The team at C I Systems are supporting an increasing number of local authorities with projects related to all things process. These projects relate to a number of issues:

•  The need for performance improvement
•  Improved service delivery
•  Better documented procedures
•  Process change
  •  for new contact centres (front office change affecting back office processes)
  •  due to the introduction of new technologies
  •  for organisational change

With a greater emphasis on process change in the public sector across the UK, the skills to deliver these projects effectively need to be learned. There are some authorities making great savings and delivering efficiency improvements, whilst others are not sure where to start. C I Systems have been supporting these projects for several years, and offer a range of services to government organisations to deliver process change. There is a new vocabulary in the public sector and C I Systems can help you understand it and train for the new methodologies that are being talked about.

BPR, Process Improvement, LEAN, Six Sigma, Process Mapping. All important in delivering efficiency savings. But which do you need to know about to deliver your project? Where do you start and what skills and tools are you going to need?

For example, at its simplest level, LEAN is about improving the flow of work through the organisation to deliver better service faster. To do this you need to identify:

•  What activities are adding value in the process
  •  e.g. ask yourself if your customers would pay you to do this?
    
•  What activities do not add value and do not contribute to the delivery of that service?
  
•  Where is there nothing happening?
  • Where is the process stalled and ask yourself why.

Clearly the objective is to ensure that the maximum percentage of the time is in value added activities. From the moment when your customers request a service to the time when it is delivered, analysts claim that typical service delivery organisations spend less than 5% of this time on activities that are adding value. What we can do is look at where the waste is, and help you remove it. We are working with more local authorities who are wanting to apply the concepts of LEAN in to service delivery and these authorities are getting the benefits of reducing waste in the process and delivering better services sooner.

Corporate Information Systems are supporting these projects with the software, training and consultancy in order to deliver these projects more efficiently.

Procedures Manuals

• Do you have a procedures manual?
• IF the answer to the first question was yes - Is your procedures manual up to date?
• Does it truly represent how you work today?
• Is the manual easy to manage, update and access by all your staff?

If the answer to all these questions is yes - then it may be you are a customer already!. If not then let us remind you of the importance of well documented, easy to access, procedures.

A key part to managing processes are properly documented procedures. These are key not just for audit compliance (to get a tick in the box!), but to ensure that your services are delivered with consistency. Consistently delivered processes are inherently more efficient.

Housing Benefits and Local Taxation are the departments within a local authority with perhaps the greatest volumes of cases and documentation. Therefore these departments are where process improvement can have a great impact.  With our associates, we have developed pre-written procedures manuals for Council Tax, NNDR and Housing Benefits. These manuals are provided with a support package to ensure that they are tailored to your organisation, your systems and your methodologies.

For a minimal investment and limited involvement from your staff this is a customised off the shelf solution.

Within Local Taxation we have 2 sections to the procedures manuals, for Council Tax and NNDR. In both of these manuals there are over 25 different procedures, modelled and documented which are available for easy customisation to use in any Local Authority. If you follow the link here, you can view just one process, see how easy it is to follow the informaiton and read the instructions:

Link to the Procedures Guide for "Summons to Court".

In the same way C I Systems can work with all departments of a local authority, housing assocation or health trust to develop your procedures manuals. Increasing demands by auditors require that these are accurate and maintained. Using Protos this is straightforward. So the consultants of C I Systems can either develop these procedures with your staff, convert existing procedures in to Protos and ensure that these are maintained and up to date.

Email: Request information here