County planning office case study

The county planning department was overstretched and ‘in crisis’. Plans were stacking up, and a three-month delay was the normal experience of those submitting plans for approval. This was starting to become untenable, as people in the community wanted to get on with building work and could not do so without planning approval.

A consultancy firm using the PROGRESS approach was called in to work with the planning team. The planning process itself was identified by the team as being cumbersome and slow, but although they could see the problems, they had never had the time to sort them out. The consultants planned in some intensive half-day sessions with the planning team to map out the process and identify weak links. Although the impact of spending time in the workshop sessions caused even more backlog to build up for the team, they were confident that they could reduce the planning cycle time (from arrival of the application to sending out of approval) by 30 per cent if they focused on it for long enough and drew out some simple agreed actions.

Various core problems were identified:

Seating arrangements were not optimal. The department was split between two buildings for historical reasons. Time was being wasted going to and fro, looking for people and searching for things.
Lack of knowledge of different roles in the team was causing misunderstanding and friction.
One administrator was particularly overloaded with tasks that she was finding extremely boring.
Lack of a cataloguing system meant that time was wasted searching for paper-based items.
The planning officers were often out of the office, but were not accessible. It was impossible to get messages to them, which was in turn holding up decision-making processes.

The following actions were agreed:

The team was moved so that they could all sit in the same office.
Four people were asked to learn more about each other’s roles by spending two hours a week together on joint projects.
The administrator shared out her ‘boring’ tasks on a weekly basis.
A simple computer-based cataloguing system was introduced.
Planning officers were given a shared mobile phone, which they used to check every half-day for messages.

These simple measures resulted in a 27 per cent reduction in cycle time of the planning process. The department started to reduce the backlog, and life became less stressful for everyone.