Business process improvement in Planning Policy - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

This is something that our planning and building control department is currently undertaking. We too have struggled in identfying processes in planning policy. However, we recently took part in a Managing Excellence in Planning Services (MEPS) trial by PAS which time-measured the work and activities we do. We have passed this information onto our BPI people. We have not heard back yet!

The simple suggestion is to get your hands on a trained Business Analyst. The mapping of business processes (and locating the once in a blue moon actions), is their bread and butter day job. They will also use standard documentation technquies that you BPI people will instantly understand. If you have to go self taught, then you need to read up on Requirements Engineering/SSADM. The book that I refer back to most often is "Practical Business Systems Development using SSADM: A complete tutorial guide " Authors: Philip Weaver, Nicholas Lambrou, Matthew Walkley. It has nice practical examples and worked sessions to explain the various techniques, although the relevant bits for mapping business processes are only a couple of the chapters, and you don't need to read the rest of the book to get a handle on them. Hope this helps

This question has come up a few times recently. My take on it is that BPR is the wrong tool for planning policy. Instead you want to do some nice, clear, thinking in conjunction with your politicians about what it is you are trying to get your planning policy to do. This "design against purpose" is much more likely to show you whether you are allocating your resources properly than BPR. It may be simplifying it too much, but BPR is predicated on having a "process" to streamline, and therefore reduce friction / costs. You can argue that there is a process to DPD production (and we do - and have a project management handbook to help you make it right) but it is low volume / high variability. And, as you might expect me to say, our "value for money in planning" events will put you in a room full of people all thinking like you - many of whom will be great to share experience and perspectives with.

This probably sounds a bit like ancient history now but lots of LPAs looked at business process imporvement for all their planning services under Best Value. I suggest you contact LPAs who were identified as excellent authorities for planning by the Audit Commission and ask them for their experiences. There may also be people at the Audit Commission who could advise you. Warwick University did (again some time ago) do quite a lot of work on this and I am also sure that the PAS benchmarking club would be able to help you. Personally I agree with Richard Crawley that BPR is probably not the most helpful. I found benchmarking clubs more useful as you can then identify specific differences in your approach to a process and understand why it is different for you. I would also suggest that the PAS LDF Diagnostic is a useful route into benchmarking. Hopefully that will give you some leads - sorry I cannot be of more help.

Hi Ian, There appears to be a lot of confusion around terminology here - so let's try to make headway. Richard is right about BPR and policy, I think. By design BPR is all about creative re-engineering of business processes (not, please, streamlining, that is something completely different and assumes that what you are doing is the right thing!) it involves being radical about changing the way in which things are done - and mapping what you do is part of the activity. But only part. Where you have fairly understandable, end to end process - with a logical start and finish - the job is relatively easy, when you don't life is more difficult. Simply looking end to end is also, not enough, there needs to be a real understanding of cause and effect about what you do not just end to end but side to side!! If you are saying that Planning Policy has no process(es) I am confused. There has to be a (legal) process by which policy is formulated and it can, surely, be mapped or - more correctly - represented diagrammatically in some way. That way is up to you - the golden rule is that the method you adopt must be easily understood by the creators and the users - that tends to rule out UML and SSADM!! The key is have a play and see what happens - you may surprise yourself. Barrie