Delivering £multi-million productivity improvements

There are always challenges in delivering Public Services in a rapidly changing world. Set that against the further complex background of dealing with Asylum applications as turmoil and refugees have spread from the Balkans to the Middle East and beyond. The teams dealing with this had little technological support and a massive paper-trail of casework.

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At this point we entered the scene to mentor a senior manager for a pilot project to tackle the problem head-on. Detailed understanding of managing people, team building and priority-setting were brought together via one-to-one mentoring and team workshops. Morale improvement was a significant element of the solution, alongside confidence in the team’s capability. We dealt with this by benchmarking best practice from other organisations and translating this into the specialist world of Immigration and international treaty obligations which add layers of constraint.

The outcome was a revision of the processes that delivered a productivity improvement of 70% (using the client’s own metrics). In addition the job satisfaction of the team members also increased dramatically as they took control of the situation. Perhaps as importantly the team were then able to become change ambassadors for a directorate of over 900 staff. It marked a turning point in the management of one of the most difficult areas of civil service operations.