Ingeus Impact Award

Continuous Improvement Strategy Execution

14 July 2023

Ingeus is a leading people services provider, delivering long-term, impactful projects to enable better lives. Working for commissioners at national and regional level, and hundreds of partner organisations it delivers programmes across the employability, health, youth, and justice sectors. It employs 2,300 people, based remotely and across 100+ UK office locations.
As a customer-focused business our goal is to deliver excellent customer service and achieve high- quality performance outcomes. Taking time to understand our customers is essential to ensure our services meet their needs.
Our Transformation Director Lisa Jasper identified that a continuous improvement culture and strategy was required to enable Ingeus to deliver excellent customer service and achieve consistently high-quality performance outcomes.
Increasingly, service commissioners including Ministry of Justice, Department for Work and Pensions and the NHS have expectations that require us to invest in continuous improvement and a structured methodology.
With this in mind, in 2021, Ingeus UK embarked on a journey to create and embed a culture of Continuous Improvement (CI) across all division, contracts, and services. In our mission to harness the talents of our contrasting teams, and to continuously improve, we launched our three-year
Continuous Improvement Strategy in October 2021.
Key milestones set and delivered included

Increasing Leadership and All staff Engagement in CI.
Increasing CI capability across Ingeus with the aim of four per cent of the Ingeus employee population accredited as Change Agents.
Implementing a programme of process standardisation with a supporting framework to eliminate variation.
Mapping, standardising and enhancing our Customer Journeys
Aligning continuous improvement activity with Compliance, Quality, Assurance and Risk activity.
Introducing Visual management.
Launching an internal accredited Continuous Improvement Academy for over 2300 employees.
Create a CI Toolkit accessible to all employees and Change Agents to enable them to identify and deliver improvements.

Activity

Fully supported and sponsored by Ingeus Executive team our Transformation Director Lisa Jasper launched a three-year CI Strategic plan. The strategy was designed to create and embed a continuous improvement culture to enable Ingeus UK to deliver excellent customer service and achieve high quality performance outcomes. Activities were carried out using Lean and Six Sigma principles.

The programme commenced with the creation of an Ingeus CI House used as an easy visual prompt for colleagues to understand and engage with the strategy. Using the CI House, the team set out the strong foundations including a Continuous Improvement Academy, Governance and Quality
Assurance Framework, and Leadership and Engagement, supported by three pillars: Standardisation, Visual Management and Continuous Improvement.
In April 2021 a skills audit across all teams established only seven employees had a qualification in a CI Methodology and highlighted that 68 per cent of employees had no CI experience. Baseline data indicated a lack of capability across the business. Root cause analysis around capability and CI experience was attributed to a lack of strategic and enterprise level CI awareness, engagement, and training opportunities for all levels, including Senior Leaders.
Key strategic solutions included:
Effective comms and awareness for leaders and staff to introduce CI strategy including monthly CI updates for the Executive team, detailing strategy execution, and feeding back
Executive expectations to leaders and teams4% target for minimum team CI capability reviewed frequently to ensure capability is being maintained
Investment in external Green and Yellow Belt creating initial and guiding coalition
Standardised Customer Journey for greater visibility of value streams and process health White Belt Awareness to all employees
Programme of variation elimination from Processes and implementation of Process Management
Launch of Accredited CI Academy for Lean & Six Sigma training
Implementation of a CI CQAF (Compliance Quality Assurance Framework) evaluation
Creation of a knowledge bank to centralise the capture of CI projects for the sharing of information, insight and benefit realisation.
Introduction of Visual Management to provide contractual data insight across Ingeus; balanced scorecard and dashboard reporting available on contracts to provide insight to analyse performance and identify what can be done better.
Quarterly Change Agent forums revamped for 2023 introducing a CI channel to ensure two- way communications and help track improvement projects in progress. Introduction of communities of practices (Summer 2023) for the sharing of CI Insight, project success and best practice.
Annual quality appraisal of Academy activity to assess impact, benefits from projects and value added

The Impact

Our approach to continuous improvement has been gradual and as with most continuous improvement methodologies, we have focussed our efforts on the people who deliver the services and interact with customers, drawing on their ideas around what will make the experience excellent and what needs to be improved.
Some of our successful outcomes Included:

Increased maturity from 1 to 4 in Leadership and engagement a result of a supportive and progressive Executive Board willing to commit to investing in Continuous Improvement for the future of the business
Significant increase Lean & Six Sigma accredited Change Agents from 7 employees to 141 to support and deliver our strategy
Increased CI capability to 5% and above within 98% of teams and an overall capability of 7% at organisation level
An increase in CI awareness from 32 to 85%
6,659 employee views of our CI SharePoint created to provide a central point of information, tools, and access to training.
More than 1700 people completed White Belt training creating significant awareness around Standardisation, CI, and Lean Six Sigma
In April 2021 only four (15%) teams were using a centralised process management approach. As a result of the actions taken as part of the Ingeus CI strategy 30 out of 31(98%) teams are now using a centralised approach to process management
More than 300 hours of Academy training delivered Qualitative outcomes
Early engagement with leaders and all staff has created a CI culture where leaders and change agents drive, promote, and realise the benefits of CI as part of day-to-day work.
Employees develop early understanding of the CI strategy and how they can support efficiency, effectiveness, and customer excellence.
Employees in key roles now equipped to make better decisions and drive effective change that balances business risk.
Increased maturity in Compliance & Quality Assurance Framework collaboration

Fiona Monahan, Chief Executive, Ingeus UK
“The last year has proven to be a journey of discovery for Ingeus colleagues. From the Executive and senior management teams to our talented front-line staff and new starters, we have been guided and supported into new ways of thinking and working.
“Our Transformation Director Lisa Jasper and her small but mighty team have delivered outstanding results in the first year of our CI Strategy – their very own masterclass in project implementation. Feedback to the Executive team has been timely and robust, and our resilient teams have seized opportunities for uptake.
“We may be a large and somewhat disparate set of teams, delivering multiple contrasting services with differing demands, yet our uniting purpose to enable better lives can only be strengthened by fresh thinking, embracing change, and minimising waste, exactly what our CI strategy is now achieving.”

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