Process Innovation

New ways to do things are always popping up, and while some are not so good, others are brilliant.

This one, noted in an article from Governing, is the latter.

An excerpt.

“It’s like the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum: which comes first, leadership or process improvement techniques? Recent success stories of governments using Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement program, suggest the secret may be combining leadership with a process focus.

“In the wake of the Katrina disaster five years ago, one Louisiana state agency leader used the “clean slate” provided as an opportunity to redesign the eligibility determination process for health-care benefits for the needy.

“Ruth Kennedy, director of eligibility for Medicaid and the Children Health Insurance programs at Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, had been attempting to reform the eligibility determination process for several years. But when Hurricane Katrina hit, the eligibility system was largely wiped out. Staff and clients had been evacuated. Records were destroyed. Offices had to be replaced. Kennedy declared: “I don’t want to just rebuild. I want to build an improved system.”

“Using Lean Six Sigma techniques, Louisiana designed a caseload management system based on the “pull” concept rather than the old approach of supervisors assigning batches of cases. Instead, available caseworkers would pull pending applications from a queue. This shifted the mentality of caseworkers from “my” cases to “our” cases.

“Kennedy used common sense management and basic process management techniques to redesign this vital element of service delivery. In the end, she made a huge difference for thousands of beneficiaries of Louisiana’s public health-care system. In the process, she showed that, while process improvement techniques like Lean Six Sigma helps, it is leadership that matters.”