Testimonials
I worked with Dave Gaster between May 2014 and December 2014 in his role as Interim Head of Strategic Waste at Manchester City Council. During this time Dave was the senior lead for the procurement of the Councils’ new Waste and Cleansing Contract, a £360m contract over full lifecycle impacting on every resident within the City. |
Daniel developed a reporting and performance management tool to support the control of agency nursing costs across both site [Chelsea and Westminster & West Middlesex University Hospital]. This required developing a standardised, parallel process from two different versions of the same system. The process was designed to support tighter financial controls and better nurse staff management. Following this Daniel developed an analysis of performance across Outpatients function, again, to produce, standardise, comparable data to isolate area of improvement. This was later collated and simplified to create a structured presentation of performance across outpatients, with benchmarks, providing an evidence base for improvement. In both cases Daniel completed the work excellently, overcoming some major shortfall in the systems he was working with. |
Daniel was engaged in February 2015 to review the current implementation of bespoke software and the business processes used by our School & Public Transport teams, with a view to identifying requirements that could be used towards the procurement of a replacement system. Daniel engaged with the teams and worked closely with them to understand how they currently work, the issues, workarounds, frustrations of working with the current systems and any requirements of a replacement system and pulled all this information in to a concise and coherent report with clear recommendations, including process maps that clearly highlighted where a number of efficiencies could be made. |
Daniel has worked with the Directorate for around 9 months and supported a transformation project concerning a review of workforce, pathways and processes. During this time Daniel has been a significant asset to the team and I would have no hesitation in recommending him for similar projects in future. |
Within local Government at a time of reducing budgets and increasing pressure to make savings, transformation programmes are often seen by those being ‘transformed’ as a disguise to simply cut posts. This has the potential to lower morale and reduce productivity. Through SSD's inclusive and transparent approach, officers have been openly engaging, as they understand the benefits the SSD ‘Visualising Transformation' approach can lead to. |
SSD helped with a number of pieces of work quickly identifying new opportunities where both savings and service improvement could be delivered. Their “Visualising Transformation” approach provided the team with a framework to undertake reviews of systems and is now being used as a basis for our approach. |
SSD supported via both interim management and change management roles. |
Support Services Direct worked in Wiltshire Council’s Transformation Programme to deliver the customer access strategy and systems thinking workstream.
Their brief was to:
- Lead substantial service reviews, from a systems thinking knowledge base. With particular focus in our environmental and transport services, and in our corporate services, in collaboration with the service teams.
- Help shape the workstream (a collaborative process), which now has ten substantial reviews under way.
- Coach and mentor the programme workstream lead, and other systems thinking practitioners in Wiltshire Council.
- Increase the council’s competence in systems thinking – both method and capacity.
All these have been achieved ahead of plan and the workstream is now delivering a rapidly expanding programme without any external support.
Support Services Direct team
All the individuals from SSD with whom the council has worked are characterised by their professionalism, commitment, passion, high work ethic and performance focus. They use a robust, holistic and comprehensive systems thinking method which is applicable to all the services they worked in, and which is quickly accessible to people who have little or no previous experience of systems thinking. They have an excellent understanding of the value and use of information, and expertise in creating insight from it and the visual representation of information and insight.
In addition to the above, the consultants are individually notable, as follows;
Dave Gaster (lead): resilient, constantly thinking, experienced, with a wide knowledge of methods and their application – and unstintingly generous with it. Constantly adapted to the evolution of the programme.
John Morgan: calm, approachable, fosters collaboration in an engaging way even with people under day-job pressure. High competence in gathering information, and facilitating the sharing of it. Elegant collation and presentation of information.
Daniel Gaster: particular strength in understanding, defining and mapping processes together with the people who deliver them. Strong understanding of the system as a whole and excellent at working with others to achieve improvement.
Stefan Gaster: reflective and observant; quick and powerful analysis, creation and presentation of information and insight.
John Rogers
Customer Access Strategy and Systems Thinking Lead,
Transformation,
Wiltshire Council.
Daniel was engaged to work within the Strategic Resources department to establish a digital mailroom within the Authority. |
Dave came to work for Wakefield Council as Interim Corporate Director - Communities. |