Welcome to Hind Consultancy Services.
Hind Consultancy Services is a well-established and experienced business and IT consultancy with specialist knowledge of both public and private sector organisations.
Our consultants have assisted many organisations to improve their ways of working, automate manual process and become more efficient in their quest to become the best in their own individual fields.
For more details of our expertise, client base and offerings please visit the relevant sections.
HCS has been appointed to continue to support the regional procurement programme in the North West. Building on its work with the NWCE, HCS has been commissioned to produce a regional strategy and to support the NW local authorities in meeting their efficiency savings.
HCS has provided extensive consultancy to the new North West Improvement & Efficiency Partnership. The work was to help to define the regional strategy and manage the transfer of work from the previous organisation, the North West Centre of Excellence. For further information please visit http://www.nwiep.org.uk
Hind CS Ltd now forms an influential part of the North West
Centre of
Excellence management team managing both the eProcurement Programme and
the Procurement “Quick Wins” Programme.
We were initially engaged to bring Prince2 project
management to a number of existing workstreams and have since been
asked to continue to manage those workstreams throughout 2006. This
engagement is via Aperia Government Services.
For further information please visit http://www.nwce.org.uk
HCS has been contracted to assist with documenting the user requirements for the BSF project at Knowsley MBC. The leading edge project will require complete business process re-engineering of the majority of services within the new schools.
Over the next few months a series of workshops will be held
with relevant
stakeholders to define the schools of the future for the
region.
The use of procurement or purchasing cards within local government has been encouraged now for some time. Neil Hind wrote for Supply Management magazine on the use of such cards under their Advisor Q+A feature.
The full article can be read here.
With working for a number of years now around eGovernment you hope (from time to time) the various projects and initiatives you become involved with actually do make a difference to citizens and local authorities. And I'm sure we've all asked ourselves whether the huge investment will ever give the benefits they promised. In honestly I am sure most of us have little direct contact with our local authorities in our personal lives but I came across an opportunity to see if services and the council – citizen interactions have actually improved, with relatively positive results!
Last Saturday lunchtime I called into some local shops and parked in one of the free council car parks. Unusually, for the leafy suburbs of South Manchester (honest!), I noticed a burnt out car in a corner of the car park, a fairly new XJS jaguar to be exact. It was only on my return to the car park I remembered that DirectGov had reporting abandoned vehicles (this was very abandoned!) as one of their priorities. If I knew this from the various rantings from PSF, or from the comprehensive advertising campaign I can’t recall. I therefore decided to due my civic duty and test the new reporting route and made a note of the registration.
On returning home I logged on and decided to act as a dumb user (easy for me) starting with Google. A quick search for “report abandoned vehicle” brought back a number of results. Surprisingly Direct Gov was second with the direct link to the Kenington and Chelsea Council page first. Clicking onto the DirectGov link brought me to an overview page with a link to report to my authority. After entering my postcode I was directed to the right page on the Tafford MBC web site.
The first thing I was asked for was the road I was reporting the incident on and as it was a car park I was momentarily stumped as it wouldn’t let me enter free text. After a quick search on multimap I found the road that led to the car park and hoped this would be good enough. One nice feature here was that it brought back a list of other incidents that had previously been reported, with a status, on the same road. With no burnt out car listed I pressed on.
The next page asked for vehicle details, my details and a free text box for other comments. Not sure why my name and address were mandatory but also added my email as contact details. After submitting details I was given a tracking reference and an estimated completion date of approx. 24 days ahead. Over three weeks seemed a bit excessive but time would tell. One other surprise was that no email acknowledgement was sent to confirm details, meaning I needed to keep a copy of the tracking reference manually.
The following Tuesday evening I decided to return to the Trafford site to check on progress. The link to search for updates was a bit hidden but when found it was a simple process to enter in the reference number and an update was provided. The status had been amended to completed with a resolution date of the Monday.
With removal on the first working day and the tracking update who am I to complain. Overall, a good customer experience that could have been made slightly better with an email confirmation at initiation and when the job was completed. I can only hope that the information was passed via a nice workflow system to a hand held device with the relative work team!
Note: This article first appeared in Public Sector Forums.
Neil Hind addresses the key question of whether a business case exists for workflow and sets out the essential components for building one that is successful and effective. One of the aims of The Enterprise Workflow National Project was to help local authorities understand the benefits that implementing workflow could bring within their organisation. Although early phases of the project concentrated on understanding the technologies and approaches to implementation, more recently the focus has moved onto the business case and reasons for implementing Workflow.
Even with this additional information, many councils still seem reluctant to move this agenda forward within their organisation. However, the ODPM have helped to move Workflow up the list of priorities with its inclusion within the Priority Service Outcomes, G24 to be specific, defined as the:
"Integration of customer relationship management systems with back office activity through use of enabling technology such as Workflow to create complete automation of business process management."
While this is increasing the interest in Workflow and Business Process Management and take-up levels in general, one of the questions that we are asked the most is: "Is There A Business Case for Workflow?".
The answer is most undoubtedly yes.
To read the full article please visit eGovMonitor.
Neil Hind looks at the issue of workflow standards and their importance, highlighting current developments which should prove good news for local eGovernment.
Agreements on standards in any industry have always proved problematic but those around Workflow and Business Process Mapping have been the subject of many debates. The Enterprise Workflow National Project (EWNP) has attempted to clarify the situation for local government by reviewing the various conflicting standards in the industry, but this has not been an easy task.
It is hoped with the recent announcement of a possible merger by the two leading (but sometimes conflicting) authorities on workflow standards, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfM) and the Business Process Management Initiative (BMPI), the situation will become clearer.
However, a number of standards have been recommended by the EWNP after consultation with suppliers, local authorities and the eSD Toolkit community. These are currently registered with the Local e-Government Standards Body for formal approval.
To read the full article please visit eGovMonitor.
The recently published IEG4.5 results reinforce the difficulties that local authorities are facing with the introduction of Workflow and Business Process Management within their organisations.
Priority Service Outcome G24, defined as the "Integration of customer relationship management systems with back office activity through use enabling technology as Workflow to create complete automation business process management" is seen as the benchmark for the implementation of such technologies.
The analysis shows this as the second-least implemented outcome to date (behind single business accounts) with 91% of authorities still at the planning or implementing stage. The Workflow survey carried out by the Enterprise Workflow National Project earlier this year highlighted that councils were expecting to face difficulties with this technology, but expected it to deliver significant efficiency savings.
The breakdown of figures, as shown in the table below, show that over 80% of councils still expect to have met this outcome within the required timetable, with 78% planning to be at the implementation stage during September 05.
To read the full article please visit eGovMonitor.