When I joined Wiltshire Council in 2006 as Corporate Director of Community Services - one of five corporate directors overall - I knew I’d be jumping in at the deep end.

I couldn’t help but be aware that Wiltshire social care was in crisis as news about the difficulties it had been having was all over The Guardian and in the professional press too.
I was really keen to join Wiltshire Council again as I’d worked there in the mid 90s and I knew what a great council it was and I also loved Wiltshire itself. The council had had an excellent relationship with its customers in the past; I was really keen to do what I could to solve the crisis.

Our overall objective was for local people to be deeply involved with deciding what services they needed. The problems Wiltshire were having had arisen from an attempt to link up the council and the local health services. The synergy wasn’t working, and everyone was suffering: customers and council officials alike. It hadn’t helped that there’d been an overspend of £11m the previous year, so making savings was as crucial an objective for me as was playing my part in getting community services on the right track again.

Tough

I was braced for a tough few months in my new job, and that was a good thing, because the months certainly were tough. I had to do my best to win and rebuild trust between the council all stakeholders: in particular individual customers (I prefer this more user-friendly word to the more formal and remote ‘service users’) and also our partners such as the Primary Care Trust.

One of the first tasks to which the other corporate directors and I applied ourselves was to address the problem of the highly silo’d structure of Wiltshire Council. This wasn’t helping at all with our imperative of simultaneously effecting a massive improvement in customer services while also saving money. Following a plan developed by Jane Scott, leader of Wiltshire Council, we set to work re-organising the council into a silo-free corporate structure in which everyone at the council could really collaborate and co-operate as they pushed our new initiatives forward.

The new budget, for example, would be managed and spent not by individual silos but by the new, restructured organisation, with the management and expenditure - again, this was Jane Scott’s idea - being based around real, constructive dialogues between Wiltshire Council and its customers. Our overall objective was for local people to be deeply involved with deciding what services they needed. In order to put this aim into practice, we split Wiltshire Council into 20 local community areas and at once applied ourselves to working with customers at these local levels to find out what they most needed from us.
These local areas weren’t new types of silos but simply a convenient administrative way of talking to people. We soon discovered that different localities varied, sometimes more than one might have expected, in terms of the different agendas and priorities they had; I felt discovering this was a positive step because it meant that we were creating the very dialogues we wanted to create.

Dialogue

I found that creating the dialogues at a local level was definitely helping to advance what I regard as my three main professional challenges, namely:

• creating a way for the council to talk to people at a local level
• ensuring that people’s voices are heard
• transforming the way adult social services are delivered to customers

By the summer of 2007, I felt we had made considerable progress with the first two objectives, but I still felt there was still much that we needed to do with the third one. What was needed was, in my view, a pretty comprehensive restructuring of the adult social care department.

The problem was, though, that the department had been restructured many times prior to my arrival, and the resulting new structures (including the one we had by the summer of 2007) were not felt to be right for the purpose they needed to carry out. I think it fair to say that by this point there was a mistrust of management itself carrying out another restructuring.

This being so, I began to wonder whether an external organisation might be able to bring us something we couldn’t perhaps at that stage bring ourselves and which we certainly needed: a muscular, efficient new structure that would be completely focused around our customers’ needs.

Partner

We finally made the decision to find a consultancy partner who could look at how we were delivering adult social services to customers and make recommendations for transforming this.

We put this assignment out to tender, and appointed the business and IT consultancy Charteris to helping us with this. After a careful investigation of our processes and methods, they delivered their report, which they called Focus on customers underpins success in the autumn of 2007.

It made sobering reading. I had been expecting some radical suggestions, but even I was surprised to encounter the main conclusion of the Charteris’s report, which that, in their view, a fairly astonishing 80 percent of our processes for delivering adult social care, did nothing of the kind. Instead, Charteris found that this 80 percent of processes were bound up with our agenda rather than the agenda of our customers, and so were not adding value to what we were offering to our customers.

We want to migrate the way we do things in adult social care throughout the entirety of the council’s organisation.

This was of course a most disconcerting finding, and it was little consolation to be told by Charteris that it was very often the case, elsewhere in the public and private sector, that about 70% or more of corporate effort is, in fact, geared around the organisation’s own needs rather than those of customers.

Customers

Charteris believes that the correct ratio should be that no more than 30% of effort should be devoted to internal matters, with the obvious corollary that 70% of effort needs to be focused on customers.

We accepted the findings of Charteris’s report, and a process then began for putting their recommendations into practice. In broad terms Charteris recommended that we work towards the following goals:

• become outcome-focused
• achieve a culture change that put the customer absolutely at the heart of what we do
• use ‘joined-up’ processes; that is, processes that are not the sole preserve of one department but which go across different departments and which are specifically designed to focus on customers
• work as constructively as feasible with partners
• embed performance management
• improve productivity

Objectives

More specifically, Charteris recommended that we absolutely prioritise the need to listen to customers and then to respond to what customers want. The precise objectives Charteris recommended to us here were as follows:

• obtain an internal view of what was important to customers
• obtain the customers’ view of what they need
• understand the difference between Wiltshire’s view and what the customer needs
• use this different view to align Wiltshire with the customer and develop design principles for use in the ‘to be’ state

These design principles were:

• Right information at the right time
• Design principles for the majority, not the exception
• Empower people to deal with exceptions
• Appropriate use of resources by setting a target of 70:30 ‘value add’ in all we do. In other words, at least 70 percent of our efforts should add value to the customer, with a maximum of our efforts being focused on our own agenda
• Clearly and concisely state the ‘why’, the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ in all communications. This methodology is a powerful precaution against any tendency to vagueness in our correspondence with customers. Every letter or other communication we send out will state why we are sending it, how the matter at hand will help the customer, and when the customer can expect us to have delivered what is necessary.

It wasn’t possible to put the recommendations into practice overnight. The overall aim was nothing less than a complete transformation of how Wiltshire Council delivers social care services to adults, and this has naturally required a change process involving further investigation and the setting of tasks and objectives, as well as a piloting process.

Momentum

The time-frame before we were ready to roll out the full transformation - it began to be rolled out in April 2009 and the roll-out was substantially completed at the end of November 2009 - may seem like a long time, and indeed in private sector terms probably would be.

However, we needed to gauge and test the forward momentum of what we were doing, and educate our 400 staff in what we were doing, as well as - naturally - maintain our services to customers during this period.

In essence, what the roll-out has involved is nothing less than a complete restructuring of our teams, of the management of these teams and of how Wiltshire Council staff work together. A special priority has been placed on the role of the customer co-ordinator (often known internally as the ‘navigator’) who helps customers move through our processes in order to get the best result for the customer.

The first phone call the customer makes to us is regarded as particularly important and we believe we have now become adept at listening to customers, especially during that first phone call, and taking responsibility for addressing customers’ problems.

We also pay particular attention to avoid a situation where the customer is just being tossed from one department to another. We don’t do that; we focus on using the initial phone call to help the customer using all our departments available.

Award

It’s been very gratifying that in March 2009 we received a local government award for connecting communities and were given the national award of being considered a beacon among local authorities.

Even more gratifying was the fact that other councils have acknowledged that they can learn from us. Managers involved in social care from Kent, Warrington and Fife council have visited us over the past few months to find out more about our work.

The roll-out of our new structure for adult social care at Wiltshire was completed at the end of November 2009. The benefits to our customers are clear: this new structure has not been imposed as a ‘top-down’ structure but has been created from the first to minister to what customers really want and has been substantially specified by the very front-line staff who talk to customers every day when customers phone in.

Indeed, the way we handle that first phone call is a vital part of the new structure and the way we do things now. We place a great emphasis now on getting absolutely as much information as we can about the customers’ needs from that very first phone call. We place just as much emphasis on getting feedback from customers about what they think of what we are doing for them.

Benefits

As far as specific benefits to our customers are concerned, I think something of the flavour of the success of what we’ve been doing can be gauged from looking at some numbers, which include:

• since we began the new way of doing things at Wiltshire, nearly 4,000 local people have attended Area Board meetings in Wiltshire and attendances continue to grow
• more than 10,000 local people have now signed up to be involved with work of the Boards through local community area networks
• more than £200,00 has been awarded to support local community projects
• Police, Fire and Rescue, NHS and MOD are fully engaged with our work and attend meetings regularly
• more than 75 percent of parish and town councils have attended Area Board meetings
• we have achieved a 75 percent satisfaction rating for Area Board meetings that take place in many of the areas surveyed. There is also a clear indication that this rating is improving
• issues have been logged on the Area Boards Issues System and more than a third have been resolved during the last cycle
• young people are engaged at two-thirds of Area Boards meetings through the local CAYPIGs (Community Area Young Peoples’ Issues Groups)
• improved audio/visual support and loop system now available with trained technician
• community speedwatch bid launched through the area boards to deal with widespread local concerns.

Perhaps most significantly of all, our new key performance indicators now relate above all to the outcomes we achieve for people.

What about the future? Our aim at Wiltshire is clear: we want to migrate the way we do things in adult social care throughout the entirety of the council’s organisation.
The 70:30 rule will be the guiding light of this migration. This really is the way ahead, and my experience at Wiltshire is that taking every step to put this vital rule that a minimum of 70 percent of our efforts goes towards our customers’ agenda and a maximum of 30 percent of our efforts goes into our own agenda, is the way to achieve the maximum happiness and satisfaction for customers, and to all the people at the council whose reason for going to work is to serve them.

Sue Redmond is corporate director of community services at Wiltshire Council.