The LCS Impact Awards

Ingeus

Background

Ingeus is a leading people services provider, delivering impactful projects to enable better lives at both national and regional level and delivers programmes across the employability, health, youth, and justice sectors. It employs 2,300 people, based remotely and across 100+ UK office locations. In our mission to  continuously improve, we launched our three-year Continuous Improvement Strategy in October 2021.   

In 2021 Collette was instrumental in launching Ingeus’ Continuous Improvement strategy. She believed this approach would create opportunities for greater collaboration between operational teams and key stakeholders within Ingeus.

Exploration of process management techniques in April 2021 highlighted that only four (15%) teams were using a centralised process management approach.

In addition, an informal opinion poll from existing CI Change Agents in November 21 highlighted that 36 per cent believed their teams’ processes were not centrally managed and 17 per cent were undocumented. Initial Promapp licence capture also highlighted that of 2700 licences, only 477 (18 per cent) were being used and  if left unaddressed, this may have resulted in a wasted cost of £33,132.16.

Activity

An improvement project was undertaken by Collette Westerman, Continuous Improvement Academy Development Manager, as part of an ambitious three-year CI strategic plan and its aim was to eliminate variation and siloed process development, to introduce standardise approaches to process mapping process analysis and ensure at least 85 per cent of teams were centrally capturing baseline processes for ongoing improvement.

Actions taken included:

• An enterprise level launch of a centralised process management system
• Implementation of a process management framework
• Launch of a standardised customer journey to help teams visualise existing and required processes
• Process standardisation scoping exercise to help teams capture their process and identify gaps and improvements
• Awareness and Leader Engagement sessions – including breakout sessions on standardisation
• Awareness and training was supported by a newly launched internal CI Academy and a programme of standardisation training using Lean Six Sigma accredited Change Agents as mentors.

Impact

As a result of the actions taken as part of the Ingeus CI strategy 30 out of 31 teams are now using a centralised approach to process management and the project has significantly improved process activities including increased levels of interaction with centralised processes, overall process quality, and visibility and reducing duplication and variation.   Some of the additional impacts include:

• Promapp System access increased to 77 per cent after just one round of standardisation training.
• Promapp awareness training increased licence uptake by 439 per cent between April 21 and April 22.
• 130 employees appointed process writers following training; all teams now have appointed process owners increasing accountability for ongoing management and improvement.
• System training through the Academy has increased Promapp interaction/Process views by 998 per cent between April 21 and April 22. A year on, this increase stands at 2,881 per cent.
• 50 processes centrally captured in April 21; to date there are 861 processes.
• Using Promapp allows colleagues to receive an immediate update when there has been a process change – meaning communication around changes is now much quicker.
• Silo working has decreased significantly and teams work collaboratively with stakeholders.
• Teams are joined up in their approach to new starter training – Learning and Development has access to ‘single truth’ operational processes that support accurate induction training.
• Reduction in duplication, variation, firefighting – giving time back to managers because their teams have the information needed to do their job.