Been to York today for a day out. We went to a cafe for lunch. Francis likes cafes so the key to a successful day out is a good cafe. This one was quite a nice cafe with decent home-made food, and I thought it was going to score highly until it came to puddings.
We ordered cakes and coffees. Ten minutes later the coffees arrived. Then ten minutes after that, just as we were about to finish our coffees, the cakes arrived.
It's a classic systems failure. No-one died, but a pleasant lunch was spoilt by an inadequate system for dealing with two parallel processes - cake production and coffee production. Responsibility for one lies with the kitchen, the other with the bar. If you were to investigate, both staff would tell you that they fulfilled the required task. Yet the customer was left unhappy because the coffee came before the cake.
I'm slightly obsessed by systems - or at least by trying to put them right. I can't stand waste - and so many systems - such as those that form the basis of many public services - are full of it. In a recent article Simon Caulkin talked about a concept that was new to me - failure demand:
"Take, for example, the contact centres that are the staple of the outsourcing industry. As customers, we know they are always busy - but most of their work is waste. Vanguard Consulting, which specialises in service organisation, estimates that, in financial services, 20 to 60 per cent of all calls represent 'failure demand' - demand caused by a previous error. In telecoms, the police and local authorities, a staggering 80 or 90 per cent of calls occur because of the same failure to provide proper service the first time around."
I've read similar arguments with regard to the social care system - that much of the apparent demand could be stripped out if people were just dealt with more quickly - and if there was a focus on doing exactly what the customer wants and needs, so that they get what they want first time. Instead we often find a system driven by central targets, where people keep getting what they don't want.
Where my dissatisfaction over the coffee and cake is soon forgotten, the impact on people's lives of poor systems in public services is far more profound.
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