what practical methods exist to enable the teams to trust their new approach and not revert to old thinking?

I have worked with many teams over the years that process applications for housing benefit in the UK, in the main they have understood the key principles they need to follow in order to add maximum value to their customers, they find new and innovative ways to delight their customers and are in general happy with the new approach to the work.

One of the key issues that keeps cropping up again and again is whilst the is still an inherited backlog of work, i.e. Before capacity levels with demand, some teams find it very difficult to see past the backlog and the failure demand it causes they therefore find it easier to revert back to old habits in terms of trying to manage the work and the staff.

To address this problem I work with the teams and their leaders to focus on delivering value to customers and trusting that the backlog will reduce given time, whilst this has worked on many occasions, sometimes it is less successful. The question this poses is "what practical methods exist to enable the teams to trust their new approach and not revert to old thinking?"

LinkedIn

I find linked in an excellent website to keep upto date with my colleagues and ex colleagues, please feel free to have a look at my profile on http://www.linkedin.com/in/lwalkerbtc

Thought Provoking Debate

Having worked in Local Goverment for 20+ years, if find this debate fascinating, I know which camp I am in, some of the comments are fantastic!!

Cut the Audit Commission, not public services - http://www.lgcplus.com/5003845.article

By all means criticise us, but get your facts straight - http://www.lgcplus.com/by-all-means-criticise-us-but-get-your-facts-straight/5004206.article

Lets Create a Goup of Common Purpose

Are you interested in joining forces to share ideas and improvement activities you have undertaken in your business / organisation.

I work predominately in the public sector helping many organisations to improve the quality of their services for their clients using System Thinking.

I would like to offer any Teesside based business the opportunity to understand some of the opportunities System thinking can bring by organising a group of like minded individuals to get together on a regular basis. Please leave comments if you are interested in supporting such a group.

Work In Progress Board

Whilst working in many different areas of the service sector I have learned that there are many similarities to what on the face of it seem like diverse services. There is sometimes a need in each of these high transactional services like payroll or accounts payable, to understand visually the volume of work in progress and where bottlenecks are occurring. This is something that teams find really hard to visualise as most of the work in the this type of system is buried in IT systems.

The point of this blog is to ask the system thinking community if anyone has come across any way of help teams to see where the problems are in the system.