Creating Value In Schools
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Operational Excellence is a strategic approach focused on continuous improvement, high-quality service and value to customers. It’s a methodology that’s been adopted from business management and manufacturing, and is recommended by the Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) for application in schools.
In this extract from the Unbound SBLs podcast, Emma Gray and Helen Burge explain:
Watch the video or read an edited version below.
Emma Gray: Operational excellence has been around for quite a long time. Picture a Japanese car manufacturer, using lean systems and operational excellence to quality assure what's coming out, and making sure that it’s right first time. And, it's all done in the smoothest, least friction, least wasteful way possible.
ISBL has translated that manufacturing ethos into something that's suitable for education, because it's a similar sort of approach. If you take away the waste, the friction and the difficulties, and some of the time spent doing stuff that doesn't need to be done or isn't important, you will inevitably become more efficient.
Then the important and inevitable step is that you start to improve pupil outcomes – operational excellence starts with the understanding that we are all there to improve pupil outcomes.
If you go in with a mindset to eliminate waste and make processes smoother and more efficient, then everything starts to move more freely. Also it releases time; time for those things that we would like to be doing, if we weren't rushing around.
For example, you've got a finance team who are receiving orders from numerous budget holders. Some are on paper, some are on email. Sometimes team members are just stopped in the corridor. Inevitably, the finance officer then has to go back to work out what it was the budget holder wanted and which code it should go to and then order it.
The whole thing really, really slows up the process. But if you can make a system which everybody follows, which is straightforward, easy to input, goods received come really quickly, you're then freeing up two or even three people's time to be doing other things. Maybe still finance things, but they're not wasting their time on stuff that is relatively easy to improve.
Helen Burge: And in that example, there's also the opportunity for so many errors to happen, aren't there? You forgot that when someone spoke to you in the corridor, they wanted 10 glue sticks. You didn't remember until two days later, but they actually wanted the glue sticks by the following Monday, so you've then created a bigger issue.
It’s about process mapping and then identifying where there are weaknesses and trying to make it better.
And yes, there will be some people that would prefer to just stop you in the corridor as they’re walking from here to there, and say they want those glue sticks. But we wouldn't go into a classroom or the staff room and say, I need you to do X, Y, and Z whilst you're in the middle of doing another piece of work.
So, I think that process mapping is then an opportunity to ask the team, because they're experiencing what the problems are. And don’t just ask the finance team, because it might be that from the teacher's point of view, actually it's not very clear how you procure things within a school, especially if they’re new to the setting, or just recently qualified. How do they know how to go about ordering stuff?
As well as enabling the process to be better, it enables people to have a better experience of school. I think it's also an opportunity to respond to audit reports, internal scrutiny reports and things like that. How are we going to solve the problem that’s come up? Could we apply some OpEx tools to try and resolve that problem that's been identified in the audit? How are we then going to make those changes within our school?
Emma Gray: The thing I particularly like about OpEx is that you can start really, really small.
You don't have to think that you’re going to change the world overnight. The tiniest thing that an individual does, will have an impact. There's that saying I came across recently: if you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito!
The smallest thing you can do will then start to spread out. And as Helen said, it needs to be something that your whole setting becomes involved with. But start out with the small things and say, this is operational excellence. It might feel like a small thing to you, but this is what it looks like. How do we continue on with this?
If everybody started doing a little bit, all of a sudden it would be game changing for the whole sector. I'm sure there is a lot of potential in operational excellence and there is now training available. You can start small and just do one day of training, or you can go further and take the strategic level – which will enable you to share the mindset and framework with other school business leaders.
