10 Practical Steps to Mobile Workforce Management

E B O O K

The Local Government Edition

Introduction

Thank you for taking the time to read the local government edition of our eBook “10 Practical Steps to Mobile Workforce Management”. We hope you find it interesting and informative. More importantly, we hope the hard-won expertise and steps within this book, will help you shape a successful approach to your project.

The challenges and practical guidance described here have been tested and proven by real people from real organisations, including local government, who are just a little ahead of you in their Mobile Workforce Enablement adventure.So why are we focusing on the anatomy of a successful

implementation? According to the Project Management Institute, the average IT project runs 45% over budget, 7% over time, and delivers 56% less value than expected. There have been numerous times we have seen this first hand. Fortunately, we have been able to help our customers overcome it.

We don’t only want you to have a successful implementation. We also want you to generate real, significant benefits, both for your healthcare organisation and for patients and service users.The report “Working anywhere: A winning formula for good work?” predicted that flexible working will

be the main way of working for 70 per cent of organisations by 2020.

The benefits of Mobile Workforce Management are significant and long- lasting. As the report above suggests, it’s only a matter of time before this way of working will be the norm.

Don’t be left behind. Start researching your Mobile Workforce Management journey now. And there’s no better place to start than with this eBook.

Good luck!Jim DarraghCEO at Totalmobile

“The way to winning user hearts and minds when it comes to mobile: support, support, support”Customer Insight from Sarah Royles, Nottinghamshire County Council 4 Step 1 - Out with the old... 6Step 2 - Be S.M.A.R.T. 8Step 3 - Don’t let your solution hold you hostage. 9Step 4 - The greatest ideas are the simplist. 10Step 5 - Your staff are your secret weapon to success. 11Step 6 - Futureproof your investment. 13Step 7 - Don’t DIY. 14Step 8 - Do it once and do it right. 16Step 9 - Learn from the mistakes of others. 17Step 10 - Celebrate good times. 18

Contents

Customer InsightNottinghamshire County Council

“The way to winning user hearts and minds when it comes to mobile: support, support, support”Sarah Royles, Service Development Manager at Nottinghamhsire County Council tell us about their journey into mobile working. “By the end of 2015, we put a mobile device in the hands of everyone in the council who needs one. Today, I want to say a little about whywe think this is going to be a really powerful enabler for the staff involved.

“The deployment – a key part of our push here to change the way we deliver ICT right across the board – has one over-arching philosophy that I think is critical in terms of understanding our thinking here: it’s about really helping staff do what they do much better – as well as cutting out as much inefficiency in all our processes as we possibly can.

I do also immediately have to say – and I’m sure many of you reading this will have some insight into this –that you can’t just say that you’re going to introduce a new way of working, even for the very best aims, without expecting a reservation or two from staff.

“Let’s be frank; introducing new things can be scary. Andsome teams, as in our initial case,

the social care team, wereslightly hesitant about how this was going to make them moreef cient. But that was genuinely our push here. We wanted tohelp our people to be as enabled as we could make them in terms ofdelivering a good service. Yes, we wanted to save funds; we’re operating inthe same austerity environment as most people in local government. But we were convinced we could transform worker lives by use of technology and meet the financial goal at the same time by doing things differently.”

Extending the system off their own bat.

“Quite rightly, you’re going to ask if it has worked. I can genuinely tell you things are definitely looking very positive. With an initial rollout of some 500 tablets and the Totalmobile mobile software on top, we are all slowly, but steadily, finding out just how much more we can achieve using these tools.

“We were careful about how we got the devices out there. We had a very well worked-out implementation plan centred on a lot of communications

and training for staff. This involved face-to-face briefings with on-going online help and resources plus a lot of mentoring from both Totalmobile people plus peers within the teams, who are doing some great work getting their colleagues up to speed with this new technology. “To be honest, we’re surprised not just at how well this is going, but also who has taken to the new practices. There have been some people racing ahead here who would have been the last ones I’d have predicted would have grasped mobile technology and ran with it. That’s been very gratifying to see.

“Not just gratifying, it’s been illuminating, too. Off their own bat, some staff have worked out how to extend the system’s functionality,

in really interesting ways, too, by incorporating photography as part of service user visits.

“We’ve not done any kind of exhaustive audit just yet, as the project is still on-going. But what we are already hearing is a lot of talk about how much not having to write up so many notes at the end of the day is seen as a plus-point, which

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is great, as we really wanted that to be a deliverable for the team.

“This is a soft benefit as we hadn’t previously been tracking how much time was spent by people in the evening doing admin catch-up.”

Don’t impose. But hand-hold!

“Can we share any pointers for best practice at this juncture, then?

I think we’d want to emphasise how important it is to communicate. You want to take your people along on the journey here. I’d also really work on listening to staff when you ask them what could be improved about their jobs; IT is really just an enabler for doing that – you won’t succeed if you just impose something ‘from above’ that they don’t see as aiding them along in their daily work schedule.

“But above all, keep being supportive. We’re definitely moving to getting allof our people to be able to deliver a much more professional service to the community, empowered by information at their fingertips – but we don’t expect them to do it all on their own. And if you want to succeed in your mobile project, I recommend you don’t either.”

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1 Hour Savedper worker per day

READ THE FULL CASE STUDY

“Totalmobile enables social workers to do what they are good at, and that’s dealing with people.”

Sarah Royles

Like most local authorities, Nottinghamshire faces significant ongoing budget reductions, with a requirement to save a further £50m over the next four years. Technology has been at the heart of the council’s agenda to “do things differently” and Ivor Nicholson, ICT Service Director of Nottinghamshire County Council, has stated that “savings and efficiencies have to be creative and innovative”. They are already realising benefits such as 17% productivity gains, 90 minutes saved in initial assessments, and £600 per employee per annum in travel savings.

https://www.totalmobile.co.uk/resource/case-studies/

Step One

Out with the old...Before embarking on your Mobile Workforce Management journey, it is vital to honestly address your current processes.

All organisations have inefficient processes. Local government is no different, but the worse thing to do is to ignore the issue, rather than consider new ideas that may provide transformation for those who provide care.

There are 3 main indicators that your processes are inefficient:

1. Lengthy manual processes.This is probably the most common inefficiency across local government. A lot of time is spent manually completing administration, health and safety, or compliance, which is then often replicated to back office systems. This takes time, time better spent providing a higher quality of service.

It isn’t always possible to eradicateall manual processes, however there are opportunities for vast improvement. Identify the most time-consuming or costly manual processes, these are the areas mobile workforce management can improve - saving time, reducing the risk of replication and errors in the recording of information.

2. Struggling to access job information.If your mobile teams struggle to find the job information they need at the point of service, you have a major issue. They spend valuable time trawling through information to find the job details they need, and it may not be the most up-to-date data.

Job information may not even all be in one place, instead there may snippets of relevant information with different departments, such as housing, repairs or environmental.By simply making relevant job

information readily available at the point of service, mobile workers are able to do their job in a timely and efficient manner.

3. Overly complex processes.If processes are difficult to understand and time-consuming to follow, you have a problem. This inevitably leads to non-adoption, as staff naturally look for alternative, easier ways to complete their tasks. If mobile staff making up their own processes, errors and inconsistencies are certain.

By providing a simple and easy to use solution that streamlines how they work on the device they know, user adoption will increase.

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Step Two

Be S.M.A.R.T.Objectives and targets are very important within local government– in fact, they are necessary. Objectives provide direction and a sense of purpose that ultimately is for the benefit of service users.

They help guide mobile workers towards the same aims or goals. It’s highly beneficial not only to come up with objectives, but to document them and communicate them to staff.

Without clear objectives, an organisation is likely to have inefficient processes (think back to Step 1). It is difficult for mobile workers to meet targets without a clear direction of the purpose of what to focus on.

We’re sure that you have heard of this model before, but objectives need to be S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific• Measureable• Achievable• Relevant• Timely

You need to ask yourself some questions;• What exactly do you want to achieve?• How will you achieve it?• When will you achieve it?• What are the conditions and limitations?• Why do you want to achieve it?

An example of a S.M.A.R.T objective is increasing your staff’s productivityby 15% by the end of 2017, with Mobile Workforce Management.

This is achievable, relevant, and has a deadline. You can also measure it in a variety of ways, an example being to determine the amount of visits completed in a week, pre and post mobile working, and comparing them.

Your objectives are the stepping stones which guide you to achieving your goals. It is important to think about them from the outset, and more important to get them right.

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Step Three

Don’t let your solution hold you hostage.Don’t be afraid to clearly define your requirements at the beginning, no matter how ambitious they may seem. You know your organisation the best, and the outcomes that are expected.

For example, one requirement that has significant impact yet is rarelyfully explored by organisations until after they’ve deployed a solution, is connectivity. The reality is that we don’t live with perfect signal coverage everywhere, all the time. The infamous ‘not spot’ phenomenon is a reality, especially in the most rural areas where services are provided. But that doesn’t mean that mobile can’t be trusted. Yes, some solutions claim they offer offline working, but delving deeper into this, it becomes apparent that functionality “falls over” frequently.

Some mobile working solutions do offer true offline working, so your staff can get the job done, no compromise.

Another requirement; device agnosticism, which refers to anything that is designed to be compatible across most common systems or platforms.

Your organisation may currently have Samsung smartphones rolled out to all housing repair staff, but what if you wish to change to iPads in 2 years? Will the solution you’ve chosen still work?

You should make sure that your solution is compatible with most operating systems and can work on different types of devices.Furthermore, you may wish to roll this solution out to hundreds of environmental staff, or multiple departments, or both. Or roll it out to 100 staff now, but increase this to 1000 in a year’s time. It is important to determine what solutions still perform with this number of users, and which will struggle.

The key thing here is to make sure you dictate the requirements of the solution, and not the other way around. Countless times organisations don’t advance with solutions because they are unnecessarily restricting whatthey can and cannot do. Money and resource is wasted on these types of solutions, because they don’t work for staff or the organisation, and as a result don’t generate cost or efficiency savings. It’s a typical case of “one step forward, two steps back”.

Think about the outcomes that you need from your mobile workforce management solution and work backwards to determine your requirements. Document them, and ensure the solution you are considering can meet them.

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Step Four

The greatest ideas are the simplest - William GoldingOver 94% of people in the UK use a mobile phone. That is a HUGE number! (Ofcom, 2017). When people are expected to use systems on mobile devices for work, they expect, at the very least, for it to be familiar and easy to use.

Sadly, most of the time, this is not the case. Many enterprise software providers still don’t give the User Interface (UI) the attention it needs and deserves.

Many providers simply mobilise their current back office systems. They think that by allowing staffto access the back office system on a mobile device, this constitutes as mobile working. The result? An app for each back office system – and none designed to work the way a mobile worker does.

Without giving thought to how a housing repair team or a social worker will use the solution or how easy it is to utilise in the work environment, the results will be the same. Failure.

So what makes a good UI?

• It’s simple – don’t over complicate things, or bombard the user with tonnes of information if it’s not

relevant. This only wastestime and frustrates staff even more.

Ensure relevant things such as work schedule, job information, and supporting documents are easily and quickly accessible.

• It’s familiar – this is the whole idea of it being ‘intuitive’. But what does intuitive mean? It means that if you put a system in the hands of your staff, they naturally and instinctively know what to do.

Back to the stat atthe top of the page – imagine giving your staff a solution that is as easy to use as the various apps they use at home? Adoption would be rapid with minimal training. They can get right on with the job at hand. • It’s responsive – responsive can mean two things. The first is ‘fast’. How quickly does it load? How quickly can I find and access the job information Ineed? How quickly does it sync to the back office system?

Responsiveness can also mean something else. Does it confirm that the form has been submitted? Even when the device is offline?

Can it prepopulate job information that has been submitted before – making for a better user experience and a more efficient service?

These will provide the mobile worker and service user with a sense of confidence that what they are doing is informed and will fix the issue.

• It’s maintainable – will the solution you choose allow you to make minor modifications and adjustments to forms and document libraries, without affecting the overall look or performance? The last thing you want to do is have a range of different technologies that require support, or to have to invest a large amount of resource to make changes.

User adoption is key to success. The best way to ensure this is by providing technology that is easy for mobile workers to use. Technology that actually makes their jobs easier and aids the way in which they work. If you don’t, the solution will fail. It’s as simple (and frustrating) as that.

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Step Five

Your staff are your secret weapon to success.A major mistake organisations tend to make when implementing any sort of change to work processes, is not involving staff from the outset.

It really does pay dividends to involve your staff from the very beginning and lay out the vision. It is important to clearly state what is changing and why. Show staff where you are today, and where you intend to be in the future.

Make sure you show them why this matters to the organisation and how it will benefit service users and their working lives. Communicate to them that it will free up time, enhance flexibility, and allow for lone worker safety. Overall improving their work life balance but ultimately improving the quality of work and helping them to meet SLAs.

It’s important to ensure that staff feel like this isn’t just something that will make them work even harder and reduce costs and resources. They need to feel that

they will benefit from it as well.

Also, ask their advice. Give them the opportunity to have their say and getan insight into what they believe their needs are. Allow them to highlight what frustrates them, what is complicated, and what takes up a lot of their time. This will also help you with Step 1 (clearing out the inefficient processes). No one knows better than your staff about what processes are and are not working. Utilise them.

Staff who are fully informed, and have been involved in the decision making process are more than likely to embrace the change. If you put a new solution in their hands that they aren’t familiar with, they won’t use it. Mostly due to the fear of change and a lack of confidence in its ability to enable them to do their job better. They’ll resort back to old ways of working.

You want to take your staff along with you on this journey. And furthermore, you need to keep being supportive, even after the solution is

implemented. You can’t expect staff to do it all on their own. A good idea is to encourage some of your staff to be “super users”. Frontline mobile workers who use the solution and love it, who can act as ambassadors to fellow staff. Super users can empower staff, facilitate adoption and provide a feedback loop of voices.

We truly believe that if you take care of your employees, they will take provide quality services - benefitting the organisation.

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Step Six

Futureproof your investment.Implementing Mobile Workforce Management is an opportunity to drive real innovation, which will transform how mobile workers do their jobs, not only for the short-term,but for long-term too.

Don’t fall into the trap of implementing a solution that works great for a couple of years, but as soon as a big change occurs, a messy and expensive replacement follows.

Fractured IT systems impact severelyon patient care and cost reductions. For local government departments with complex processes and best practice, planning ahead isn’t easy.

But by anticipating the future and developing methods of minimising the effects of potential pressures you can continue to provide a level of care that is exected.

There are 3 things that you can do to help futureproof your investment:

1. Transform together.Cross-department coordination is one of the biggest barriers to transformation. Technology will never

be effectively implemented in silos. Everyone has good ideas about how to innovate. True leaders understand that a strong organisational culture helps surface these ideas and spur innovation. Just because a process or solution has been around for decades doesn’t mean it’s right today.

Ask your staff and service users what they like and don’t like about the services they use and provide. As mentioned in the previous step, listen to each department, devise a strategy that works for everyone, and then decide on the necessary solution.

2. Accept that change will happen.Technologies will change and requirements will change. Your solutions will need to be adaptable to keep up. The only thing you can do is design your solutions to be flexible, or work with an experienced supplier who is constantly updating their solutions.

3. Build/purchase an open solution.When it comes to building software, or purchasing a software solution, it’s important to choose technology that is flexible and doesn’t back you into a corner. Make sure the

solution can integrate with other existing solutions, as well as those that may emerge in the future.

Don’t be a hostage to suppliers who are unwilling to assist you inyour innovative approach. Make sure you work with a supplier that is continually innovating themselves.

Make sure that your potential for innovation isn’t restricted by old technologies or outdated processes. In this fast moving market, there will always be opportunity for continual innovation. It’s vital to think about the future when choosing a solution. Whatever solution you choose will not be relevant for you forever, but it should be adaptable and easily augmented to suit your future needs and those of your service users.

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Step Seven

Don’t DIY.It’s easy to understand why some organisations choose to research building a solution themselves. Concerns over their unique requirements or being ‘locked-in’ to a specific vendor often arise.

It is true that effective Mobile Workforce Management is not easy, there are many aspects that need to be considered. Which is why we have put together a list of considerations when collaborating with a mobile-first supplier.

1. Expertise.With a Mobile Workforce Management vendor, every single member of their staff is working on the solution, with no other product or service distracting them or taking away from their time. This means they accumulate expertise. They can bring the experience of other organisations to yours. They only profit if they offer a competitive product. More than likely they will also have built up a methodology for delivering projects that’s been battle-tested.

2. Resource.They have the manpower and the budget to, not only develop the solution, but to maintain it and continually innovate. Your internal team could spend a lot of time developing something, and by the timeit’s finished, it is already out of date. Suppliers whose focus is on Mobile Workforce Management, continuously improve, update, and innovate their systems.

3. Scalability.Suppliers know how to develop a solution that is built to scale. But look out, some solutions struggle to perform once they hit over 100 users, particulary if they don’t offer a Cloud based service. Some solutions also don’t work on multiple platforms or devices. But with experienced, mobile-first suppliers, this isn’t an issue.

4. Dedicated support.Suppliers have a dedicated support team to help with any issues, or fix any bugs or glitches that might occur. If you have developed your

own solution, issues and glitches take up a lot of your internal resource, distracting staff from their job at hand.

5. Integration.With the amount of back office systems local government has, integration is a very complex process, and can take a lot of time. It is very likely that you don’t have the skillsets within the organisation to integrate seamlessly with your back office system. However, trusted suppliers who develop Mobile Workforce Management also perform the integration process, and more than likely have integrated with most, if not all, of your back office providers before.

Work with people who understand and have a focus on Mobile Workforce Management. After all, they have done it all before. Your knowledge of your own processes, combined with the right, experienced provider’s knowledge is the perfect combination.

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Step Eight

Do it once and do it right!We previously said that doing Mobile Workforce Management right, isn’teasy. Many organisations significantly underestimate the amount of time and resources they’ll need to give to the project.

Having the required skillsets can be a blind spot too: both in terms of understanding specific technologies, but also the ability to think about how people use mobile systems vs more traditional platforms.

Enterprise mobility is unique. Therefore it needs a unique approach. Five things to seriously consider with enterprise mobility are:

• New technologies and platforms that require new skillsets and the time to learn them, not to mention the dedicated support for these technologies.

• The time and skills needed to understand the unique systems and data requirements of mobile working in general.

• The time needed to properly understand how your organisation’s mobile workers in particular,

really do their work. After all, your solution needs to be designed to work the way your people work.

• The complexities of procuring, deploying and managing multiple mobile platforms.

• Neglecting to include the resource needed for effective back office integration. The phrase, “do it right, do it once” comes to mind here.

The cost of failure is enormous. There have been many occasions where an organisation has implemented a poor solution, and a year or so down the line, it is rendered unfit for purpose.You have lost out on considerable “man hours”, a significant amount of time which could have been spent benefitting from a quality solution that meets your needs and enables better quality of service.

You will also have to go out to tender for a new solution, since you’ve realised that the value can be delivered from elsewhere. Which can take a lot of time. This cost of failure is significantly greater than the savings you had originally tried to make, by investing in the

wrong solution first time around.

Adopting a Mobile Workforce Management solution is not a quick andsimple process. Think of the amount of systems it needs to integrate into; the amount of staff you have; the amount of information they need access to on a daily basis; and analysing the best processes that will deliver the best results. It needs a lot of time and effort at the beginning, in order for it to get up and running.

But once you start realising the benefits generated, it will all be more than worth it. Productivity gains. Cost savings. Boost in staff morale. Higher quality of service delivered. These are only some of the benefits you will gain with a good quality solution.

By not being prepared to make the required investment, you are running the massive risk of a failed project, wasted resource, and more than likely, the need to do it all over again.

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Step Nine

Learn from the mistakes of others.We hope that at least some of what you’ve read up to this point has sparked some new thinking and some new ways to transform how your mobile workers are providing services.

We’ve had the fortunate opportunity to reignite people’s beliefs and confidence in Mobile Workforce Management. All too often a bad experience with a supplier ends in project failure and innovation stagnates for a while. For local government, this is not an option.

So, if you’re part of one of these organisations who have a failed mobile project under your belt, don’t give up.

If you have never implemented any form of Mobile Workforce Management before, and feel a bit overwhelmed about it, never fear. Ask the experts!

When we say ‘experts’, we don’t mean suppliers, some of which will only tell you what they think you want to hear. We mean your peers. People in other local councils who have successfully implemented Mobile Workforce

Management, especially after a failed project, and will be brutally honest with you. Speaking to your peers is a chance to collect ideas and insights. We’ve all heard of the sayings that two heads are better than one and that a problem shared is a problem halved.

But anyone who is involved in these type of projects should be more than happy to speak to you about their journey, their challenges along the way, and how they overcame them. Ask them things like;

“What are the main drivers for mobile working?”“What challenges did you have to overcome?”“What would you do differently?”“What did you do right?”“What are the gaps filled by the new solution?”“What benefits are you gaining now?”

You’d be pleasantly surprised to learn that almost every organisation has had to overcome some hurdles. Mobile Workforce Management is not something to be underestimated. But if you follow the steps outlined here, and seek advice from real people who have done it all before, it

definitely makes for a much smoother process. And don’t worry if you make a mistake or two along the way. It happens. What’s important is that you recognise when something isn’t working properly, and you work effectively to make it right.

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Step Ten

Celebrate the good times.So you’ve implemented your Mobile Workforce Management solution and it’s a raving success! You’ll soon realise benefits and insights that will allow your organisation to continually improve and grow.

What should you do next?

Celebrate success!

Firstly, celebrate with your colleagues for a job well done. A lot of energy has gone into making this project a successful reality. Celebrations don’t need to be costly or flash. They can be anything from a little get-together in the breakroom between shifts, or a meal out after work. Thank your team for their hard work during the project,to reinforce their initiative and to inspire them to continue to deliver a high quality of service.

It’s ultimately about motivation. It also boosts morale. Staff are able to appreciate that they are achieving something great and of meaning. That they’re undertaking

a better quality role and users are receiving a higher standard of service because of their hard work.

This will lead your staff to look more favourably towards future projects with a confidence that they can continueto improve and achieve great things.

Secondly, celebrate the organisation’s success with the project. Not only celebrating the successful implementation, but celebrate your newfound benefits as well.

Too many organisations are shy about highlighting their successes. But it’s these that make you different, it highlights to service users that you run an efficient, and high quality service, with skilled and experienced staff.

Be proud of your team and what you have achieved. Be proud of your organisation and the new way in which it works.

Celebrating success also positions your organisation as one that is innovative and forward-thinking. An organisation who is looking to improve, and an organisation that suddenly looks a lot more attractive to work for. An added benefit for recruitment levels.

So learn from other people’s successes, and accelerate your own. Shout it from the rooftops. Be proud and enjoy working for your more efficient, cost-effective, happier staffed, even BETTER local government organisation!

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Totalmobile will help you release the potential in your mobile workforce. Our ‘mobile worker first’ approach to innovation results in solutions people love to use.

Our customers are seeing significant increases in workforce capacity and cost savings, while also ensuring compliance and driving levels of service consistency. We will transform how your organisations works and help your people do more of the work that really matters.

Totalmobile Pilot Point 21 Clarendon RoadBelfast BT1 3BG

T: +44 (0)28 9033 0111E: info@totalmobile.co.uk

www.totalmobile.co.uk