tried and tested ways of working that have served us so well in the past? For instance, Prince 2 as a change methodology reliably delivers 30% success rate to achieve change. Oh yes, that’s a reliable probability to fail 70% of the time.
 
Well at least Lean improves part of a service well, achieving a net improvement to around 30% of projects engaged in, or again a 70% failure to achieve sustainable improvements as required from the outset.
 
So why is it that these internationally adopted ways of working are industry standards?

• Well for one thing when done well; they do deliver
  • Most transformation fail due to being under-aware of the whole system issues to address, not creating essential Knowledge.
• They have a constant structure, so should be able to be cloned from place to place!
  • Cloning rarely works, such that less than 10% of the service is understood, like the tip of an iceberg.
• They provide a mechanism for procurement, to say we want this to be done this way.
  • Most transactions contracts appear to be good, but sub-optimise outcomes.

 
So far, AMfL has never failed to not only to deliver what was required, but to also exceed requirements, both in terms of time to achieve, and the financial/operational targets to deliver.
 
Why is that the case? 
AMfL is not a singular way of working, other than: It always starts with the client: What do they want? How do they work? What are the current outcomes? What will good feel like? How will that be best designed and communicated?
 
Visualised information uses 80% of the brain capacity and is the most effective way to communicate of all the senses. VT-AMfL consciously unpacks the psychology of change, utilises models that add context, such as Data>Information>Knowledge>Tactics (D>I>K>T), Transactional Johari, the Voice of the Asset (VotA), Causal and Feedback Loops, Simplicity on the other side of Complexity, Closed Loop Thinking and an appreciation of Neuro-science which all lead to an Organisation that Works Naturally Together with a Leadership that knows where it is going, communicated to all involved to be able to truly engage.
 
 
NOTE
 
Visualising Transformation is a “way of Working’ (WoW) that takes information within a system and translates it into relevant meaning for the people involved, enabling clarity and better, faster decisions. VT-AMfL is the outcome of continuously improving Continual Improvement.
 
VT-AMfL is a Book designed to navigate an organisation to work naturally together, with a three-day training course called VT – CAUSAL to accelerate it through a cultural change.
 
We would love to hear you thoughts, for all enquiries contact Dave Gaster at daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk.