Work within this service followed on from two previous 2 previous programmes within the Trust, both within operational services, resulting in a financial improvement of £2.8 million. Meridian were asked to complete a programme within the corporate functions to move their focus away from transactional duties and towards more value adding duties. The Trust wanted for their corporate functions to be more customer focussed and supply the best experience for operational services.
Meridian worked with the all staff within the corporate services through a series of interactions, consisting of workshops and individual sessions. During these various sessions, old practices and transactional duties were challenged to discover if there was a better/ more productive way to get to the same outcome and ensure the staff can add more value within their work for the same input of time (doing more work with the same resource.
The workshops consisted of two parts: one of which duties can be stopped and the second part focussing on what activities could be added to the workload. In the first part Meridian helped the service line challenge the status quo and establish actions to positively change their previous ways of working. The second part was all about the service line beginning to work smarter and value adding, once the time spent completing transactional duties had been taken away.
The process implemented within the corporate services was aimed at streamlining processes, ensuring less work being spent doing transactional duties and remove, instead focussing on value adding, ensuring the operational services were best supported to deliver their day to day care.
The main results of the programme are:
- Throughout both corporate projects, the Trust has reinvested £225,000 back in to services through removing nonvalue adding duties;
- Reducing month end budget reporting from a high of day 12 to day 4, releasing time to be spent with operational services;
- Produced project plan for automating 35% of Information reporting, releasing 60-70 hours once fully automated and running;
- Education & Workforce Development can now update their Electronic Staff Records (ESR) at the point and time of delivering training, keeping the system as up to date as currently possible;
- Workforce Services no longer require 7,500 vehicle documents due to utilising the system in a smarter/ more effective way. Additionally, they have been able to stop recording information manually, which can be kept within the ESR;
- Improved communication channels, reducing the duplication of effort within each Corporate Service and ensuring the correct activities are sat with the correct service lines and that information has been appropriately handed over;
- Produced a standardised project approach for the Transformation team, resulting in consistent delivery of projects irrespective of project manager, leading to improved project results;
- Provided a greater transparency within services around their current duties, which are ‘must do’ or ‘value adding’ in terms of governance and output;
- Producing service offers where necessary, which provide guidance and accountability for where responsibilities lie;
- Removed service specific drop-in sessions, where the output was being duplicated through a separate function/ forum;
- Refined a newly installed PMO process following various feedback from services experiencing the process for the first time. Thus, ensuring a fit for purpose process, that is understood and achievable for operational services.
All the above improvements have ensured that Corporate Services within scope of the project became more fit for purpose and became a better support network for operational services. All the previously required information has been transferred in to a more user-friendly setting. Resulting in staff being able to self-certify/ complete, whilst removing delays and manual input in to processes.