Business Transformation Through Incubation
The Challenge:
One of the projects tackled under the innovative incremental partnership between Hammersmith & Fulham and Agilisys was the Council’s Housing Benefits Service. The Council, highly rated in other services, had only a 2-star rating for Housing Benefits, and, crucially, was on the brink of DWP intervention.
As such, the challenge the Council faced was to improve customer service and gain significant savings:
- Reduce processing time, improve performance, and raise the CPA score to 3-star within 6 months,
- Reorganise the service the following year, to achieve cost savings of £750,000/year
The Solution
The Council took an innovative approach to tackling the problem, transferring the Housing Benefits service into the Customer First division of the Council, a division specifically set up to deliver cross-service customer-focused improvements, supported by the Hammersmith & Fulham-Agilisys partnership.
The Housing Benefits service was incubated within Customer First, under the supervision of an experienced Senior Manager working with the Transformation Manager. The Transformation Manager worked with the Business Transformation team, set up by the Council in 2004 as a change team through which both process and organisational changes are delivered. Council staff seconded into this team worked closely with experienced Agilisys staff to transfer skills and knowledge.
As a first step for the Housing Benefits project, a project team of Council and Agilisys staff was created first to assess and analyse where problems arose, and then to re-engineer processes as necessary, supported by a detailed communications programme.
The assessment uncovered a number of issues, including incorrect initial applications, additional errors through duplication of entries, and significant additional administrative time required simply to follow-up on and correct errors. Furthermore, these errors were not noticed until Housing Benefits specialists entered the process at a much later date, causing additional delays.
With the knowledge gained through the investigation as well as our experience working across the public sector, we worked with the Council to design new processes, rolling them out first through a pilot, and then gradually across the service, ensuring any learnings were incorporated into each iteration
The Benefits
H&F Housing Benefits improved their CPA rating from 2-star to 3-star in the space of just six months, with average processing time for new claims reduced from 62 days to only 36 days. The Council continues to improve as it actively works towards a 4-star rating for this service currently assessing new claims in 26 days.
The project has also been a success financially, as the new processes have significantly reduced workloads, enabling 30% redeployment of staffing of the service while continuing to provide improved customer service. This has generated a savings of over £1m/year from 2007/8 onwards, significantly more than originally forecast.