When I started out as a researcher 18 years ago one of my first tasks was to write a series of worse case scenarios that managers would use as part of their development. They would be written along the following lines: “You are a manager of a large department. Your budget has been cut by 20% and you have 30% more clients. You also have to implement a complex new piece of legislation. What do you do?”
Fast forward to 2015, and now those worst case scenarios are business as usual. That’s how challenging it is for social care managers. I shudder to think what a worst case scenario would look like now!
If finding more money, or staff, or time, is not an option, then where do managers go for help in hard times? A new resource of change management in social care can provide some of the answers. Written by Robin Miller of Birmingham University and Tim Freemen of Middlesex University, and turned into a digital tool by us at the Social Care Institute for Excellence, the resource is a practical, user-friendly, accessible guide that brings together tools to help people manage change.
What makes it different from many toolkits is that it provides a series of realistic scenarios in social care – a care home, an integrated mental team, an adult care team, and a learning disabilities provider – and helps the reader think through which approach would help them manage different change challenges.
Take the scenario of Bharat, who is managing a new generic social care team, including the people he used to manage, with the addition of two new teams. This has all been done to remove management costs and barriers between the specialisms. On top of that, Bharat is tasked with overseeing a radical change in practice that enables service users and their families to rely more on their own resources and to use direct payments to supplement them.
After discussions with his local authority improvement team, Bharat chooses the “Lean” management tool to help him address these challenges. The term refers to an organisation’s ability to do more work with less resources, and has two key focuses: seeking to minimise costs throughout the process; and standardising processes without removing employees’ ability to do their jobs well.
You can learn directly from Bharat as a manager as he pins down, with his team, how best to use Lean to achieve the outcomes that have been set. The resource then talks you through how he implements Lean, and what he learns from the process.
Developed through extensive research with frontline staff and service users, the guide feels very real. Now in a digital version, it is also much more accessible than your typical management handbook or toolkit.
Thinking back 18 years, when I wrote those scenarios, managers had fewer tools to draw upon when deciding on how to approach change. Yes, there was the internet, but it wasn’t yet widely used. There were also many, often clunky, toolkits and management science textbooks. Had it existed then, I think this resource would have been the first thing participants looked at when they picked up the worst case scenarios.
