The quality of the public service usually has a very general edge, which is when the procedures become eternal. Many users are already resigned to losing the whole day in a process that they do not know how long it can take.
The positive thing about this reality, if you have to manage the public service, is that, more than in other activities, such as the expectation of users is low, with a little good management you will be able to satisfy them more than if the same effect happened in another area..
It happened to me a few days ago that we went as a family to write down my newborn daughter. We got a "quick documentation center" that, in my opinion, had a title that was too ambitious for what it was.
We arrived 10 minutes before our shift, and the waiting room was packed with people. The first step of the process was to present the requested documentation. With no problems, in 5 minutes it was ready and we had to wait then for us to be called for the next step: in half an hour!
This second step was also very fast. We had to verify the registered data and sign at the bottom. Two minutes. But then… wait for the third step!
The latter was the most elaborate, since they had to photograph my newborn daughter, and take their fingerprints, which is not always easy, since babies of that age do not usually collaborate too much with the process. However, in about 10 minutes it was ready.
Finally, after 2 hours from our shift schedule, we were able to leave the "quick documentation center". 2 hours of total process to occupy 17 minutes of net process.
In other words, of the 120 minutes, 86% were waiting.
Here is the key to act in improving the quality of this public service.
What does the user want? You want to finish the process as soon as possible. Total time is what counts. It does not matter if the processes, individually, are agile. What matters is the total process, including waiting.
And how can the total process be streamlined? It's a matter of service design
A step-by-step procedure resembles a production line where one process follows the other. The problem is that, between each one, you have to wait until the next machine is ready to receive the product.
For what reasons could I not receive the product? Well, because I am busy with another product, or because I am inactive.
In a public service process, it means that an employee is serving another user or is not available at his job, or is performing another task.
However, there are jobs in which, although this process is streamlined, it will not reduce the total process of the process. Why? Because they are not the bottleneck.
This concept is essential to analyze this situation. It is a matter of being clever and detecting where it is convenient to implement improvements, so that this improvement speeds up the entire process. And this place is called a "bottleneck".
Eliyahu Goldratt's book “The Goal” explains this concept very clearly.
In summary, speeding up the time in a bottleneck will result in a reduction in the time of the complete procedure. On the other hand, speeding up time in any other process will not impact the time of the entire process.
The bottleneck in my case was taking the photo and taking the baby's fingerprints. Reducing those 10 minutes would have made us all wait less. Reducing the time for receiving documents would only translate it into a later wait.
Therefore, to increase the quality of this public service by reducing user waiting times, the process must be redesigned to reduce the time of its bottleneck process.
Once this is done, it is essential to achieve high efficiency, especially in that key process, since any delay there will affect the entire service.
Finally, when the process is working in a predictable way, and the times of each step are known with greater certainty, it will be possible to assign the shifts to the users in order not to send them so far in advance, which will result in waiting, but in the just time to go through the process, reaching the bottleneck when it can process it, and not before.
Summarizing then the steps to follow:
- Identify the bottleneck process. Design the service to optimize that process. Reduce time losses and inefficiencies in the bottleneck process. Count the process time and assign shifts to avoid intermediate waits.
In this way you will certainly increase the quality of the public service you provide, since delays are one of the main causes of dissatisfaction of users.
