Changing the change

Agile for Public Services

Matt Barnaby, Dennis Vergne

We work with the front line of public services

You start with…

• Varied & complex services

• Reducing budgets & shrinking teams

• A background of constant change

Change in Public Services, It’s not a sprint

… so is it a marathon?

They have to deal with…

• Services that often work in silos

• Political worries & pressures

• Vulnerable & excluded service users

They have to deliver…

• Real hard cash savings

• Clear benefits for residents

And they still have to keep on doing the day job

…actually, it’s more akin to a

full-on ironman

So do we give up?Or change the way change has been done?

3X3 changes

For public services,

This is

how it often feels

This how we feel - sometimes

Dennis

Matt

• Process complicated• Service fragmented• IT not integrated• Teams demoralised• No holistic view of problems, • difficult to intervene early and prevent

Seven separate teams responsible for investigating all forms of ‘anti-social behaviour’ including ‘fly tipping’, abandoned vehicles, noise nuisance, street drinking etc.

Whole Service Agile Prototyping

1. Recognise that we deal with complexity

2. Change the fundamentals: Agile change, adaptive leadership and organisation

3. Involve people who feel the ‘pain’4. Start whole service prototyping

quickly5. Focus on practical behaviour

change6. From self-management of

project/dev teams to whole org

Our approach

Three types of problems

Complicated Complex

An English person driving…getting from A to B

in London in Amsterdam in Cairo

Simple

1. Recognise that we deal with complexity

Big complexity ..…front-line public services facing changes in business model & culture

From

•More policing

•Technology products

• Fixing ill people

•Catching criminals

•Retribution

•Making you pay

•Support for the farmers

To

•Prevention and community solutions

•Customer inquisitiveness

•Promoting healthy people

•Preventing crime

•Rehabilitation

•Helping you pay your way

•Sustainable environment

From (based on) work from: Keith Ruddle

Recognising the problem…world we live in

Change the fundamentals

Dimensions of change

Complicated ->

ProgrammaticComplex ->

AdaptiveLeadership Manage change from the top.

Teach solution and motivate. Direct people to perform.

Encourage participation from the bottom up. Set purpose, challenge, boundaries and coach.

Focus of change

Emphasise structure and systems. Achieve standardisation and consistency.

Innovation, diversity and deviancy

Process Plan and establish (Waterfall approach-based) programmes

Experiment and evolve (Agile)

Organisation Performance management, performance indicators

Motivate through commitment, purpose and freedom for self direction (TEAL organisations)

Use of consultants

Consultants analyse problems and shape solutions (expert)

Consultants support employees in shaping their own solutions (midwife)

Table: adapted from Theory E & Theory O by

Beer and Nohria

2. Change the fundamentals: Agile change, adaptive leadership and organisation

3. Involve people who feel ‘the pain’

“..If you are not part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution….” Bill Torbert

4. Start whole service prototyping quickly

“You only understand a system once you start to change it” Kurt Lewin

• Real user engagement

• Prototype team with people from five different teams started on day 3

• Directly gaining anti-social behaviour calls – filtered for a few post-codes

• First call – turns out that all five teams had knowledge of background

• Other partners involved – including police (confession)

• Prototype grown to cover all postcodes. Prototype became the ‘business as usual team’

• More prevention, higher motivated team, £0.5 million savings

Whole Service Agile Prototyping

© Basis Ltd

• Complexity across different teams, working on different things, in different ways. Yet to the same service user

• ‘Business as usual’ is the driver therefore they are not able to engage with change full time

• One of the ways to momentum is to start with a ‘rapid improvement event’ – getting individuals to collaborate on the issues, opportunities and define ‘potential testable elements’ before co-creating and initiating prototypes

• Such an “event” can take between 3 days and 15 days. For instance, see a 5 day event:

For example

5. Focus on practical behaviour change

“It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting”

Richard Torseth @rtorseth

Self organising teams

From: N. Obolenski

6. From self-management of project/dev teams to whole org

Driven by user needs over "expert" solution

Individuals & interactions over processes & tools

Working prototypes over comprehensive business cases

Making changes and learning from them

overmaking set plans and following them

Changing behaviour through experience

over learning theory

The Agile for Services Manifesto*

*with obvious respect to the Agile Manifesto

Get involved! www.agileservicemanifesto.org

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