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

The public sector has masses of data and almost as many conflicts of interest, the press exacerbates these problems, hounding a mixture of genuine mistakes and stupid errors, such as having laptops stolen or left on trains with confidential information in them, with neither security protection nor encryption to prevent open information.

It’s generally the case that ICT security issues have become more important than saving lives, leading to incredibly stupid situations where an organisation won’t share information between its own departments, let alone between separate organisations. We’ve seen internal security so rigorous that the organisation is losing over £1M a year needlessly and can only get useful information to solve that from the DWP! Of course the new British fascination with litigation aspect also impacts this, such that a care worker may spend 30% of their time caring, 15% travelling and 55% creating records to prove that adequate care has been provided for the circumstances at the time. Invariably these records are in notes fields, involving ‘free-type’ which are not readily accessible to create collective information. (See later blog on Deep-dives for social care)

If all incidents were shared in this way by multiple departments and multiple agencies, you will see that things are happening all over the whole area. GIS is an extremely powerful database with in-built maps, able to carry enormous amounts of information, with an ability to select different information at different scales of mapping, with the ability to zoom-in where-ever there is something of interest.

At a multi-agency level, each agency could have a unique shape (symbol) and or colour for an event, thus six agencies could all share events across their areas, these agencies could include: Police, Fire, PCT’s, Councils, GP’s, Ambulance and larger RSL’s. The amazing thing that will happen at this ‘something happened’ level is that clusters will start to show at certain addresses and locations.

For each agency and department on its own, these clusters may be quite small in number, however, taken together they may suddenly show sixty or seventy issues at, or very close to, a single address. This is still not information, but it is very easy to obtain intelligence which will enable two or more agencies to discuss what is happening at a few key addresses, which in some cases will enable joined up insight to be obtained. The dots on a map do not solve issues, but they will enable better questions within an organisation and across several organisations.

These maps are based on real incidents within a small area of a city (top above) for all environmental issues , which shows quite clearly that many streets and addresses have no issues at all, then there are increasing clusterings around certain estates and more particularly around certain roads and specific addresses. The power of assigning colours and shapes to types of incidents or for each agency also allows a rapid assimilation of what is important in a wide context and for your agency. 

This ‘something happened’ data doesn’t need to be entirely accurate, an aspect which a Police force initially was worried about by taking data straight off their CRM rather than waiting six weeks for it to be evaluated and combined with other clean data. The information to the right depicts a mainly night-time issue of rowdy / inconsiderate behaviour near a night club. GIS filters can be used to isolate prime periods of time, such that Friday and Saturday nights from 20:00 to 2:00 could be displayed separate from the rest of the information.

We were able to show them dozens of multiple issue addresses in their county, not only showing 50+ issues at a single address, but also several properties with 30+ issues either side, simply using and sharing this data sensibly was a big part of their 20% immediate reduction in ASB across the whole county.

At another authority the council’s CCT unit were producing 800 possible police leads a month, which had to be passed onto the 999 system one at a time. We found that by deploying light-duty PC’s in the unit, the immediate engagement of other police officers became simple, with a rapid decrease in minor crime and a 60% reduction in all complaints.

This form of multiple agency mapping and data sharing could be achieved between you and your other agencies in under a week! There will be virtually no cost, there will be savings, not only of lives, but also of time, effort and considerable costs that follow a failure to create and share great information.

The final simple diagram shows how collectives of data from Social Care, the ASB unit, Environmental Health noise complaints, fly-tipping, the PCT and the Police, all can have only a dozen or so issues each at an address, but between them have over fifty issues, when even worrying households will have less than twenty. Data shared simply on the basis that ‘something is happening’ may just be a life-saver.

·         Isn’t this sharing of data preferable to the next Baby P or Pilkington case being in your area?

·         Wouldn’t you prefer different departments to share information rather than add £1M a year to your costs?

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 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

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