Prison Break

Last week I had the experience of visiting a Category A prison. For me, getting in was a lot harder than getting out.  I suspect it is the other way round for the actual residents.

I was there at the invitation of one of the directors to share with their senior team approaches to service re-design, in order to increase efficiency and effectiveness; after all, they along with the whole of the public sector will have to do more with less.  How do you start to deal with something as complex as the regime of a prison?  How will you know that you've really improved - working smarter, not just harder?

As you'd expect, the way that things are done in this particular environment is highly prescriptive - very process-driven, and this is one place you can start.

There are four-stages to improvement:

1. Find out how things are done.  What do people think is the current process?  You can get more than one view here, they're probably all right.  You'd imagine that there would be volumes of procedure documents, but it's not guaranteed that what's written is how things are actually done.  In my view it's best to talk to people, although in areas where performance is being measured you may get a formal answer rather than what is actually done, so some insight is needed.
2. Find out how well things are done.  This isn't as hard as it sounds, because public sector services have for a long time been required to provide information on performance.  But once again, you may need to talk as there is often some cynicism surrounding published performance measures.
3. Decide how well things could be done.  Setting realistic and measurable targets for improvement provides motivation for all types of change.  SMART objectives are as valuable in an organisational context as they are in a personal context: Specific; Measurable; Attainable; Relevant ;Time-bound
4. Develop options for change that will improve. Now whilst this sounds blindingly obvious, it is the hardest step.  You need to come up with ideas, convert those in a modified process, and then find a way of proving that the modified process is better and does not have undesirable side-effects.  This is where is business model is so important.

Only a business model enables them to compare the performance of the new process with the current one and measure "the size of the prize".  It's the prize that provides the business incentive to make the change.  In a prison environment, there will be few areas where they can experiment with a process in the real world; a model enables them to examine hundreds of scenarios and determine the specific change that delivers the best outcome whilst checking that unexpected and undesirable impacts are avoided.  Time to lock in those benefits.