COMMENT
A holistic approachtochange
Gill Terry of Birmingham City Council describes how other organisations could learn from the council’s experience, to realise substantial savings and service improvement with a consistent, holistic approach for managing change.
T
he need to change how organisations operate has never been greater, with
constant pressure to become more efficient and effective. The focus is not just on cost-cutting, but on driving efficiency whilst simultaneously improving the quality of services and transforming workforce productivity and performance.
To overcome these challenges, incremental change is often insufficient as it is necessary to fundamentally rethink and radically redesign what a business or organisation does in order that it can flourish in an ever changing world.
Organisations need not only to improve the
transformational change is a complex and risky process and whilst the council was prepared to make the initial investment in improving those services, overall the change programme was required to realise substantial savings. It therefore needed a way to ensure that the improvements and the savings flowed from the investment.
To address these challenges, Birmingham City Council’s own robust approach to change management (the CHAMPS2 method), was designed to ensure an holistic approach to service redesign, encompassing all components of the future service model – people and process as well as technology.
been central to this success, resulting in the organisation becoming a leaner, more efficient, cost-effective and increasingly more customer- focused.
The council is also committed to encouraging and embedding a culture of successful change and propagating best practice across the organisation.
Consequently, the council is now better placed to deal with change in the future and has been recognised externally as a best practice leader in business change.
This has culminated in the development
chances of successful transformational change projects, thus increasing corporate confidence, but also to facilitate the creation of a repeatable model of success, thereby developing a culture that welcomes and seeks out change.
Business change is now perceived as central to organisational sustainability and critical to realising effectiveness and efficiency. This involves not only thinking about creating innovative, often cross-functional processes, but also taking the opportunity to improve technology and the organisational structure to achieve holistic change and propagate a culture of true innovation.
In the case of Birmingham City Council, back in 2006 the key challenge was that significant change was required to improve a number of under-performing services. Embarking on
22 | public sector executive Sep/Oct 12
The CHAMPS2 approach demonstrates that the delivery of successful transformational change has at its heart, the development of a new vision for future service delivery, with a strong focus on making sure that the intended benefits are realised. Adopting a benefit-led approach to realising objectives enabled the council to minimise risk, reduce cost and achieve the successful delivery of innovative and quantifiable transformation. Using CHAMPS2 across the organisation also introduced the advantage of a common language, minimised duplication of effort and provided best practice tools and templates, complemented by a quality management framework.
Birmingham’s radical ten year programme of transformational change is considered the largest such programme ever delivered in the UK public sector. The CHAMPS2 method has
of a range of opportunities, enabling other organisations to gain from using the CHAMPS2 method and learn
from Birmingham’s experience of transformational change.
Access to the entire online method has been made available for free, along with the development of accredited CHAMPS2 training and examinations, formal qualifications and a range of change management support services.
Birmingham’s transformation experience
demonstrates how a business change method with a UK local government origin, can become recognised worldwide and across all sectors, as a useful tool in supporting holistic service redesign and transformational change.
FOR MORE INFORMATION E:
information@champs2.info W:
www.champs2.info
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