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The Challenge
Warwickshire Police is one of the smaller Forces in England and Wales. However, it borders onto six others (including one Metropolitan area) and has a significant road infrastructure, all of which contribute to its demand profile.
The Operational Communications Centre (OCC) was struggling to meet the 999 call answering target, and the mean answer time for 101 calls had been declining over time. Similarly, the true demand on the digital desk was unknown.
Warwickshire Police wanted support to design an efficient operating model to meet key performance indicators (KPIs) across the different demand streams. This included identifying the staffing requirements on a new 101 triage desk, and the subsequent impact on call handler requirements.
Process Evolution’s Approach
Process Evolution carries out detailed analysis of telephony, digital desk and resource data to understand the balance between demand, resourcing, processes and performance. As a result of the baseline work, a series of modelling scenarios for different operating models were created.
The analysis and outcomes from practitioner workshops enabled our Call Profiler software tool to be used to create a virtual replica of the OCC. With this, iterations of the identified modelling scenarios were carried out to identify the optimum operating model and staffing requirements to meet desired call answer performance targets.
Findings
A new operating model was designed in collaboration with Warwickshire Police which introduced a new 101 triage desk, a pool of 999 and 101 call handlers, and a Digital Desk that could be ‘interrupted’ to handle 999 calls when required.
This new model required a similar number of staff to the current model while offering improved 999 call handling performance and increased resilience during times of peak demand.
Shift pattern options that maintained the current core rota structures were identified that supported the new operating model and allowed call answer performance targets to be met.
In Summary
- The new operating model would improve performance
- To implement the new model, a small uplift of 1.9 FTE would be required
- The proposed shift pattern allowed for a ‘smoothed’ consistent hourly resourcing pool
- Any reduction in staffing numbers would increase the call abandonment rate
- All of these aspects allow the OCC to improve performance in meeting demand with current resource levels
Outcome
Immediately following completion of the review, Warwickshire Police used the results to successfully ‘bed in’ a new 101 triage desk.
As part of Phase II within their OCC change programme, Warwickshire Police are using Process Evolution’s findings to support the design and implementation of the new operating model.
Mike Smith, Chief Superintendent for Public Contact said:
“Process Evolution helped us to design a new operating model in our contact management centre across our 999, 101 and digital desk workload. They were knowledgeable and professional, and clearly explained the impacts of decisions and assumptions that we made along the way.“
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