City Of Edinburgh Council are an enterprise customer with unlimited usage of Engage Process. They moved rapidly from Gold to Platinum to Enterprise in a 3 month period based on evaluation of the outcomes and benefits for their organisation. We were lucky enough to have a case study at Local Gov Camp of what they have achieved and here we have captured a high level view of their approach and their achievements.
A small central team has enabled and developed an enterprise continuous service improvement capability and they achieved it in a year. That capability continues to deliver benefits and the team at Edinburgh continue to push us to help them deliver more. We truly appreciate what they have achieved and were luck to be able to get 15 minutes to record this video where Martyn Thompson from the Lean and Automation Team at City of Edinburgh Council describes some of their journey and what they are achieving in their Continuous Service Improvement approach (TM City of Edinburgh!).
We will also have the full case study so watch this space but for the moment sit back and enjoy a Devonshire idiot talking to Martyn about just some of the things they have achieved and the savings they have found using Engage Process the best process improvement software suite.
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Why use Engage Process? What can you achieve?
Edinburgh Case Study
Andy Sandford: [00:00:00] Okay, so we are here this morning, actually it’s just about this afternoon. I’m Andy Sandford. I’m lucky enough to have one of our fantastic customers in Edinburgh on the line. And I just thought we would do a quick session because we often get asked to put people in contact with Edinburgh, so trying to be a bit more efficient and practice what we preach here, and maybe cover some of the questions that people would ask Martin and the team with me. I’ll just let Martyn introduce himself.
Martyn Thompson: [00:00:36] Yes, Andy. Thank you. And my name is Martyn Thompson, I’m a Senior Change and Delivery Officer for the City of Edinburgh Council and I work in the Lean Automation team.
Andy Sandford: [00:00:45] Brilliant, mate. Thank you. So i have just got a couple of questions really. What were some of the challenges? You’ve been with us for 14, 16, 18 months now. And you had some challenges. There was a reason why you engaged with us. At an event went ooh we like the look of that. Tell us more.
Martyn Thompson: [00:01:05] So, yes certainly so I wasn’t part of obviously the reason Engage was brought in. Engage was brought in to part of a continuous kind of reviews in the council and a program of work was going to take place called the ERP to look at systems for H.R. debt, accounts receivable, banking and procurement. And I was fortunate enough to get a project manager job last in 2018 late 2018. And as a result of that, I was kind of put for put directly towards the team who will using Engage Process as somebody who’s used Visio before I was a bit apprehensive about picking up another Visio tool. But I think within the first five minutes of getting a demo of Engage Process quickly realized that this is not Visio. This is a separate kind of entity that gives you a whole host of different things that you didn’t get with Visio. Our challenging at Edinburgh, as with a lot of public bodies, is to save money effectively, to look at processes, to look at services, to look at things happening within the Council that we can identify the financial benefits too. So Engage Process allowed us to actually do that.
Andy Sandford: [00:02:19] Great mate. Oh, that really hurt me when you said another Visio tool. We’re definitely not that.
Martyn Thompson: [00:02:26] No, certainly not no, no, no, certainly not.
Andy Sandford: [00:02:29] Not that there’s anything wrong with Visio in the right place.
Martyn Thompson: [00:02:32] No Visio, has its purpose.
Andy Sandford: [00:02:35] Yeah. Thank you. How’s it helped you? What’s it helped you to achieve?
Martyn Thompson: [00:02:40] Helped me personally to understand the process from end to end, to understand who’s involved in the process, what is involved in the process, whether that be transport or ICT systems dependencies it helps me to understand the time a process takes and the cost attached to that process as well. So those are my kind of primary factors that help me when using that erm it helped me as someone who might be going into a service area that I have no understanding or background knowledge of. Help me quickly get up to speed with what the process is erm it has certainly helped my team do the same and really helped us, as I said, to Andy in previous conversations, helped us base our evidence, our findings and our business cases on fact.
So as before, you may have had averages or rough, rough estimates. We really try and get as much kind of hard concrete figures and tankage process that really drives the confidence up and in ourselves. When we present an update to someone we know, we’re presenting them back factual information. And as we know, we have a kind of three step validation process. So we will process map out what is service or get the service to map out the process for us. We will then reconvene and validate it with them subject matter experts or service managers. And then we will reconvene again and have a leaning workshop. So normally a 3 step validation process where people involved in the process and business analysts our changing and delivery officers can actually be part of the conversation with the managers and really go through it and have confidence that the process map is kind of the realistic process that exists.
Andy Sandford: [00:04:29] That’s great. I mean, just picking up slightly the wider stakeholder bit. One of the things I find is really, really important is about a shared visual demonstration of the process with all stakeholders. So for me, it’s about how have you found that? Because obviously you build in live in workshop, has it how to get the stakeholders all on the same page.
Martyn Thompson: [00:04:54] Yes. Yeah. As before. There’s maybe a problem in the council where we can have documented processes and this obviously allows us to document our processes. But really having a visual tool on screen in front of someone when you’re mapping something out really helps to drive confidence in the stakeholders. So they were confident that they were confident that that was what the process was. And if you going to then change the process and rather than presenting a to be vision, we can actually present a To Be process so we can show them quite clearly this is what we anticipate and expect and then measured and measured the process to be in the future. And it rather than it being a written tool or a tool that’s hard to understand, it’s quite visual on the screen for senior managers to get round, get their heads round and have confidence in what you’re doing.
Andy Sandford: [00:05:44] there self I find it helps as well in terms of do people feel an ownership, you know, for central team comes in and they plaster the wall with post-test and they go away and they construct some savings and, you know, an excel sheet. Some reports of Visio map maybe there’s not that same ownership because what the stakeholders get back is different. So a good thing with the engage is the fact that people see it and the fact that people can own it and feel ownership of the product.
Martyn Thompson: [00:06:21] And what we normally do is we will give people access to the map. So if you were a senior manager, you had a management team of, say, half a dozen, we would give them access to the project so they could actually come in at any point they wanted and say, well, where are we at with this project how the process maps getting on. They could just come in themselves and have a look they don’t need to request access. We will set them up access for that project just to read only access we will give them read only access for that project. So any kind of point we can jump into and have a look to see how we are getting on with the redesign.
Andy Sandford: [00:06:54] Yeah. So it really does help avoid that. It’s not been done to us. It’s with us and.
Martyn Thompson: [00:07:02] With us Yeah. There’s collaboration it’s a really collaborative tool.
Andy Sandford: [00:07:05] And it makes it makes delivery so much easier if that’s the attitude. Sometimes you can get really, really delayed in projects where stakeholders react really badly to the outputs and you end up doing huge amounts of rework. So tell us a bit about what you’ve achieved, Mate. I mean, you’ve got some great numbers in just over a year. So do you want to, can you share some of them with us?
Martyn Thompson: [00:07:29] Yes, certainly. So in terms of delivered delivered about £175k of savings. In terms of a pipeline, we got a pipeline of about £800k at the moment and a thousand pounds. And in delivery at the moment is about £400k worth of project benefit. So we’ve got i think five or six projects live at the moment and we expect full year effect will be about £400k, if not potentially more. I just I’m wary to to overestimate the under estimate and overdeliver.
Andy Sandford: [00:08:03] Absolutely. Under promise over deliver. It’s the best way mate you’ve you’ve trained with a really small team a couple of hundred users, you’ve got erm over a thousand processes mapped now. Probably.
Martyn Thompson: [00:08:17] Certainly over a thousand processes. There were probably about 200 or so users or that we provide them troubleshooting and guidance and training. We’ve got e-learning as well. And and above all this you’ve got the guys from Engage Process always on hand and Andy of course to answer any of the weird and wonderful questions that tend to come up when we are doing a bit of process mapping
Andy Sandford: [00:08:40] That’s brilliant. It’s the fact of how embedded you have got it. So you don’t have a central team doing transformation. You have a series of improvers distributed across the service areas that do kind of think like process improvers now because they’ve got some tools that can help them do that. So I think it’s fantastic. And, you know, really moving from a point implementation for projects to actually a real strategic pillar as part of what you’re doing now.
Martyn Thompson: [00:09:16] Yeah i would agree
Andy Sandford: [00:09:17] Great stuff. So final question mate I think it is so for those people that would say Martyn what would you say about this. How could it help us? Is it worth it for us?
Martyn Thompson: [00:09:31] I mean, if you’re not sure, have a look it. Get a demo of it have a look to see what it does it might give you everything you could possibly need. It certainly give us everything that we could possibly need. Rather than having four or five different documents with a calculator on one, a spreadsheet in another one just holding your volumes, one with your risk log on it. We have got a central repository with all that and that’s what Engage gives you your risk log for your process Engage gives you your time and gives you your roles involved and Engage gives you your process maps. So it really over kind of a one size fits all bit of software that kind of gives you that gives you everything you’ve probably had multiple different spreadsheets or systems that you had before, but it’s really a great central tool to give you that those tools to achieve and it is very user friendly. So you have people like myself and my colleagues who obviosuly have been using it for quite a while so we know all of the intuitive tools it’s got. But for somebody who just wants to jump on and clear a basic process map. They could do that with no training at all. They could do it with absolutely zero training and quite quickly using the tool work out how to use it, because it is very intuitive, very sophisticated. It is not like previous kind of process mapping software that I’ve used where you you need a half day training just to get a basic process map on the page.
Andy Sandford: [00:11:03] That’s great. And from my perspective, I would always say to people, have a look at it. We do do a months free trial. What we do is we invest in actually training people as well for that trial so people can properly evaluate it. So there’s literally no risk to an organization. Take the months free trial will give you an hour and a half webinar to get you started. You can put a process in or multiple processes, and you can evaluate it. And to be honest, if it doesn’t fit right now, it will probably set in the future for you. So, you know, we’re quite happy to spend that time. And we, we are like you mate. We want to work with engaged people. There’s no point trying to drag people to buy something if it’s not the right time. What are you trying to achieve and finding out whether their software is the right set. And we as a company really didn’t want to be, let’s just say, like a traditional software vendor in the public or private sector even. You know, we want people to be able to see it prove that they want it and then actually get on board as really engaged people in hopefully they can achieve even a fraction of what you guys have done that at Edinburgh some amazing outputs. So thanks. I really appreciate your time. Martyn, if you did want to speak to Martin, I’m sure he might, but i am mindful that they are a very busy team. As you can see, you don’t map thousand processes in just over a year by.
Martyn Thompson: [00:12:42] That’s certainly not me alone that has mapped those processes i have got a great team
Andy Sandford: [00:12:44] I know.
Martyn Thompson: [00:12:44] A great a great team that works with me.
Andy Sandford: [00:12:46] Excellent, mate. Thank you so, so much. And thanks, mate.
Martyn Thompson: [00:12:53] Thanks so much. Take care
Engage Process full case study
Come back soon to see the full presentation on Engage Process from Martyn talking about the work in detail and some real project examples. In the meantime have a look at our blog about the best continuous improvement software
If you are interested get in touch and we can answer any questions you have, set up a demo or the free trial [email protected]
