ARCHIVED - Quality Service - Benchmarking and Best Practices: An Update (Guide X)

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1. The Time is Now!

Quality is Everyone's Business

Federal departments, agencies, and Crown corporations must provide Canadians with quality services despite significant fiscal restraints. To remain viable, public service organizations must create corporate cultures that value leadership, encourage client and employee involvement, and continuously improve services, work processes, and management practices. In recent years, public service organizations have initiated many changes. A sampling includes:

• Human Resources Canada, through its Income Security Programs Redesign Projects, will save $40 million annually by computerizing employee access to client files.
• Revenue Canada worked with importers to implement industry-tailored solutions involving "electronic commerce", "streamlined reporting and release", "periodic entry processing", "offsetting debits and credits", and other procedures. Companies estimate they will save tens of millions of dollars over several years from these procedures.
• Benchmarking initiatives in the United States have led to major improvements in the services and products of such federal agencies as the Census Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management.
• A number of Canadian government departments, agencies, and Crown corporations have initiated benchmarking processes, including AECL, TBS, CIDA, PWGSC, Health Canada, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada.

Many departments and organizations, after restructuring and downsizing, are trying to regain momentum. They are looking for ways of providing quality services while systematically managing change and continuous improvement, objectives aligned with the government-wide quality services initiative.

Quality Services and Treasury Board Secretariat Expectations

The aim of the quality services initiative is to create the conditions for employees to respond better to Canadians' demands and help to rebuild public confidence in the federal government.[1] Starting in 1996, departments will be required, in their Business Plans, Outlook Documents or Estimates, to report on measured improvements to client satisfaction and on their quality service plans. As part of the government's renewed expenditure management system, the Treasury Board Secretariat is also requesting that departments define expected results in their business plans, then report on performance. It is no longer sufficient to ask how well a program is performing; departments must now demonstrate their "value-added accomplishments".[2]

The Benefits of Benchmarking and Best Practices Sharing

With constant pressures to improve services, resource use, delivery times, and overall operational efficiency and effectiveness, Benchmarking and Best Practices Sharing are increasingly being accepted as powerful and useful organizational change tools to be used as part of a planned approach to improving service quality.

Benefits of Benchmarking

Benchmarking may

• improve strategic planning;
• provide assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the current core business processes and related critical work processes;
• foster organizational methods and practices;
• lead to significant cost savings, and improvements to products, services and business processes by comparing and adapting current methods and practices to those identified as "best practices";
• foster and sustain an improved organizational capacity to successfully implement quality and process improvement initiatives.

Benefits of Best Practices Sharing

Best practices sharing may

• educate leaders and employees of new possibilities;
• improve management practices, work processes and services;
• accelerate continuous improvement;
• promote networking;
• stimulate others to action;
• minimize "re-inventing the wheel";
• recognize creative leaders, employees and teams.

A Practical Kit

This guide should help you integrate these management change tools in your organization. Following this introductory section are:

Section 2: Benchmarking - what it is; how it is used

Section 3: Best Practices Sharing - Some Points To Ponder

Section 4: Launching initiatives

Appendix A: 34 examples

Appendix B: Names of useful contacts; invitation to share your best practices

Appendix C: Bibliography

Appendix D: Benchmarking and Best Practices Sharing Team

Endnotes

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