Tackling backlogs - a conversation with Andy Brogan

Recently on the Next Stage Radicals Facebook group, fellow 'radical' Adrienne Rogers started a conversation about backlogs.  At the hospital where she works, lots of activity has understandably had to pause because of coronavirus, meaning backlogs are growing.

Backlogs will be a cause of concern for many of us at the moment.  This crisis could mean:

• Increased demand, like at a council's Welfare Benefits service I spoke with earlier on in this crisis, who had in two weeks received as many claims as they had in the previous two months.
• Fewer people to do the work, because of increased sickness, self-isolation, caring responsibilities, etc.
• Simply being unable to do the work, because it's unsafe or impractical.  I spoke with a council's Food Safety Team, who've been unable to do any of their scheduled inspections. 
• The exceptional priorities this crisis has requires of all of us, with people taking on different roles, or being moved to where they are most needed.  That same Food Safety team were speaking about the possibility of them doing coronavirus contact tracing, as they're already skilled in doing this for other diseases like salmonella.

During the conversation, Andy Brogan (founding partner of Easier Inc) shared what I thought was some really helpful advice about backlogs, in both business and human terms.  I thought others might benefit from this advice, and I was keen to know more, so Andy and I got together for a (remote) chat where I asked a few questions. Here's how it went.

Q1: If you’re a team with a backlog, how might you start to tackle it?

The first thing is to consider how we frame the problem.  It's easy to think of them as backlogs of activities or things to be done.  In healthcare and public services, we may see queues of referrals, assessments, appointments, and wonder "How will we ever get through these?"

So I'd suggest we start framing our backlogs as backlogs of people to help, not backlogs of things to do.  This has a few benefits:

1. In our backlogs there may be multiple items relating to the same individuals, families, households, or communities.  By framing the backlog as 'people to help' rather than separate activities, we can collapse out activities in to something much more effective.  This strips out the noise and duplication and gets what matters done much faster.  I saw this an an insurance firm a few years back.  Their backlog was around 10,000 items, but through a household centred lens it was really about 1,500 households.  Understanding this totally re-framed the operational response. We created small multi-skilled teams that had case ownership rather than task ownership, and saw the queue evaporate within a few weeks. 
2. Taking this human-shaped lens gives us the opportunity to focus on doing only what matters now, post-crisis. The things that were wanted and needed pre-crisis may look very different by the time we get back to work, so doing the activities that are sat in in our queues may not be doing what matters now
3. Another opportunity – especially in public services – is to recognise our relationship with people, families, households and communities may have changed.  Their capabilities, expectations, and openness or desire to embrace different methods of engagement may have changed. They may be more willing to use technologies like Zoom or social media.  The pride in our key workers and the spirit of responsible citizenship and reciprocity between people and public services that this crisis has encouraged may mean there are greater opportunities to support people to self-help, to help each other, to volunteer, to hold group consultations and so on.  We can capitalise on the experience we have all been going through without abusing it, and we can all emerge a little bit different, a little bit more capable and perhaps even a little bit kinder than before.

Q2: What information might be helpful for people to know while working on a backlog?

I might start by asking “who is in my queue?” instead of “how much is in my queue?”

I’d think about where it makes sense to look at the queues as individuals, and where it makes sense to look at them as ‘hotspots’.  By this I mean groups of people who share characteristics that may be important to how we can help them.  For example:

• people who are related or live together (where a household shaped response could be an opportunity);
• people who live in the same area or access the same community centres, e.g. schools, GP practices, sports clubs, etc (where providing or supporting a local response could help;
• people who have the same needs and requests as each other (where supporting them as a group of providing peer support could help)
• people who are likely to be capable of self-help (where written information, a conversation, or group session could set them free).

There might also be a simple basis on which to prioritise who to focus on first, for example who is likely to experience harm if we don’t help them within the next days or weeks?

Q3: What are some practical things a team working on a backlog could be doing – say on a daily or weekly basis?

There are a few things that I think are really important for teams to do.

1. Make the backlog visible at the team level.  Avoid running lots of little backlogs everywhere which end up hiding or compartmentalising the issue, and creates extra pressure on people to reduces their queues, which may not be the same as doing what matters. 
2. Have a clear priority rule for who gets helped and in what order.  Without this it's really hard not to get drawn into fire-fighting the 'hotline' requests which quickly pulls effort out of shape. 
3. Have clear definitions of what good looks like, both for the people your work exists to help, and with progress through the backlog.  For example, how would you want the people you are trying to help feel as a result of your help? When would you have helped 'enough'?  What would you want to be true as a team at the end of each day, week, month, etc?  What would you see if you were making good progress together?  Framing these things can help quickly reduce tensions, make sense of progress, and agree decisions about whether, when, and how to adjust.
4. Have regular check-ins, favouring frequent and quick so visibility and collective responsibility are maintained.
5. Have meaningful 'in the work' support, where someone is paying attention to what's happening and why, what's being learned, what may need adjustment, and where judgement calls need to be made or supported.  

This last element can really grease the wheels of progress and provides a great opportunity for rapid and dynamic learning and adaptation, as well as a sense of ‘being in it together'.

Q4: What challenges to you think a team might face?

Every context will reveal its own challenges.  A key one for management and leadership is to recognise that the old measures may not be helpful in the new world. Continuing, for example, to monitor things like waiting times for specific activities doesn’t really make sense in a human shaped – rather than activity shaped – world.  This will also drive behaviour back in the direction of ‘getting things done’ over ‘getting people helped’.

In some contexts a predictable and important tension can also be around where service scope should start and end. As we take a person-shaped lens we may see that what would really help people is something quite different to what we might normally offer.  Or it might be something that is beyond our normal scope of expertise. In such circumstances it really helps to have clarity and peer support:

• Clarity: do we have a shared collective understanding of when we have done ‘enough’? Can we afford for our customer to define this for us? Can we afford for them not to?
• Peer support:  is it easy for us to get help with decisions that may be at the boundary of what’s clear and certain? Have we baked this into 'the work', which will enable us to keep working effectively and at pace.  Or is it remote, hard to access, or hidden behind committees, email queues, etc – which will leave us juggling activity rather than getting people helped.

Q5: Can you give any examples of when you’ve helped people with their backlogs?

In pre-crisis times this was a common issue.  I’ve helped quite a few organisations and teams – public and private sector – with backlogs.  One of my favourite stories is about what happened after I’d left a pensions firm I’d worked with. They had a predictable problem every year during what they called 'pension season'. A flood of requests to top up pensions before a tax deadline would hit the firm and send queues into meltdown. It would take them a full quarter to recover their position.

When I worked with them we realised a more human-centric response to their work in general – not just for pension season – would mean using multi-disciplinary teams who had case ownership, much like the earlier example I mentioned. This naturally led teams to do a degree of cross-skilling. People in the teams spotted that simple tasks they could each do separately but not all do together, could be easily trained in and would create more resilience. 

When I checked back with that client 18 months after working with them I asked ,"How was pension season this year?" to which they replied "You mean pension week?"  The teams had cross-skilled so that each team member now had the specific skills required to do pension top-ups. This took the operational capacity to handle ‘pension season’ from being a few skilled people to a system wide capability. Pension season now hardly registered as a blip on their radar.

Q6: What opportunities might this give us to improve how we work once this crisis is over?

I think the big opportunity here is not just backlog busting nor even ‘just' better, more effective, more timely or more efficient service. All of these things are possible and valuable but the huge win is what it does to the workplace. 

Imagine a workplace where you:

• Have real collective ownership of the work that exists to be done
• Work together to stay on top of it
• Are supported to grow your skills in response to the opportunities you identify for adding more value
• Have a voice in what’s happening and how that’s affecting you as individuals and your shared mission as a team
• Have a greater and much more systematically supported connection to the purpose and value of your work because you are dealing in humans and families and communities, not in widgets, referrals, tasks and activities.

In a pretty profound sense, I think that what can seem like a fairly prosaic task – "tackling a backlog" – could in fact be a perfect opportunity to truly re-humanise work.  Don’t you?

Want to know more?

If you’d like to see more stuff like this, have a chance to chat with Andy, myself, or other like-minded folks, then check out Next Stage Radicals.  

We’re an open learning community made up of people with a passion to make work work better. There’s more on the website, or follow us on Twitter, or feel free to get in touch with Andy or I if you’d like to know more.