Pot holes get stuffed for longer in Edinburgh

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) November 26, 2009 -- City of Edinburgh Council have just been announced as winners of a national Guardian Public Services award for their radical new approach to fixing pot holes in the city. This is the first time this sought after award has been awarded to a pot hole repair team and a first for City of Edinburgh Council.

The old cliché of council staff ‘looking into’ holes in the road instead of fixing them no longer holds true in the city, according to the latest council figures. Council workers now focus on fixing pot holes permanently the first time they visit, instead of wasting time on the bureaucracy of tracking and logging complaints.

Geoffrey Sim, senior customer service officer, says the pot hole project - which received £96,560 of council funding - required a complete change in management thinking, providing unprecedented authority for frontline staff. The managers' role shifted from ‘manager knows best’ to supporting and helping staff.

Sim, explains: "An analysis of what customers wanted and what the council delivered identified broken systems for fixing potholes, gullies and street lighting." There was a huge backlog in pothole repairs and gully cleaning. Customer correspondence had broken down and staff stress was undermining morale. So under the Right-First-Time pilot project, correspondence and repair processes were redesigned from the residents’ point of view. This changed the emphasis from tracking and logging mail to answering and analysing it. The emphasis for potholes shifted from temporary, quick-fixes to permanent, right-first-time, repairs.

Sim believes a key element of the project is that it was staff driven. "They're the experts so they know the glitches," he says. "People at the top of the organisation don't always know what to measure. So with turning things on their head, staff are setting agenda for managers. This project has made talk about empowerment and systems thinking a reality."

Reduced stress from improved mail-handling has improved morale and prompted further voluntary staff development, with assessments accredited by the industry lead body.

In April 2008, frontline staff began applying the new ‘systems thinking’ approach to mail and road defects systems in the south-west of Edinburgh. Systems thinking was introduced to them by consultants Vanguard Scotland. Key achievements included an average of 140 potholes a week permanently repaired and a reduction in the time taken to fix a pot hole from 144 to 23 days.