Pot-holes in our roads are a very common sight, but should that be the case? We live in a country town near the interface of four counties; all four counties have excessive pot-holes, requiring frequent avoidance tactics while driving, which may easily lead to someone losing their life, instead of just damaging a tyre. A report in the local papers shows that tyre and exhaust firms are benefiting significantly from this decay. I was originally a highways engineer via initial training and a systemic thinker, able to construct financial business cases, please read on:

In 1984 I took over a Direct Labour Organisation (DLO) of 200 highways workers in central London, inside a two year period we added 45% to our income with no extra people employed, while charging 14% less for our products as a whole, moving a three year loss into profits. That was achieved by management, unions and workers working together to improve how work was carried out, simply doing far more of it, using better materials, obtaining better prices and eradicating quite a number of custom and practices.

Leap forward nearly 20 years, another inner London borough was paying out over £3/4 M a year for ‘trips and falls’ claims, which was increasing by more than 20% per annum. We talked with the unions, asking whether they want to retain custom and practice, with a likely £1M+ lost to them as budget, or try new ways of working? The outcome was an eight-fold increase in pot-holes fixed per day, via an inspector, a semi-conventional two man team and linked lone worker using a proprietary mix which cost a lot per bag, but was extremely easy to use. The amount of new claims started to immediately reduce, (we targeted what to fix at first via claims awareness, then by type of location), the roads got better, the claims reduced, more work was available for the workers to do.

In a Metropolitan Borough a couple of years later, they were ‘reducing costs’ of employees to save money, we were able to show that as a direct result of removing a ‘NRSWA Inspector’, (New Roads and Street Works Act), that roads were being dug up and left open longer, and that repairs were taking longer and then falling apart quicker. After some unrelated headway on other issues, we were ‘trusted’ to appoint an agency inspector whose long term employment was simple, ‘achieve more fine income than your costs, and you stay on’. That inspector was able to record and achieve fines in excess of three times his cost, not by being ‘Attila the Hun’, but by forming working partnerships with the utilities companies, so they could learn from their mistakes. We demonstrated that over 55% of ‘trips and falls’ defects had started from a utility trench, thus our NRSWA funded post was also preventing future pothole costs, and increasing parking income.

In a County we were able to bring several strands together, the NRSWA control was thought to be fairly good until I showed that £6,000 worth of fines could be achieved from a three hour walk, their elaborate dashboard systems showed what they needed to do, and gave percentages of all sorts of stuff, but they had no idea what caused trips and falls. They realised from our ‘root cause analysis’ that many of these defects were due to the way they designed their work. Then our review of section 58 of the highways act, (S58 = Trips and Falls), showed that 21 people were involved in processing the first part of a claim, and that took them on average 90 days to complete a report. Our review enabled that to reduce to 2.65 days, with only 3 people involved reducing the costs from over £300,000 a year to under £67,000.

Bringing this all together in one place was a delight, being able to repair quickly, understanding that some types of road construction fail differently to others, that a skim of asphalt over crushed stone (the way that rural roads and older estate roads used to be built) will fall apart very quickly once the asphalt cracks, that laying asphalt in heavy rain reduces the life-cycle of the road by more than 50%, (see the A43 near Silverstone as an example), that a 4 ½ “ (110mm) kerb-face encourages drivers to park on footways, leading to immediate damage to new footways, that narrow lanes on carriageways, (perhaps created by white lining a cycle lane) makes HGV’s travel along a single line, quickly rutting a road, that regular inspections of roads and footways fully compliant with legislation is cheaper than cutting corners, that working in partnership (from a position of strength) with utilities leads to repairs that don’t fall apart in less than a couple of years.

If you create great information from arrays of disparate data, if you can share that information with the people that need it, and you create a good understanding of how this all inter-relates, then it is possible to improve repair rates, reduce the time from defect to repair, understand the relationship between prevent and repair, know where to deploy people for the most benefit, learn to become proactive rather than reactive, going to places where damage may have started as a result of flooding or ice, prior to getting complaints.

The old world reaction could be: Pot-hole starts to form, damage to first car, then the next three, gets reported, damage to the next ten, gets inspected, then gets repaired. The costs? 14 damaged cars, the council will probably need to pay for ten of these, then the costs of repairs, admin, legal defences ++.  Or, Pot-hole starts to form and either has been seen from an inspection and is repaired before it becomes serious, or neighbourhood volunteer reports it and its repaired the next day. With the right information systems a typical repair time can reduce from three weeks to three hours. The result of that? No claims, no call centre details, no legal costs to defend….One single serious injury leads to average compensation payments of £40,000…. Are a few of those a year cheaper than repairing before a claim occurs? (Many seriously injured people are quite old or frail; some are sole carers for their partners. Highways issues are frequently the lever point that causes long term social care support!)

The two causal loops show the opposites of reducing costs to save money, versus inspect and create information. The first ‘saves £60,000 a year’ and then leads to millions of extra costs each year, with secondary issues and an increasing demand on social care.

The second needs an extra inspector to properly review assets and manage adopted highways; this improves highways, reduces claims and leads to an improved quality of life, in real terms saving well in excess of £1/2M a year in a well-run council.

A far more detailed ‘white paper’ on Rethinking Highways Management is near complete, please request this from Daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk

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 acknowledges that everything is connected, no one idea is unique or independent of others, this is one of many planned ‘blogs’ to be released over the next couple of years. We would love to hear your thoughts, or to deal with requests via daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk

Partly because of our ways of working and the areas we work in SSD will become involved in project rescues that could in turn infer all P2 projects fail. What we do know is that over 70% of all projects fail and that SSD have never failed to exceed customer expectations. This includes the fact we have always succeeded in the rescue of failing project including rescuing a whole department that was in a cataclysmic meltdown. This item focusses on two quite different interventions, a parking project which was to start up ‘decriminalisation of parking via an externalised contract’ that was behind critical timelines and needed engagement, then ‘a garden waste project’ which imploded from a customer viewpoint.

One of my perspectives of P2 is that people are engaged into it in a patronising, need to know basis, inferring the project manager is all knowing and we are mere cogs in a machine. The VT approach to change is to give everyone a view of the whole work, so that they know where they fit in and how they can contribute beyond their apparent niche in life.

The parking review had masses of detailed project plans, meeting notes and structures, with many people working on their discreet pieces of work. In essence it was full of controlling information but going backwards against needed schedules quite quickly. The initial data gathering after SSD being involved enabled the core elements of achievement to be refined, in order that everyone was working in an open, almost unstructured way in meetings, where all the participants were able to agree the handful of ‘must-do’ items with timescales with a few ‘drop-dead’ dates which was easy to sign up to. This enabled teams to understand exactly what was required, aware what they had to do, how they could help one-another and what fed into each strand of work.

From the first meeting we were able to create a very simple ‘mile-stone map’ with half a dozen ‘drop-dead dates’ which told us the must-does of the project. Having done that we explored the dependencies and assumptions made in the initial PiD, which showed other ways of working were possible, some of which were better than originally designed. The parking ‘day job’ required a review of recharge rates in parallel with two private sector businesses and a rapid development of methods to overcome parking appeals. Inside six weeks we developed a common charges policy and changed an appeals outcome from 80% failure to 20% simply by understanding the business better to manage the service. Within two months of starting the previously floundering Prince 2 led scheme was on track, with a more ambitious plan developed, leading directly to a £400,000 a year improvement in surplus. The scheme was completed on time, exceeding initial projections.

Following an interim assignment, SSD were awarded a significant consultancy contract to develop a new waste strategy and implementation plan. On the first day that the team were together, we became aware that the garden waste service was in meltdown involving eight back office people being full-time engaged in fire fighting an ‘inadequately’ designed and implemented Prince 2 scheme. Within a VT CPAD [Check/Plan/Appraise/Do] methodology we would seek some ‘quick-wins’ early on as this helps with capacity and positive energy in the review, we had been targeting to start with the ‘Christmas Blip’ (a sudden increase in defects every year).

The three of us picked up all the data we could find relating to the problems experienced in the new Garden Waste service and discovered that there were far more issues on week one than week two of the service. Even stranger was the fact that the team apparently creating the problems were virtually problem free on many days, but having massive problems on other days, so clearly not a team issue. Our initial work was to seek the ‘root-causes’ of the issues with a view to finding a cure for them.

Our initial stage of intervention was achieved by over-writing computer generated work sheets, correcting these in the afternoon prior to issuing the next day. We started our intervention on a Monday morning, by Wednesday that week the back-office issues had halved, with only four people needed to field issues. We continued to work on this which led to us discovering the cause of the issue had started in the contact centre with newly appointed staff failing to fill all the boxes on their forms correctly, leading to transpositions of work between rounds and days of collection. They also failed to ensure that the customers advised where the garden waste would be, with many anomalies as they weren’t at the front gate.

The rapid reduction in pain was worth a great deal to the council from a reputation point of view, especially as this was a ‘paid-for service’, but even more to us as we had apparently waved our magic wands reducing a ‘meltdown situation’ to halved In two days, quartered in four days and eliminated in under a fortnight. What transpired after the event was that the Prince 2 project leader was not comfortable with operations, so had concentrated her efforts within ICT, Finance and Customer Services, the establishment of Direct Debit being far more important than collecting and delivering the materials. The waste manager had repeatedly raised issues with the design, had asked for testing and validation, but was always demoted to a ‘we’ll get onto that later’ platform.

This very rapid improvement created a level of engagement with us for the ‘Christmas Blip’ that was extremely useful, which then led into a review of waste enabling one of the best recycling returns in the country for £1.7M a year less budget than they started with.

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 acknowledges that everything is connected; no one idea is unique or independent of others. This is one of many planned ‘blogs’ to be released over the next couple of years. We would love to hear your thoughts, or to deal with requests via daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk

My waste collection service (at home) is designed and run by a small back office team who neither fully understands how to maximise value for money nor understand the realities of collection logistics. They’re managing change at present from one system to another. They design phases of services to appease the majority of customers, which in this case meant they stopped collecting garden waste three weeks before Christmas and not scheduled to collect it until the third Monday in January while only collecting general waste in the meanwhile. It snowed (so with their H&S hats on) decided to postpone collections this week, thus that bin won’t be collected for another fortnight despite being full with leaves before Christmas. As I recycle in excess of 80% of all that goes out of the house and I’ll have to place compostable materials in my general waste bin, I’m not happy.

Business methodologies over the last thirty years have evolved to create niches of expertise which run virtually autonomously from each other, departments and hierarchies in effect being more important than the business functions or customer service, risk management and internal targets then add harm as often as useful purpose.  The ‘Rethinking Waste’ white paper on the SSD website shows that designing services which integrates Policy, Operations, Disposal, Customer care and Material disposal, will greatly improve service delivery, environmental achievements and massively reduce costs.

NOTE: Visualising Transformation [VT] is a way of working that maximises the information to all people within the system so as to be useful for their purposes. This enables people to see what is happening and have knowledge as to how to use that information which is at the heart of Lean and Systems Thinking.

VT acknowledges that everything is connected; no one idea is unique or independent of others. This is the first of many planned ‘blogs’ to be released over the next couple of years. We would love to hear your thoughts, or to deal with requests via daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk