CASE STUDY: DHA ID TURNAROUND CASE STUDY: DHA ID TURNAROUND PROCESSPROCESS

Presentation to Centre for Public Service Innovation (CPSI)Cape Town  

11 October 2012

BY THE CHIEF DIRECTOR: ID PROCESSING MR LT SIGAMA

PURPOSE OF THE PRESENTATION PURPOSE OF THE PRESENTATION

To share Department of Home Affairs (DHA) experiences on Turnaround programme and how turn around programme has resulted in improved transparency, accountability and better service delivery.

How DHA implemented open government data initiatives

How DHA monitors and sustains the effectiveness of such initiatives

Impact of the initiatives in relation to transparency ,accountability and better service delivery

To share how the Department of Home Affairs is collaborating with the banking sector.

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BACKGROUND BACKGROUND

Focus of case study: successful turnaround of ID books processes in the Department of Home Affairs, reducing the processing time from 127 days to less than 45 days.

The purpose of this case study is to identify the key elements of this successful change process and to extract key implications for government in terms of improving front-line service delivery elsewhere.

The case study has been drawn up as a collaborative effort between DHA and Department of Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency, in consultation with Department of Public Service and Administration (which played a key role in supporting DHA with the turnaround project).

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BACKGROUND BACKGROUND The purpose of this case study is to:

Extract the key elements of this service delivery improvement turnaround process

Introduce the operations management approach used by the DHA

Introduce some of the tools and systems utilised by the DHA to improve its speed and quality of service

Present the lessons learnt for the public service

Extract key implications for government in terms of improving its front-line service delivery models

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DHA TURNAROUND:CONTEXTDHA TURNAROUND:CONTEXT

Since 2006, a number of change projects were instituted to turn around the performance deficiencies in the department.

The DHA realised that the challenges in the department were so entrenched that it will require not just a quick training of front-line staff, but requires a new approach to doing its business.

Drawing on management approaches commonly used in production industries, it introduced an Operations Management approach and backed this up with tools and on-the-job training to ensure the approach becomes part of the culture of the organisation.

DHA now has the in-house capacity to roll-out this approach to other service improvement projects such as Temporary Residence Permits.

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DHA TURNAROUND: CONTEXTDHA TURNAROUND: CONTEXTThe problem:

In June 2007, it took an average of 127 days to get an ID, with some customers waiting as long as 250 days.

These long waiting times had a number of knock-on effects causing the entire business to become more and more dysfunctional:

many customers were applying multiple times at different offices,

temporary IDs had to be renewed many times,

40% of customers at front offices were there multiple times to enquire about the progress with their IDs.

Long queues, frustrated customers, complaints and bad press were the order of the day.

There was no mechanism to track and monitor status or progress with applications and the backlogs of applications throughout the Central Production Facility was standing at more than 236 000.

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DHA TURNAROUND: CONTEXTDHA TURNAROUND: CONTEXT

A Support Intervention Team, led by the DPSA, recommended a fundamental transformation of the department.

The turnaround project encompassed all ID related processes and customer interactions; both at the front of the value chain (more than 242 Home Affairs offices around the country) as well as the back end (central Identity Document processing facility).

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TOOLS AND APPROACHESTOOLS AND APPROACHESA. Governance Arrangements

Project Steering Committee: led by the Minister and met once/month for strategic guidance to the project.

EXCO: chaired by the DG, met every two weeks and was authorized to take all key operational decisions and also provide strategic oversight.

Operation improvement on strategic issues: The management of the DHA understood operational matters, related to improved service delivery, to be strategic matters and showed visible leadership of the project with regular visits to the officials involved in production. This was supported by weekly Operational Committee meetings.

Stakeholder management: A commitment was made with the Unions that this would be a non-retrenchment change-process and this was made public by the DG, to manage resistance from staff. A Turnaround Consultative Forum was established to deal with Employer / Employee issues.

Programme Management Office was established to coordinate the work of the different work streams and ensure deadlines are met. DHA officials were hand-picked and paired with consultants, with the approach being to coach, hand-hold and mentor DHA officials. At the peak of the intervention, 150 consultants and 300 DHA officials were involved in managing the process. A DHA Project Manager was appointed to head this PMO.

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TOOLS AND APPROACHESTOOLS AND APPROACHES

B. Comprehensive organisational baseline: as-is assessment

Established the “as is” with regards to service delivery, organisational culture and decision making processes, by collecting in-depth data.

This included a customer survey, which identified that 60% of customers in queues were there to query the progress with ID applications.

A three month work process assessment was done, which involved a walk-through of each stage of the process of ID production and identification of redundancies.

This information assisted the DHA to identify quick improvement such as:- the Customer Service Centre (an outsourced call centre)- Track and Trace service (an electronic tracking system for IDs with SMS alert service).

In addition, the baseline assessment highlighted that the key problem was poor supervision, no targets and no teamwork and changing this did not require retrenchments, recruitment or large scale changes in human-resource policy.

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BEFORE

The operations management team challenged our ways of The operations management team challenged our ways of

working in critical areas of our processesworking in critical areas of our processes……

ID Process and Operations Management

Initial Working Environment at Fingerprint Section

AFTER

……leading to a more conducive working environmentleading to a more conducive working environment

ID Process and Operations Management

The New Working Environment At Fingerprint Section

TOOLS AND APPROACHESTOOLS AND APPROACHESC. Coaching Consultants vs. Doing Consultants

A team of consultants were hired in 2007 to help lead a department-wide turnaround.

They were chosen for their extensive experience of the public service and their proven track-record of managing complex public-sector turnaround programmes, notable having been involved in the SARS-improvement programme.

Their mandate was made clear – because of the non-retrenchment guarantee, the focus was not on hiring new staff, but rather on process- streamlining and improvements to performance management.

The consultants were expected to implement these reforms in a manner that transferred skills and leave behind tools and systems that can be used by officials of the department.

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TOOLS AND APPROACHESTOOLS AND APPROACHESD. Utilising Production and Operations Management approaches and tools

The ID process was analysed and a new end-to-end process was designed, reducing the steps from 80 to 15. Examples of improvements and tools introduced are:

A track and trace system: required staff to scan IDs in and out of each stage of the process, allowing the turnaround team to understand how much time an ID spent in a given section and to locate slow areas,

New finger-print scanning machines : resulting in the turnaround time in the Fingerprint Verification Section being reduced from 27 days to 4 days and clearing of 236 000 backlogged records.

A single courier service was put in place, with a strong service level agreement (SLA), to pick up ID applications and drop off completed ID books at front offices,

Immediate changes: The processing of Temporary IDs used to take time and added to the workload – these were now issued on the spot,

Officials were organised into small cells/teams instead of long assembly lines in the Completion Section,

Workstations were demarcated and colour coded with clearly defined areas for incoming and outgoing work,

A front office checklist was developed to ensure that application information is correct and complete,

Individual and group performance targets were negotiated with staff. Targets were realistic and achievable.

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DHA CASE STUDY: TOOLS AND DHA CASE STUDY: TOOLS AND APPROACHESAPPROACHES

E. Productivity and Quality Review, Reporting and Monitoring (1)

Visible and daily monitoring based on actual performance data was introduced. Weekly quality reports were produced and distributed to all offices and monitored, including exceptions reporting and monitoring.

Regular operations review meetings are held at all levels to monitor output and quality.

Special focus on management of key service provider contracts

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DHA CASE STUDY: TOOLS AND DHA CASE STUDY: TOOLS AND APPROACHESAPPROACHES

E. Productivity and Quality Review, Reporting and Monitoring (2)

Group performance was made visible and managers were trained to keep track of it, using wall charts, track and trace reports, published rankings, monthly awards for individual and group’s performance and brief early morning meetings where production and targets are discussed every day.

The idea was to de-link the performance management process from the formal performance assessment process and to make performance management motivating and not punitive.

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DHA RESULTSDHA RESULTS

Reduced turnaround times for IDs from an average of 127 days to less than 37 days;

By end of 2008, 93% of customers polled said waiting times for IDs were faster than expected and 92% said they were impressed with the new SMS notification

Reduced turnaround times for passports from an average of 47 days to 23 days;

An efficient Customer Contact Centre answering 95% of calls in 20 seconds and resolving 90% of calls on first contact;

Full spectrum Track and Trace system functionality allowing for the tracking of applications throughout the production process as well as sending of SMS alerts to customers;

The extension of Track and trace to cover other documents including Passports, Birth, Marriage, Death, Citizenship and Late Registration of Birth;

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DHA RESULTSDHA RESULTS

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DHA RESULTSDHA RESULTS

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DHADHA’’s COLLABORATION WITH THE BANKING s COLLABORATION WITH THE BANKING SECTORSECTOR

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HANIS – Home Affairs National Identification System

Over 38 million unique fingerprints sets

Over 13 million photos stored

Allows for Identification(1:n) and Verification (1:1)

Verification used for:

Passport Application

Background

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Online Verification

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Gives 3 main results:Green: ID number exists on HANIS and the scanned fingerprint matches that image stored on HANISAmber: ID number exist but HANIS cannot confidently match scanned and stored fingerprintRed with message “ Identity check failed” : - owner of scanned fingerprint (client) may not be the owner of the ID- fingerprint of rightful owner of the ID has been fraudulently changed on HANIS- quality of stored fingerprint is not of good quality

Online Verification

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BANKS Number of Transactions

1. African Bank Investments Limited 21 149

2. ABSA 57 876

3. FNB 259 660

4. NEDBANK 4 294

5. STANDARD BANK SA 35 979

Total no 378 958

NUMBER OF ONLINE VERIFICATIION TRANSACTIONS FROM APRIL 2012 TO END OF AUGUST 2012

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Rolled out to all Civic Services offices

Rolled out to 117 Mobile offices

Being used for:

Temporary ID Certificate – able to produce in 1 day

Emergency Passports – in 1 day

Re-Issue applications

Passport applications

Commercial verification with 5 banks as of November 2011

Progress Report

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (1) CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (1)

(1) Summary of key success factors:

Active and visible top management leadership

Dedicated internal programme management with selective external support

Get the basics right first and focus on one improvement to build confidence

Credible base lining and benchmarking

Realistic target setting

Use operations management tools and approaches

Introduce and maintain a performance management culture that is motivating and not punitive

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CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (2) CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS (2) (2) Dedicated capacity may be needed in government to provide support to

service delivery departments to successfully implement service delivery turnaround programmes. The DG in the Presidency should coordinate a task team consisting of DGs of DPSA, PALAMA, DHA, DPME to work on this.

(3) Turnaround processes require a very specific leadership style and behaviour from senior management. Senior managers of other service delivery departments should gain exposure to the leadership experience of the DHA through programmes such as Project Khaedu.

(4) Operations Management, as an approach for service delivery improvements, has tremendous value and a strong drive is needed to introduce this into service delivery programmes.

(5) There is a need to introduce more on-the-job coaching and mentoring as a learning and training approach, particularly for frontline service delivery operations.

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Thank You Thank You

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