We are well into the Discovery phase of the Children’s Social Care Admin review project. We have been busy bees over the last 3 sprints (6 weeks)!
Identifying efficiency gains
We have carried out 17 research conversations with a range of admin staff, seniors, and managers within Children’s Social Care, with more sessions booked for the coming weeks. These conversations give us vital insights into the key issues for the admin teams, including issues that require further research.
To follow up on these conversations, we have started shadowing several admin team members to see how they do things; this helps us identify potential efficiency gains.
Admin team members have highlighted that the creation of data reports each week is a very time-consuming task. We have started investigating ways to make this process quicker and easier for them. Watch this space for more information on whether this will be a quick win, or an opportunity we take forward into Alpha.
The right technology
Having the right technology and knowing how to use it is imperative for projects like this. We have set up and started using all the technology we need to record our insights, allowing us to keep track of the timings and tasks undertaken by the admin teams.
This includes; Teams, Airtable, Miro, MS Bookings, Planner and Clockify. We are expecting to use data from these systems to inform the opportunities we take into Alpha.
Quick wins; don’t mind if we do
We have already identified and started to action three quick wins. The first was a review of the number of emails received by certain members of the team, and how we can reduce this, ether using ‘rules’ or by turning off some notifications.
We have also identified a time saving around the approval of agency worker timesheets, making this process around 2 hours faster per week!
Finally, we have created a Teams channel to make it easier for the admin teams to have conversations and store documents in one place.
Plans for the next sprint
During the next sprint, we will:
- continue to shadow some of the admin team
- carry on investigating the creation of data reports to see how we can make this process more efficient
- analyse the caseload data information to see what we can learn
We will also take a deeper dive into the end-to-end process of identifying and engaging a Trade Supplier through to service delivery and the payment process, as this has been identified by most admin officers as a time-consuming and frustrating issue.
