Better Management - Goverment Style (Fort Wayne, Indiana)

When I encounter skepticism that government can be made more efficient, I like to respond with examples like this. Emphasis added by me.

Fixing potholes and processes
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is one of the first major U.S. cities to roll out Six Sigma. Mayor Graham Richard, elected to the position in 1999, had long been familiar with quality improvement. In 1991, while serving as a state senator, Richard helped start the TQM Network, a group of small to midsized companies that used benchmarks to improve their processes. Most of these companies were suppliers to General Electric, a company that famously enjoyed success with Six Sigma. GE’s suppliers in the TQM Network took note, and many of them implemented Six Sigma programs of their own, Richard says. When he became mayor, those successes were still fresh in his mind.

[...]
The city’s first Six Sigma projects, permitting and pothole repair, were chosen for this reason because they were high profile and would provide noticeable results for Fort Wayne’s 250,000 residents. Both were problem areas: Before Six Sigma, it took an average of 50 days to get a city building permit, and it took up to four days for city workers to fill the many dangerous potholes that form on the city’s roads. Of course, before Six Sigma no one in the city’s offices knew these statistics, as no one had ever collectively examined them.

Richard’s goal was to get potholes fixed within 24 hours of their reporting. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” Richard remembers. “Everyone said, ‘You’ll never make it.’” Black Belts mapped the locations of potholes, finding the areas of the city where they happened most often and concentrated their efforts there. Today, most potholes are fixed within four hours after they’re reported.

In addition, Black Belts used flowcharts and maps to highlight redundancies in the city’s permitting system and slashed the amount of time it takes to issue a permit from 50 days to just 11 or 12.

The trick, Richard says, is for public agencies to institutionalize the notion that they are service providers, not bureaucrats.

“When you remember that fact, you’re telling people that you’re there to provide a service, just as anyone in the public sector would,” he says. “People don’t think of government as a business, but they should. We’re one of the biggest service organizations in the area.”

The often-substantial cost of Six Sigma training can be a deterrent to its successful implementation--especially for smaller companies and governments--but Richard found an innovative way to provide it. He used his connections with the TQM Network to have experienced Black Belts provide training, and then reached a deal with Six Sigma giants Raytheon and ITT to allow city workers to attend internal Six Sigma training sessions. A TQM Network Master Black Belt, Roger Hirt, served as a mentor to Fort Wayne’s fledging Six Sigma practitioners, and also offered Green Belt training.

Richard estimates that the training could have cost the city $50,000 per Black Belt, but it totaled less than a tenth of that sum.

In just five years, Six Sigma has revolutionized Fort Wayne’s city government. City workers have completed 60 Six Sigma projects, which have saved upward of $10 million, and there are now 35 Six Sigma belts on the staff. Fort Wayne’s school district is now implementing Six Sigma, and the city gets monthly requests for information from other public administrators interested in modeling Fort Wayne’s success in their own cities.

Fort Wayne’s Six Sigma-facilitated improvements include:

Variation elimination and bottleneck reduction, allowing the fire department inspectors to perform 23 percent more reinspections annually, without any staff increases.

Parks department workers, led by a Six Sigma Black Belt, designed an experiment to determine if city trees were trimmed at the right frequencies, reducing complaint calls from citizens by 33 percent.

Improved accounting in the transportation engineering department freed $150,000 that had previously been tied up due to inaccurate estimations of project costs.

On-the-job injuries have plummeted to one of the lowest rates in the country.