The pursuit of excellence in large organisations

The goal of every government agency is to deliver their services in the most efficient and effective way possible. One of the recent technical phrases for this kind of delivery is operational excellence, or OpEx, and Ruth Owen, the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the NSW Department of Education, describes OpEx as the pursuit of “a really slick, well-tuned engine, with everything working well together.” Not everyone has one of those, but for those who do, it is “a hidden gem of big organisations.” At the Department of Education it would mean that “systems and processes all work well, that people and have all the capabilities and know where they fit into the processes, and that everything works as intended, at the right time and with the intended impact.” Whilst the Department is not quite at this stage yet, to get there they are focussed on three areas: service excellence, experiential or operational excellence, and digital excellence. Many agencies focus just on customer experience, which is essential, but to really achieve OpEx, all three elements are necessary.

In fact, true operational excellence only comes about if all parts of the system are working well together. For instance, in every government department there are two types of people. “The rock stars who advise the Ministers, craft and write speeches and policies, and the roadies, who are in the background, just making everything work and driving hard to make sure that the policy is actually delivered.” Not only are both types “equally important,” but in reality in a modern department, “you can’t have one without the other,” and if one isn’t performing as well as the other, there can never be any kind of excellence. 

Any education department is “keen to drive professionalism, high esteem and the importance of what we deliver on behalf of government.” Yet, nothing happens without the “quiet deliverers behind the curtain who drive and achieve the standard of operational experience we are after.” Under the auspices of the NSW Department of Education, there are “145,000 teachers and about a million customers in the terms of school kids across the state.” The only way for both types of employees and for everyone under the banner of the department to achieve any kind of excellence is through “operational cadence, where everybody knows what works, on what day, and how it all fits together.” In other words, everyone essentially needs to know what all the pieces of the organisation are, how they all work collectively, and what all the deadlines are. This is useful for customers who often expect predictability, especially in the realm of education which is divided into terms and semesters, but it also “decompresses the system and creates a rhythm for all of us to stick to.”

Stopping the chaos, driving the cadence

Whilst the priority of the Department is always to “improve the quality of education in schools and to improve our student outcomes,” decompressing the system is one clear way of attaining operational excellence across the whole department and in fact across the whole public sector. This decompression stems from the fact that “teachers have an increased workload and are generally overworked, underpaid and are not happy.” This is unhealthy for teachers, but is also permeating the rest of the Department. Especially since the height of the pandemic, the pressures on teachers and on the entire education sector have been immense. 

“In education, we’ve got to stop the chaos and we’ve got to create cadence and order.”

Ruth Owen, Deputy Secretary/COO, NSW Department of Education

In a practical sense, one way of eliminating chaos is by having all enquiries “coming through a single front door,” and then “supporting schools and looking at their own internal process.” There needs to be a unified cadence not just at HQ in the offices in the city, but across all the schools as well. Although each school is different, each still operates from the same curriculum and runs on the same timeframe. “So we are now also enabling principals and their support staff to have a think about what operational excellence looks like within their schools.” In simple terms, “we are taking away the complexity.”

The problem however, is that although the department “is full of outstanding educators, they don’t have the background of driving operational excellence.” They are generally keen to make things easier and less chaotic for themselves, and they understand and respect the prerogative of the department, but “simply don’t have the airspace or the belief.” The excellence across the system will come when the department gets full buy-in from the teachers, all the support staff and ultimately the principals and the students. One way to achieve that is through the experience of the Department of Customer Service in NSW.  More than any other department or agency, they understand their customers “and know how to walk a mile in their customers shoes.” The Department of Education is not quite at that point yet, but many executives have now started to “go out and look at how schools actually operate.” When they do that, they see how overworked and distracted teachers can be. “Every 30 seconds, there’s a kid that needs a Band Aid or a teacher who needs some photocopying.” 

As a department, “we have mapped every process and task done in a school, for the first time ever.” The next step was to analyse the process map to see what processes are an absolute necessity, what processes can be removed, and what processes changed, digitised or simplified in some way.  

“We have to really understand the roles and experiences in schools before we can design solutions, otherwise they aren’t going to fit the experience of the customers.” 

Ruth Owen, Deputy Secretary/COO, NSW Department of Education

Only this kind of engagement and deep dive into the school and departmental processes will allow the whole department to take one step further towards operational excellence, which in turn should lead to excellence across the entirety of the system.