INCREASING PERFORMANCE AT THE SUBSIDY OFFICE OF A LARGE COMMUNITY

Issue

The Grants Office of a large municipality has a coordinating role
for the entire grant chain. New applications are submitted here in
considered before substantive assessment takes place,
including a financial risk assessment. Also lying here is the
Process direction to meet legal decision deadline, and threat of being exceeded
thereof, to be monitored. The grant information system is operated on behalf of the
chain in cooperation with developer and I-domain further developed.
To achieve the task of providing services to residents and organisations
Improving is shifting deployment to other tasks and
improvement projects desired.

The question before Improven was whether, and if so how much, capacity from the
operational implementation can be released. This can be done when the
performance per employee increases sufficiently

Our approach

To form a picture of current performance, various analyses were made. No dashboards were yet available for this purpose and were therefore generated from data files. The analyses showed that the total number of files has been fairly stable and predictable for years, but that the performance of employees varies greatly among themselves and over time.

The influencing factors on performance were then determined. The biggest influence factor was the imbalance created by the way work was distributed among employees. In addition, although the process was clear, the actual execution and processing time differed due to the lack of standard work instructions. The degree to which employees could work with the different systems also differed, and points for improvement were not structurally addressed.

As a solution, it was decided to distribute work differently through an objective distribution key by a work distributor. To this end, files were also categorised by processing time with a fixed standard. In dialogue with employees, standard work instructions were developed with less waste in the execution process, making processing time more predictable and expected to decrease on balance. Through weekly start-ups, the work flow is monitored and improvement points are reported and acted upon. To realise everything, intensive cooperation was started with colleagues at the IV organisation.

As a result, deployment could be shifted and this was achieved. In support, several dashboards were developed to monitor work distribution, deadline monitoring and performance.

Result

The grants office was able to shift deployment to other task areas due to the performance enhancement of the operational process.
The grants office has a proportionate and transparent division of labour.
The grants office has standardised and established working methods.
The grants office has the necessary dashboards for monitoring its own processes and chain performance.
The grants office is working on continuous improvement through week start-ups