Part I:
The Formative Years – In search of service excellence
Stories from a Government Shared Services Centre
Happy Customers. Engaged Employees. It takes time and effort. Regretfully, it does not happen automatically. Our journey as a shared services centre for the Singapore government over the last four years had made us revisit the theme of service excellence again and again. It had made us challenge old ways of doing things, prodded us to re-examine how to organise the organisation better so that we can better respond to customer needs. This is a story of that journey, sometimes rocky, sometimes surprising, sometimes wonderful.
But before we go into the story - a little about us. Vital.org was formally launched in July 2006 as a captive shared services centre for the Singapore Public Service, serving initially just shy of 20 agencies in areas such as payroll administration, HR services, finance services (primarily dealing with vendor payments) and learning & development services. Today, she serves over 100 distinct government agencies in the original service lines and new areas such as asset management and travel management. By 2010, over a million transactions pass through our hands. She hires close to 500 people serving a population of some 80,000 public servants.
Overcoming the limitations of Emails
When we were first formed, work instructions from our customers arrive to specific officers primarily via emails. Since many of our officers were formally from the customer agencies, it was the work norm. Like most organisations, we don’t have a culture where supervisors have access to their officers’ emails so the supervisors were often left none the wiser if the emails went unattended while the officers were on leave or simply swarmed under. It was also next to impossible to get any service analytics. This is a recipe for unhappy customers. Every service company that had to scale up have to overcome this at some point. Some organisations create generic email accounts if their work volume is small, with duty officers manning the email line. Even this solution gets overwhelmed by volume. In time, we invested in an online case management system that we asked our customers to log work instructions to discover we receive over 40,000 work instructions annually with each instruction capable of containing hundreds of transactions to be processed. A service escalation framework was established where every week section managers, department heads, directors and the Chief Executive would review cases that have aged more than 3,7,14 and 20 working days respectively.
The helpdesk morphs from a GP Clinic to an A&E Department
We have all heard of real world examples of phone lines that no one picks up and where voicemails are always full to know we need to prevent this from happening to us. So, a helpdesk was formed with full time officers with the usual suite of statistics on dropped calls and recorded conversations. Of the calls that come into the Helpdesk, only 10-20% needed to be sent back to the backroom for the specialists to answer. So like most helpdesks in the market, our helpdesk was the equivalent of a General Practitioners’ Clinic, taking care of the usual colds and headaches. Then something changed.
So we had this problem of urgent work requests that came in through our case management system that our service escalation framework was unable to respond well to. So we created an “Emergency” button that allowed customers to indicate to us that this is a rush job. We morphed the Helpdesk into an A&E Department where three times a day, they would receive from the system the list of emergency cases which they will run through and where necessary, call the customer to ascertain the nature of the emergency. This added an estimated 4,500-6,000 work instructions to their annual workload. We improved our responsiveness.
Account Managers were born
With close to 600 lines of service, over 100 customer agencies, we resembled a manufacturing company providing products to businesses. Some of our customer agencies are quite large with tens of thousands of employees while some are quite small with scores of employees. For over 40 of our customers, we began to have full time account managers. These managers maintain an overall view of the account and are the primary points of contact. Our account managers are the customer’s advocates, our asset to understand our customers’ pain points and present our face to the customers. One of the main drawbacks of being a shared services centre is that our employees are no longer as plugged in to the happenings in our customer agencies as when they were part of those organisations. Account managers are our investment in building social capital with our customers so that we can, if not bridge this divide, at least narrow the divide.
The case of the officer who went the extra mile
Lest we think life in managing the customer is only about troubleshooting and crisis management, there are also moments of wonder and pleasant surprise. Take the case of a compliment we received of an officer who was responsible to brief retiring officers of their retirement benefits. Typically, the retiring officer would make an appointment at our office and our officers would brief them on their retirement options and advise them on how to exercise any retirement or pension options. On this occasion, one of our officers had apparently found out that the retiring officer was a cancer patient and had been warded in the local hospital. The officer literally went several extra miles and did the briefing at her bedside after office hours. It is moments like this that service delivery moved beyond the mundane and becomes an inspiration.
The journey has just begun
These changes, wrought over the first four years, are perhaps just the basic building blocks. Many organizations whether they are in shared services or not, have taken similar, if not identical paths in the quest for service excellence. Service excellence is as much about the smile and the friendly voice as it is about designing responsive organisational structures and investing in social capital. That said, the service journey has only just begun and we will have to be our own harshest critic to improve constantly.
Part II:
The Formative Years – In search of productivity growth
Stories from a Government Shared Services Centre
For a shared services centre of about 500 people, we currently complete about 10-20 work improvement projects annually from which we expect to result in productivity savings. In 2010, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called for a 2-3% productivity growth per annum for Singapore. How does this translate in practical terms for a shared services centre?
Productivity by the numbers
Of the 500 staff at the shared services centre, 450 are directly involved in operations. A simple way to think about operational productivity is in terms of the number of transactions that is processed through a shared services centre. A 3% productivity growth can be interpreted as having the same number of people processing 3% more transactions per year. We can also, loosely speaking, take the opposite view - given the same number of transactions, can we process the same number of transactions with 3% less people? Practically, this means that we must strive to do the same number of transactions for 450 people with 437 people in the next year and then 424 in the following year and 411 the following year.
As a young shared services centre, we were in an enviable position that the number of transactions were growing as we took on new clients and with existing clients giving us more work. As such, on an overall basis, we still found ourselves, to be growing.
Productivity as a ground movement
Lest we lull ourselves into thinking that productivity movement is just a numbers game. It is not. At the organisation’s level, improving productivity reduces our cost to serve. On the individual level, these projects are attempts to do the same work in a more time-effective manner or in a manner that would reduce all sorts of human errors, avoiding time wastage in re-work.
Here’s a short list of categories of projects we like. We like projects that seek to reduce manual data entry, especially if the information is already available in any one of the disparate systems that we may find ourselves operating. Typographical errors and transcription errors are expensive to detect. We like projects that reduce manual tracking of cases, especially if these need to be tracked over months. We like projects that reduce manual computation. We like projects that allow the upload of mass of cases, recognizing that in some systems, updating of cases screen by screen can be time consuming.
These projects reflect an organisation’s respect for its employees’ time, ever seeking to make good use of their time, reducing opportunities for human error when possible.
Productivity by community
As a captive shared services centre, we are fortunate to be working with both systems and policy owners whose own policy and systems reviews impact us positively. Their own work improvement projects, whether it is redesigning transactions so that they can be added to the suite of employee self services or building in more system checks that eliminate the need for manual verifications or building interfaces so that data can flow between related systems without the need for duplicative human entry. These efforts often eliminate the most mundane parts of the shared services work.
The journey has just begun
For the productivity movement to succeed as a ground movement, our experience suggests that a good starting point is respect for our staff’s time. We are concerned if our pace of innovation is sufficiently fast. This is by far the hardest question to answer. At the very least, a 3% productivity growth is probably a good starting point.
Part III:
The Formative Years - In pursuit of Operational Excellence
Stories from a Government Shared Services Centre
We have a retired army colonel as our Director of Operations. Every day, he does battle with two natural laws – the law of large numbers and Murphy’s Law. If you have ever had the word Operations in your title, you will know intimately that what can go wrong will most certainly go wrong eventually, most likely just when your attention is elsewhere. He has one of the toughest jobs in the organisation but also one of the most interesting ones. He is on the scene when things go wrong playing chief investigator, crisis manager and chief engineer all rolled into one.
The case of the misbehaving KPI
We believe there is merit in recording and reporting volumetrics and performance indicators. We are into this in a big way these two years. For example, one of our midsize customer agencies subscribes to some 80 of our lines of service and we collect and report on some 200 KPIs every month. Collectively, the number of KPIs for all our customers can really add up. The operation of the law of large numbers and Murphy’s Law almost guarantee that in a small percentage of the KPIs, they will be misreported sometime. Entropy is a fact not only in the world of science. Suddenly, a misbehaving KPI, especially one which was reported as 100% when it was not, becomes a minor crisis of confidence in all the KPIs. We have learnt that a steady hand at the helm means a lot at such times. These misbehaving KPIs could be due to a design flaw in the collection and reporting or a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the KPI itself or simply a human oversight. Each time one of these KPIs misbehave, a group of operations people huddle around it and beat it back into obedience.
The case of the missing future job
One of the interesting problems we recently had with our more sophisticated customers is that they want to send us work instructions to be done not immediately but a year (or more) later. This is most often a payroll related or HR related transaction, perhaps related to a contractual clause. Fast forward a year later and we could find out that both the officer at the customer end and the officer charged with the job had both left the organisation and of course no one was the wiser until everyone felt the consequences of a job not done. Suddenly, there was a dispute over whether the understanding was for the customer to resend the job when it was due or for the shared services centre to queue the job in some time machine. This one was easy to fix. Today, we have a case management system which has an advance date feature to time capsule the future job so that it would trigger effectively the duty officer of the day in the future. No doubt Murphy is conspiring how to mess up our time capsule as you read this.
The journey has just begun
Life in operations can feel like a battlefield but it is also where one earns one’s stripes. Life in operations can feel like a detective story where you are charged to solve the many little puzzling developments that were unanticipated or unplanned. Life in operations can be inspiring with moments that touched real lives. We like to think life in operations is a relentless pursuit of operational excellence for those who have a passion for excellence.
Clarence Ti
Chief Executive
Vital.org
About Vital.org
Vital.org, a department under Ministry of Finance, was formally launched in July 2006, as part of the Singapore Public Sector’s effort to aggregate common administrative services and reap economies of scale to bring about greater business value for the whole of Government. It currently serves more than 100 Ministries, Departments, Organs of State and Statutory Boards in Singapore. The suite of services includes finance services, human resource services, payroll and claims services, learning and development services and travel management services. Vital.org won the Honourable Mention Award under the Best New Shared Service Organisation (under 3 years in operation) Award during the Annual Asia Pacific Shared Services & Outsourcing Awards 2007. Visit www.vital.gov.sg for more information.
