This article is written by Ryan Hunter, manager of San Francisco's city performance lean program

Last year we at the San Francisco City Performance Lean Program had the honour of being nominated to Apolitical’s Global Public Service Team of the Year in the “Doing More with Less” category. And while — spoiler alert — we came in as the runner-up, the nomination gave us occasion to step back and think about the ways we are doing “more with less” ourselves.

Our passion is to help city departments provide the highest quality of service to San Franciscans, not through investments in money or technology, but through lifting up the best ideas of the dedicated public servants who do the work every day. We’re a small team in San Francisco’s City Hall, dedicated to empowering city staff to continuously improve government services for the people of San Francisco.

Just like our clients, we find ourselves challenged to do the best possible work with the fewest possible resources, and the most effective thing we’ve found is this: we don’t solve problems, we make problem-solvers.

We’re always eager to share our best ideas with other innovative public servants. After all, we ourselves are standing on the shoulders of other municipal improvement teams. As you think about how to serve your citizens, we’d like to share with you our biggest efforts in 2019.

1. We kept building problem solvers. In our two lean leaders cohorts, 46 staff from 15 city departments applied lean methods to solving tricky problems in their home departments. Over three months, all these champions had 24 hours of training, sat for 1-1 coaching with our team, and won buy-in for change from their co-workers and sponsors.

These rising stars are the backbone of our program, and the results they have achieved are impressive. They’ve done everything from getting seniors rapidly onto public insurance and feeding programs to streamlining accessibility hearings for disabled transit passengers.

The huddle is the most powerful engine we’ve found for creating a top-to-bottom culture of continuous improvement and getting front-line staff invested in the unit’s strategic goals

We’re especially proud that our autumn cohort was chock full of second- and third-generation lean leaders — folk who enrolled based on word-of-mouth endorsements from their co-workers. There’s no greater vote of confidence in the work than trainees who convince their colleagues to get involved too. We also trained more than 200 staff in our half-day Lean 101 class.

2. We partnered with city departments to reduce time-to-hire and to keep employees on their benefits during a time of crisis. Through partnerships with the HR divisions at the Public Utilities Commission and the SF Public Library, we slashed weeks and months off time-to-hire for city staff.

Library leadership can now view their entire hiring pipeline at a glance in a tableau dashboard, and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is cutting months off the hiring timeline through low-tech, low-cost solutions, like kicking off the process with a strategy meeting instead of a form. The health service system, which administers benefit plans for city employees, has been finding simple solutions to keep staff from losing their health insurance when a crisis causes them to take unpaid leave.

Solutions there have included doing “pick-ups” so employees who owe small premium amounts can pay later, and connecting directly with leave management staff at the three city departments that were found to make up the majority of unpaid premiums.

3. We trained executives to lead with humility. We’ve long realised that committed sponsorship is the number one determinant of project success or failure, so in early 2019 we launched our Lean for Executives class.

We’ve now trained nearly 50 city executives and managers to reward problem-solving, empower their staff to make decisions and lead as coaches. One executive told us, “This training should be mandatory for all new managers in the city.”

4. We brought problem-solving to front-line staff with huddles. A huddle is a daily 10-minute meeting where all members of a work team convene to surface problems and potential solutions, look honestly together at the group’s performance against goals, move “Just Do It” solutions (JDIs) forward rapidly, and celebrate small victories.

It’s the most powerful engine we’ve found for creating a top-to-bottom culture of continuous improvement and getting front-line staff invested in the unit’s strategic goals. Our internal huddle completed nearly 50 JDIs in 2019, and our two partnership huddles (together with Lean 101 trainees) completed dozens more.

5. Our program’s standard work passed its stress test. Mid-year, two of the analysts who had been with our team since its founding both left within a few months of one another (Kyra to law school and Jenessa to a full-time lean gig at Genentech — awesome opportunities for them both!) We had to rapidly bring onboard a new team member, run lean leaders with one fewer staff, and juggle all our team roles.

We are limited in our ability to scale — for us to reach the entire city, we can’t just hire more staff

But thanks to the hard work of the rest of our team and our dogged insistence on standardising our work these past years, not only did the ship stay afloat, but we managed to create new training content during the transition as well.

So what’s next?

We plan to keep moving the ball forward in 2020. Here’s some of what’s in the pipeline:

  • Behavioural Insights: We piloted our fourth line of training in early March, to help city staff apply the principles of social psychology and behavioural economics to their interactions with the public to help customers make the best decisions. (Think Nudge.) We’re especially excited to be partnering with DataScienceSF, who will help staff run A/B tests to prove when their new designs are effective.
  • Ramping up online offerings in the wake of Covid-19: Coronavirus has deeply impacted our ability to train staff and run improvement efforts. We’re moving quickly to scale up our online offerings, including this blog and a brand-new online training in personal productivity called “Getting Things Done”.
  • Staff development: We’re building our bench internally by creating opportunities for more of our staff to become A3 coaches, lead new training modules, and shadow lean facilitation. Those of us on our core team are broadening our improvement skill sets into Six Sigma and Design Thinking.
  • Starting departmental lean programs: We are limited in our ability to scale — for us to reach the entire city, we can’t just hire more staff. Luckily, some of our prior lean superstars are gearing up to lead training and coach improvement projects independently. We are planning to equip several city departments to run their own lean training in the coming year.
  • Additional partnerships: Already this year, we are assisting the new One-stop Permit Centre to stand up a huddle, where for the first time, staff from a dozen different permitting departments can solve problems together. Additional partnerships are in the works!

Whew! I always wish we could do more. We’re a scrappy crew — all of us have other responsibilities besides the lean program, and lots of staff support our training with just a handful of hours. Still, when I add up our staff time dedicated to lean, it’s only the equivalent of a bit more than three full-time staff. I feel pretty good about our ability to do more with less!

We’re always happy to share our lessons learned with other innovation programs. Lots of resources are available on our website, or reach out to us at con.leanprogram@sfgov.org and set up a time to chat. — Ryan Hunter

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)

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