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Shifting mindsets,
increasing capacity
Driving operational excellence in the public sector
PwC Public Sector
Shifting mindsets,
increasing capacity
Driving operational excellence
in the public sector
4
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
5
Spotlight - The power of Lean in Education
6
Shaking up the routine
7
Spotlight - Thinking Lean in Saskatchewan
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Demystifying Lean
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10 steps to success
10
Spotlight - Lean in health care
11
How we can help
12
Contact
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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3
Creating a culture of continuous improvement
The need for all organizations to find efficiencies, free up capacity
and be more transparent has never been greater. But for public
sector organizations, these pressures are even more acute.
Citizens’ demands are increasing – they want better, faster and
more convenient services – without increased fees. All the while a
demographic shift is happening. An aging workforce is leaving the
job market and with them, critical knowledge of an organization’s
operations. And without budget increases, replacing that talent is a
challenge. This means the public sector needs to do what it does best:
find ways to improve performance without increasing costs. A shift in
mindset has to happen, focusing on improved service levels, creating
capacity, increasing productivity and growing capabilities. And in
order to do this, leaders need to focus on the citizen and find ways
to reduce waste and improve value-added activities. By approaching
these challenges with evidence-based techniques, cultural change
can take hold and stick to drive overall operational excellence.
What’s operational
excellence?
Operational excellence is a combination of approaches that create
a mindset of continuous improvement. This is achieved through
organizational behaviour change, which looks at how leaders
lead and how teams work. Then by assessing what work gets done
and when, you’re able to eliminate wasteful activities to increase
productivity and capacity.
Tools
Streamline
activities
Focus on
the citizen
Resource
capacity
Mindsets and
behaviours
Measurement
Employee
engagement
Sustainable
change
Lean
Perform
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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Spotlight
The power of Lean in Education:
Making change stick
At Ontario’s Mohawk college, Lean practices are being applied
across the organization. Their first project focused on identifying
and analyzing key processes in IT and Human Resources that would
have a significant positive impact on students, faculty and support
staff. This included the password creation and reset process and the
triaging of new requests in IT. Within HR they honed in on three
key processes, including the request to hire process, the recruitment
process, and the performance management process. The key
stakeholders in IT and HR helped identify the processes that would
have the greatest impact on their team’s workload, and would have
the most significant impact on the end user. They worked with
these stakeholders throughout the engagement to understand, from
their perspective what needed to change.
People involved in the
project now look at
everything they do on a
daily basis completely
differently, and the
excitement about the
possibilities of Lean
across the institution Based on the five HR and IT processes, there was a lot of work to
continues to grow. be done in just four months. The identified processes were mapped
and to keep momentum going, the project teams identified ‘quick
wins’ and future-state opportunities. The ‘quick wins’ were areas
that could be changed immediately in order to have a profound
impact on the operational processes. The future state opportunities
are projects on the horizon. The short timeline helped drive
momentum, and kept the project team engaged and focused on the
end goal.
For many involved, it was the first time to see the end-to-end view
of a process, which they found to be an eye-opening experience,
and another factor that helps instill a culture of continuous
improvement. People involved in the project now look at
everything they do on a daily basis completely differently, and the
excitement about the possibilities of Lean across the institution
continues to grow.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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5
Shaking up
the routine
The traditional way of working means management is focused on
emails, meetings and fighting fires, leaving them no time to coach,
mentor and develop their people. That leaves staff unclear on daily
priorities or where they should be focusing their efforts. Peaks
and lulls in demand lead to a disparity in resources where some
teams are significantly over-burdened with work, while others
have greater capacity. This constant state of flux means problems
are rarely fully resolved with workarounds put in place in an
effort to save time. By removing these layers of band-aid solutions
– and getting to the root cause of the problem – organizations can
unlock significant capacity and improve productivity to deliver
more efficient and better quality services, quickly with limited
capital investment.
So where do you start? Our approach to creating a mindset of
continuous improvement in organizations is underpinned by
Lean principles and techniques. They’ve proven to be effective
in delivering substantial benefits by improving and sustaining
organizational performance. It brings senior management closer
to day-to-day operations, and engages front line staff in problemsolving.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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6
Spotlight
Thinking Lean in Saskatchewan
Finding efficiencies has become a key mandate for governments
in Canada as citizens’ needs increase, infrastructure depletes
and costs continue to climb. The Government of Saskatchewan
embarked on a government-wide project to improve the
It’s estimated that effectiveness of government services and create a culture of
$20M in costs have continuous improvement within the civil service. Saskatchewan is
the first province in North America to deploy Lean across all aspects
been avoided, and of the provincial government.
process cycles and
wait times have Our team was selected for Lean consulting, training and
been reduced. implementation across executive government ministries and some
crown corporations. We’ve been developing and customizing
training material, and have trained executives and frontline staff
through a full suite of Lean tools and techniques. Staff have been
following our “See, Learn, Do” approach to complete knowledge
transfer and become proficient in operational performance
methodologies.
To date, we’ve trained over 250 deputy ministers, assistant deputy
ministers and executive directors in Lean fundamentals. We’ve
trained almost 3,500 managers, supervisors and front-line staff
in basic Lean tools and techniques. Over the last four years we’ve
assisted about 20 ministries and crown corporations to complete
more than 250 continuous improvement events and an additional
300 events have been completed by internal resources. As a result
of efficiencies and resource capacity that’s been freed up across
government. It’s estimated that $20M in costs have been avoided,
and process cycle and wait times have been reduced. All of these
efficiencies have resulted in a return on investment of over 10 times
the project cost.
Lean philosophy will continue to play a major part in how the
Government of Saskatchewan works, how leadership leads and
how the civil service thinks about and performs work in all areas
of government.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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Demystifying Lean
A common misconception about Lean in the public sector
is that it’s about reducing the size of government. Lean, as
a philosophy, strives to create value in the most efficient
way, freeing up capacity for more important work to get
done. Originating from the Toyota Production System,
Lean Thinking has been developed and applied to various
industries in the last few decades. The administration,
development and delivery of public services are burdened by
bureaucratic processes that divert focus away from end-users’
needs. Lean Thinking, with its focus on waste elimination,
flow and value creation, has proven to be an effective
response to dramatically improving public service processes.
Lean techniques such as value stream mapping and
kaizen rapid improvement events identify and eliminate
unnecessary and non-value added activities that have built
up over time. Lean efforts aren’t just about fixing broken
processes. Public sector organizations have found that these
methods allow them to understand how their processes
work on the ground and to build a culture of continuous
improvement. By getting process activities and procedures
to function smoothly and consistently, you’re able to free
up staff time to focus on higher value activities. While
successfully implementing Lean requires hard work and
commitment, the results can be instantly impressive.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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10 steps to
success: Perform
Perform is our approach to operational excellence that enhances
what staff do, how they do it, and the tools they use. It’s based
on Lean best practices, but focuses on long-term, sustainable
behavioural changes. Perform is about improving productivity –
A 10 module performance elevating the inputs, resources and processes to deliver the desired
management system business outcomes. It’s a 10 module performance management
system introduced incrementally through weekly learning cycles
introduced incrementally
and supported through daily on-site coaching.
through weekly learning
cycles and supported Perform addresses cross-functional or cross-organizational
through daily on-site issues by bringing the right stakeholders to the table to problemcoaching. solve. Perform creates a culture of measurement, accountability
and continuous improvement and addresses the root causes of
why many “traditional” Lean programs fail. It drives radical
improvements in the performance of teams within an organization
and is deployed throughout, locking in the gains for good. Because
the benefits stem from behavioural change, it’s quicker and cheaper
than traditional process redesign and IT investments.
Celebrating
success
Information
centres
Coaching
and
capability
Process
confirmation
Performance
reviews
Perform
Standards
and value
stream
mapping
5S and visual
management
Vision
Problem
solving
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
Learning cycle
Design
Review
Training and
coaching
Construct
Implement
Routines
and
practices
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Spotlight
Lean in health care: Engaging staff,
improving patient outcomes
One example of where Lean is being employed is in a clinical
setting at one of Canada’s largest health care organizations. Over
What we’ve been able the last three years we’ve been engaged in helping realign what
to achieve is aligning frontline teams and clinical staff work on by mapping their skills
people with the highest and capabilities to the work that they’re doing.
skills and capabilities
focused on the highest
patient needs and
priority clinical
activities.
What we’ve been able to achieve is aligning people with the
highest skills and capabilities focused on the highest patient needs
and priority clinical activities. We’ve done that by engaging all
the clinical teams to identify the key metric or area of focus. For
instance, in the nursing and clinical care teams we’ve been working
to align them on a single day of discharge for each patient. This has
a direct impact on improved patient care.
How we’ve been able to do this is simple: by engaging staff. We
worked to put plans in place to help monitor performance with
the patient’s family, the various clinical sub groups as well as
the logistical teams. By focusing on that we’ve seen 20% to 30%
improvements in attaining a single day of discharge, which frees up
bed space, resulting in a big impact on wait times, overall patient
experiences and clinical outcomes.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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How we can help
The transfer of skills and capabilities are
core to our Lean and Perform approaches.
We train groups of employees, or Change Agents, so that
operational excellence becomes a part of the organization’s
culture. Over a 10-12 week period, Change Agents are identified,
trained and coached, becoming self-sufficient to lead operational
improvement projects moving forward. We do this in three
important phases: See, Learn, Do.
See
We work with you to implement 10 modules
that drive new behaviours to deliver a step
change in performance.
Learn
We teach you Lean and Perfrom mindsets and
coach Change Agents on behaviours to build
transformational skills across teams, from
top-down and bottom-up.
Do
Organizations become self-sufficient, driving
continuous improvement in everything they do.
By creating a culture of continuous improvement, the Lean and
Perform approach helps public sector organizations drive efficiencies
to improve service delivery, create added capacity and increase
productivity.
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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For further information
contact:
Haneef Chagani
Partner, Consulting & Deals
[email protected]
604 806 7071
James McLean
Partner, Consulting & Deals
[email protected]
403 509 7535
Shifting mindsets, increasing capacity
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