Improve public services, one step at a time

We’re in the midst of a huge amount of work to transform government. Government is massive, complex and over 800 years old, so how do we transform it? The answer is: focus on changing one small thing at a time, and eventually it will add up to big change.

The shift towards end-to-end services that truly meet the needs of the public and civil servants will take time to achieve: it’s a long-term and challenging target condition. We are starting a process of innovation in conditions of uncertainty, so we cannot know in advance how we will reach this target condition. It’s up to us, and everyone else working within public services, to run a series of experiments that allow us to make small changes, quickly.

Tools like the ‘plan-do-check-act’ cycle help us to run these experiments and make small changes quickly. Here’s a summary of the cycle:

• Plan. Recognise an opportunity and plan a change.
• Do. Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
• Check. Review the test, analyze the results and identify what you’ve learned.
• Act. Take action based on what you learned in the study step: If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

We can apply these small improvements to our teams, our service areas, our profession, our business units, and public services as a whole.

This general approach to improvement, applied to multiple levels of an organisation, is often referred to as an improvement ‘Kata’ (a Japanese word that’s been taken and used to refer to a basic pattern that is used to improve our mastery of something). It does not tell us what to do, it just tells us how to improve. You can find a video explaining Kata here.

The improvement Kata is suited to conditions of uncertainty, but is also suited to helping us to avoid burn-out. Government is 800 years old and one of the largest organisations in the country - if we each try to change it, at scale, on our own then we will burn out. The improvement Kata helps us to balance the need to help government improve, with the need to set realistic targets: as long as we are focussing on improving one thing every few weeks then we can be proud that we’re doing our job well.

We may want to work more closely with areas of our organisation beyond ‘delivery teams’, like procurement and portfolio. They are both places where prioritisation and investment decisions are made based on value - things that product management does well and should step-up and support. Change management is another area of the organisation that we should work more closely with: continuous delivery and continuous integration are integral to our way of working and are (in effect) modern methods of change management. Lean Enterprise dedicates a section to translating continuous delivery for traditional, enterprise Change Management process.

Reading:

• Transforming a 150-year-old government agency, Tera Atlas
• Why Enterprise Agile Teams Fail, Sam McAfee