Public Administration goes to Lean school. The case of the Municipality of Villorba (Treviso)

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Protagonist of the Lean project carried out by GC&P was the Municipality of Villorba, a town in the province of Treviso, and, in particular, the Technical Office, a department that has to deal with building permissions and declarations from the almost 18.000 Villorba residents.

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The main objective of our project has been to prove the effectiveness and flexibility of the Lean approach in every organization including public institutions. In particular we have demonstrated its effectiveness in a department which deals with bureaucratic work subject to frequent legislative changes.

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After explaining the basic principles and techniques of the Lean Organization we have involved the participants in the “Lean Game”, a simulation of a traditional production process that allowed them to experience the effects of a lean transformation and created a good climate of interaction and participation. Our starting point was a simulation of the most traditional “batch and queue” production system (which, by the way is still present in many companies) in order to show how inefficient it is and how poor are its performances in terms of cost, quality and customer service. After this we have gradually made a number of changes that made the process more and more effective and efficient. By means of this game we have stimulated our “Players” awareness of the need to apply lean principles to their work in order to make their processes faster and more efficient. Following this first phase we have analyzed the processes carried out by Technical Office concentrating our attention on the two types of services that are more frequently supplied. For these we have performed a “stream mapping” measuring Lead Times, Cycle Times and Flow Indices. As a consequence we have identified the activities that do not generate value, but require an investment of time and resources. We have reviewed and streamlined the procedure of sorting and distributing incoming and outgoing mail, proposing, according to the principles of “Visual Management”, a number of boxes of different colours for different types of petition and for the different persons who have to deal with them.. We have also worked on the forms to be used by citizens making them as simple and as error proof as possible. We have created a new big “notice board” to be installed at the entrance of the municipal building. The board contains two types of information: on the one hand those needed by the citizens who have to start a procedure; on the other a series of performance indicators concerning the service rendered by the institution. Special attention has been given to efficiency: for this reason a section of the board is devoted to comparing actual lead times for each procedure with the times prescribed by the law.

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Now the working place is more tidy and neat and less cluttered with documents and papers and pending dossiers.Lead times have been more than halved from 20 days to 10 days, thus fully complying with the objectives set by the Legislator.