DHSC: FGO: Simplify & Deliver – recruitment process improvement support

The Simplify and Deliver programme aims to improve how our department operates in order to become more effective. Ministers, the Permanent Secretary and our own staff have cited the need to overcome unnecessary bureaucracy and inefficient processes, dismantle siloes, empower teams and make better use of supporting technology. The programme is proceeding through three phases: a) assess and prioritise the biggest opportunities for change alongside delivering some simpler changes, b) co-design harder changes, test and learn with a number of teams across the department before c) using these teams to support wider adoption of successful changes.

This requirement relates to one of our simpler changes, to streamline the process for internal recruitment in the department. This has been prioritised by a network of staff as a key challenge, and is high impact as most teams engage in it. Improvements could save significant amounts of time and speed up delivery by weeks. However, internally in DHSC we do not have many people with skills and experience in rapid process improvement, or with the ability to simultaneously make changes to digital systems to deliver improvements quickly. We are proposing to use specialist skills to support this process over a period of 5-6 weeks.

Objectives of the work:

• Prepare for process improvement of internal recruitment through understanding current process, stakeholders, digital systems, constraints, data collection/analysis

• Run a rapid improvement event to take process from current to improved state in a ‘live’ environment (i.e. improving the systems as the event progresses), where the new process is measurably faster and to a higher quality

• Conduct any follow up activity to ensure new process can be fully embedded