Lorna Smalley reflects on how Hammersmith & Fulham LBC has turned around a massively failing benefits service For years, Hammersmith and Fulham LBC was held back by the poor performance of its benefits service. Previous attempts at turning the service around came to nothing, and it remained mired in dysfunction. Its reputation as one of the poorest-performing benefits services in London had an effect on the whole council – and its CPA rating. But all that has changed. Now, we can say we have a benefits service we are proud of, where we justifiably say it is delivering value for money and hitting performance targets. The service is on course to save £750,000 of public money. The secret to this success has been a new approach to change management. Instead of parachuting in trouble-shooters to ‘cure' the service's problems from outside, managers decided to put the entire service in ‘incubation'. That meant moving the service into the intensive care of the Customer First department, with the business transformation team providing the extra support and resources needed to get benefits back on the right track. This brought some clarity to the problem. For the first time, the team was able to see where the jams and bottlenecks were. And it was quickly evident the processes in place were not aligned to the IT structure and were actually working against each other, despite a number of big IT changes. With the help of the council's strategic partner Agilisys, a team of business transformation analysts streamlined key processes, cutting out waste and error. The new process greatly improved customer contact and staff activity. The incubation approach meant the change project was treated as a top priority by management. Supervisors were able to free up staff to work with the transformation team on how to fix process problems, and this made the changes less painful for staff and produced a quicker turnaround as a result. It has really worked for us, and I would thoroughly recommend the incubation method to any other authority embarking on a similar project. The change project started in August 2005 and was completed in October 2006. The team devised a pilot to run out some new processes, and this was led by a team of staff volunteers for six months. Almost instantly, there were dramatic improvements. Within weeks, they were reporting performance of 17 days for new claims and six days for claims for ‘changes in circumstance', compared with 62 and 27 at the start of the project. The new processes reduced workloads and telephone calls by 42% through people not having to chase up progress of their claim. In addition there were 23% fewer customer visits, 66% less correspondence needing to be sent asking for information or evidence and 26% fewer documents needing to be scanned and indexed. The pilot was judged successful enough to be rolled out across the whole private sector benefits section. All of this has been achieved with the active participation of the staff and with minimum effect on ongoing service provision. The programme has been carefully managed to ensure there has been little direct confrontation with the trade unions and therefore, no serious industrial action. One of the keys to the success of the incubation approach has been the emphasis on communication with staff, and a change network was set up in October 2005 to make sure everyone was consulted, informed and on board. We wanted people to know that the role of the project was to improve processing times for new claims and change of circumstance, deliver a more cost-effective use of resources, and create a better working environment for the department. Change was placed in the hands of three layers – lead sponsors, who were the new Customer First departmental senior managers; local sponsors, who were existing benefits team leaders; and manager and change agents, who were department officers. A crucial early part of the communications plan was to assess ‘change readiness acceptance', an initiative to work with staff to identify problem areas and underline the need for change. And this had the desired effect, with more than 70% feeling positive and optimistic about the changes ahead. The cost, so far, has been £620,000 for the business transformation team and the Agilisys contract. Staff will be reduced by 30% from next April. This will save at least £1,050,000 from 2007/8 onwards, which will exceed original targets. Improvements still need to be made, particularly in the areas of processing of appeals – still poor performance – and overpayment recovery. But for the first quarter of 2006/7, Hammersmith and Fulham LBC was the third-best inner-London borough, and seventh out of all London boroughs. Lorna Smalley is business transformation manager at Hammersmith and Fulham LBC
