Audit Scotland

RESULT - What did you want to achieve and did you achieve it? 

The Business Support team at Audit Scotland had recently gone through a restructure and our main objective was to strengthen and promote our newly formed team whilst bringing the team together to identify key improvement opportunities to take forward and develop our services.

This was important for us as following on from the restructure we recognised that the team had changed and we were keen to ensure the team had a clear vision, mission and values and strengthen working relationships, coming together with a shared focus and goal and ensuring that our colleagues across the business were aware of the support services we provided and were utilising these effectively. 

Having recently become members of Quality Scotland and liaising with the fantastic team there, we agreed that working towards the C2E Project Validation award would assist us in achieving our objectives.

We did achieve what we set out to, having produced a BSS Business Plan which the full team had input into. We have successfully raised the profile of the team with various communications, statistics, guidance and blogs. In addition to this we developed mechanisms for gaining feedback from our customers and this will be continually used to develop our services. We achieved all of this within a five month period which is something the team is particularly proud of. 

APPROACH - What approach did you take? 

We felt this project was necessary to provide the team with a clear vision and objectives for the year ahead, to promote the newly structured team and the services we provide to the wider organisation, and to gain feedback from our customers.

We invited Quality Scotland along to facilitate a full day session where we talked through our progress in various areas e.g. Business Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Clear Vision and Mission and produced a Business Improvement Plan which highlighted the areas we felt could be improved and we prioritised these.

We identified six key areas, however for the purposes of the project validation we selected three of these to focus on, these were Development of a BSS Business Plan (Strategy), Raising the profile of the BSS team (Balancing Stakeholder Needs) and Development of Customer Feedback Mechanisms (Customer Survey).  

DEPLOYMENT - How did you go about taking this approach forward? 

We set up working groups for each project who met regularly. The working groups consisted of a cross section of staff from across the BSS team.  

We agreed a project plan and assigned individuals within the group to roles to ensure everyone had an involvement.  

We also communicated our progress at various meetings and utilised AS communication channels (eg Yammer, ishare) for blogs, announcements, posts etc.

We also utilised Slido for times when we couldn’t all get together and/or there was a particular topic we wished some feedback/or a vote on. This was extremely useful and a good way to get feedback from everyone in the group as we recognised that there are some colleagues who don’t like to speak out in meetings, therefore providing Slido as another option to gain honest feedback was really beneficial.

ASSESSMENT & REFINEMENT - How did you review what you had done? 

Our groups all utilised the project plan to keep on track with our performance. At times we did require to change some dates along the way, however the key thing was keeping this up to date so that we could effectively track our progress.

The teams met regularly to review the progress made. This included reviewing the Improvement project template to ensure that the RADAR approach had been effectively deployed and we had seen the projects through to completion.  The action tracker was extremely useful in ensuring we were up to date with the required actions.

It was then time to call in Quality Scotland for our one day assessment to validate our project.  This involved them speaking to Project Leads, focus groups and a cross section of the teams.  This provided them with the opportunity to ensure we followed the RADAR logic and had achieved what we set out to.

In preparation for this assessment we produced a submission document and it was fantastic to see how all of this came together and the work the team contributed to.

What are 2 or 3 key learning points you would like to share for the benefit of other members?

The Improvement Project Template is key and no project should be started without this.  Some colleagues were so keen to get going that they just wanted to get straight into making changes, however our first step was always to get the working group together to have a discussion around the Improvement project template to ensure that everyone was aware of what we were trying to achieve, why it was necessary, how we would do it and also how we would measure our progress.  This also provided the opportunity for the members of the group to contribute and ensure they were onboard with the project from the beginning.

The Project Plan is key to keeping on track with your actions and this was something we found extremely useful.  This was available to the full team also so that anyone could access this to get an update on where we were with the projects.

Some of the team felt slightly apprehensive at the beginning of the project and wondered how we would manage to fit it in around our ongoing work, however this process has changed the way in which we work permanently in that we are now always focussed on continuous improvements and this is embedded into our day to day to work.  We all found the process a rewarding experience and were proud of our achievement.  It got the team working better together, communicating better, communicating with the wider organisation and has developed the support we provide and the services we offer.  

We found that keeping people up to date with what we were doing also really helped us and kept the momentum going.