Going to ‘the Gemba’ — shadowing front-line service workers
Digital Services means more than just putting a newer, shinier, faster system in place without thinking about the consequences; it’s using digital thinking to reimagine and redesign the service, wholesale. But how can you do this without understanding what happens on-the-ground in the first place?
This is where shadowing comes in.
‘The Gemba’ comes from lean thinking — one of a number of concepts we use in our projects. It’s a Japanese term for ‘real place’ and in lean projects, means the place where the work is conducted. For Toyota, who popularised lean practices, it meant walking the factory floors.
For Newham’s Digital Services team, going to the Gemba means effectively becoming part of the team for the day. We’re currently working with the Repairs and Maintenance team to realise the benefits technology can bring to both the staff and residents through the Repairs and Maintenance Service.
The team spent time with the Repairs and Operations Centre, who take calls from residents who need to report a problem. We also shadowed the team who coordinate the schedule of work and spent a day travelling the borough with the gas engineers themselves.
It might sound time-consuming and you might be thinking ‘why does a digital service need to watch an engineer fix a boiler?’. But to really get to the heart of the service and understand the problems users face, there is no replacement for seeing actual users encounter real problems.
“Using the PDA … involves a lot of typing and we just want to get along with our work”
By spending this time with the people who receive and deliver the service, we’ve been able to learn about the policy, process, culture, people and technology they work with and the problems they face. Here’s one example.
Newham’s gas engineers use a mobile app to log their work completed throughout the day. The functionality of the app is great on paper, but it’s only through watching someone use the system that we can see that much of the time spent on the app is navigating endless menus and manually adding data that the technology can generate automatically (like time and date). Not something you’d necessarily find from a chat with staff in an office or the management team, but a blindingly obvious pain point when you see it in the field.
A single small but simple change that, when combined with dozens of other improvements we’ve discovered through shadowing, will add up to a big improvement in efficiency.
We’ll be continuing to shadow the services we interact with, making sure the service design approach we use is informed by going to the Gemba. So next time you think you’ve spotted a problem you can solve, ask yourself — have you actually seen the problem?
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This blog was co-produced by London Borough of Newham’s Digital Services team and Rainmaker Solutions, their Strategic Digital Partner.
