Road to Excellence: improving the UK's roads with Six Sigma

The Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) is part of the Department for Transport (DfT) in the UK and our main focus is safety and environmental standards on the roads within the UK. We annually test vehicles to provide the governance mechanisms for car testing (although a private garage carries out the test, we actually manage the garages and ensure that the policies they adopt are correct). We also oversee road check systems and emissions checks, for instance certification according to the new London Low Emissions Certificate.

One of the biggest challenges that we face are the constraints felt by any government agency by having to comply with DfT policy legislation but because we are a neutral trading fund, we don’t have to chase the big financial efficiencies as a business.

We’ve been using six sigma for about three years, so we are still at an early stage in our development. Before we got involved with it, we had run a lot of projects and quite a few had failed to deliver what we expected. We turned to six sigma as a possible solution but as we struggled to get senior management buy-in, we were working in ‘stealth’ mode. We still have a lot of big projects within the business which do not use the methodology, but we also have other projects which are gaining priority and are using lean and the six sigma approaches.

Cultural change

The biggest challenges for us have been cultural change and getting people to think in a process perspective. Interestingly, it’s also been tough to get people to slow down a little bit. As an organisation, we’ve always been into big step changes, for instance if the government announces a three per cent reduction in head count, all of a sudden projects sprout up with external consultants. If we take a more pragmatic view and stand back, we might realise, for instance, that if we manage our resources staff-wise we’d actually achieve savings there rather than needing to launch a big project.

I think the business is starting to realise that we don’t need a ‘big bang’ to achieve our goals. We need to think of new ways in which we can continue to develop as a business and still deliver and also realise that we don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money to deliver big change.

One key benefit from an early six sigma project was a cost saving of £74,000. Just by carrying out some simple process work, we realised that we didn’t need another member of staff. Another project led to savings of £110,000 and that was purely as a result of re-aligning the budget.

Reactivating the philosophy

When six sigma was originally raised as an idea within the business, nearly 100 people went on a four-day training course on lean and six sigma techniques. But the problem was that the work environment to get those people using what they had been trained to do wasn’t there, so they went back to their day jobs and the whole idea died a death. I was on the fringes at the time and that was really where I came in. We were then asking, how can we reactivate this philosophy?

Once we had set up a few projects using the methodology, the next question was how can we get the business to buy-in at a bigger process level? Over six or seven months we developed a whole business process management system (BPMS) to nail down key processes and it was finished in December 2007. It was a key milestone for us, to get people to think, ‘I am the process owner’. The whole BPMS approach builds on the ideas of continuous improvement of the process, people and resources. It’s been one of our big wins over the last 18 months.

I don’t think we have actually realised the benefit of the BMPS yet. One key factor is that we’ve had some people come in from outside the business at director and senior management level, from banks and the telecoms sector. Because they’ve been in an environment where they used lean, six sigma and other techniques of continuous improvement, they’re bringing process knowledge into the business and, more importantly, the buy-in.

The importance of buy-in

Although we’ve been pushing hard internally to get people to understand the method and we’ve been carrying out training, the big push is coming from these new external directors. It’s tremendous to finally be part of something that has got huge buy-in at director level.

The importance of buy-in is one of the key things that I would like to get across to anyone. Getting buy-in and a champion are the most critical things when you’re rolling out six sigma. The first couple of years, we operated in stealth mode, but over the last year or so we’ve been able to get people to ‘talk the right talk’.

Our future plans are more targeted. We are just embarking on a big change programme which embraces the lean and six sigma methodologies and we’ve just run another training programme where 11 people went on a three-day induction course. We then taught them about their new projects, with myself as the overall coach. These people will then be given individual projects where they can tailor their knowledge and training and deliver them into the business.

This builds straight into a programme of change, so it’s not a stealth project any more, it’s just part of how they work and that’s the key to all this. It’s training people, getting them activated straightaway, and making them part of this change mechanism, so they’re not out on a limb. That’s our new direction for the future.

You’ve got to be persistent and if you really believe in it you will get through. But, as we’ve proved, it can take quite some time. You’ve got to believe in what you do and people come around eventually. We still have to challenge the rest of the business, but we’ll get there. By developing and working on the cultural change in this programme, people will see the good that we’re doing. We’ve planted a seed and are hoping that it will bear fruit

VOSA are clients of Catalyst Consulting. For more information, click here (internal link).