The Challenge

To understand and simplify a bureaucratic system in which support was provided for adults with disabilities through seven different funding streams and, as a national trailblazer, design a new way of working involving a joined-up customer journey.

Why change was needed

Customers seeking a solution to a problem were being dealt with by multiple agencies and teams, leading to delays, waste and sometimes unsatisfactory outcomes.

What we did

• The Right to Control is a government-backed Office of Disability Issues initiative to give disabled people choice and control over the support needed to go about their daily lives.
• Barnet was one of eight national trailblazers selected to design and test new ways of working and Habanero supported them using lean methodology to improve services.
• A core team was established to understand the existing services, to create a new joined-up customer journey and to experiment with real cases before being implemented nationally.
• The stages of the intervention were:
• Understanding the current state and creating an emotional connection between leaders and customer journeys. Customers were a core part of the team, bringing the views of those supported by the council into the heart of designing new services.
• Co-creating a new design with leaders, front-line teams and disabled people. We ran a two day ‘decision accelerator’ event to gather more than 40 leaders from all the organisations who were part of delivering the new system. The core team shared their learning about the waste we had discovered in the system and the group then took radical decisions about the future.
• Experimenting with the new design for a small number of new customers across all partners in order to learn and adapt.
• Successful ‘go-live’ on the first national date and continuing development and embedding of the new system. The Office of Disability Issues said the team’s experimentation meant they had a deeper understanding of customers and a clearer vision of what the future should look like.

The Results

A new kind of customer journey
Holistic – considering all areas of the customer’s life
Multi-disciplinary, i.e. one person to talk to and one assessment for the customer
Right first time
Waste cut and bureaucracy reduced

The Client Says

In the light of public sector spending cuts “.........we have to look at how we can develop a service by ways other than simply spending more money. We need to make sure every penny the council has for looking after adults with complex needs is spent as wisely and as fairly as possible. Making our services simpler and more economical will be a real challenge for us over the coming years.”

Cabinet Member for Adult Social Services