BWoW pilot layout (2002)
at the moment BWoW was adopted as the standard for Ealing’s office accommodation, the Council embarked upon a major service change programme restructuring entirely the manner in which it provided services to its customers. Seeking to maximise the number of transactions within a single customer ‘visit’ (whether that be ‘in person’, by telephone or online) this change programme required major adaptations to the ground floor of the headquarters building (Perceval House) to provide individual service points, online facilities, waiting areas and interview rooms. The role of BWoW was of significant importance in delivering sufficient volumes of ‘back office’ accommodation to support these ‘front line’ customer interfaces. Visitors to Perceval House were to expect a single customer service agent to be able to answer most of their basic questions with the offer of an interview with a specialist to be arranged and completed within a specific and highly ambitious timeframe. The flexible working features of BWoW were vital to allow these specialists (who might otherwise be working at another location) to be accommodated within their own department for a period before and after their interaction with the customer.
Fortunately the EPT were given sanction to invest approximately £350k in a pilot study in order to test the validity of the assumptions made in the report. To ensure the maximum chance of success the EPT capitalised upon a restructure of the Council’s Property Services to bring two sections that had previously not worked together into a single location, laid out in accordance with BWoW workspace principles. The process was a challenging one but following a period of review and measurement of key success factors the EPT were able to report a very satisfactory set of results (space and cost savings of over 40%) and qualitative outcomes (high staff satisfaction ratings) to ACES Conference in Troon in 2003.
As might be expected when one programme becomes subsumed within another, larger one some of the features of the original BWoW project were ‘lost’ or altered in a manner not altogether sympathetic to the principles established and tested within the pilot. Of particular relevance was the replacement of ‘clustered’ groups of desks, which had provided a ‘close’ fit with the non-orthogonal shape of Perceval House’s office floors, with linear agglomerations of ‘single person’ desk types. This arrangement excluded ‘perching’ in which laptop users occupied either the ends or junctions between the clusters and discouraged staff from voluntarily ‘co-locating’ to undertake joint tasks; a method of working that was observed on many occasions during the pilot study and which delivered unexpected improvements in occupation densities. The rationale used by the overall service change management project team was that once installed, the open-plan desking and meeting room layouts (which replaced the ‘light touch’ moveable enclosures of the BWoW pilot with rigidly fixed, conventional meeting rooms) would not change. This proved to be an error which, as will be discussed later, proved to be a constricting factor in subsequent efforts to develop the BWoW model. Other departures from the pilot template were removal of the informal ‘soft’ meeting areas and replacement of ‘local’, small-scale breakout spaces with larger, single, cafe- like, facilities distributed at a ratio of one per floor.
New work settings (2005) ‘Roll-out’ of BWoW
Having achieved its initial objective of obtaining support from the Board for the principles of BWoW and demonstrated its effectiveness through the pilot study, the task for the EPT was to ‘roll-out’ the pilot model across some 1800 work settings in the initial phase. A workplace change programme on such a scale would inevitably involve expansion of the delivery team and collaborative working with other departments. However
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The service change management timetable was an exacting one and the BWoW model of designing workspace clusters through consultation with users had to be abandoned in favour of ‘generic’ layouts, identical regardless of the service function being accommodated. The ‘swing space’ required to permit half of a floor of Perceval House to be refurbished every four months was achieved by the EPT who negotiated with the housing department to move staff forming their emerging ‘arms length management organisation (ALMO) to a suitably ‘arms length’ location away from Perceval House. Work commenced in early 2005 and was completed by October 2006 with staff migrating from other office locations as part of a general re-distribution of staff around the building. Apart from Property Services no other teams Council staff had ever worked within the new office arrangements and considerable credit is due to Ealing managers for adapting their working practices in such a short period of time.
THE TERRIER - Autumn 2011
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