Reforming City Government

Case_22_Fort_Wayne.pdf

Problem
The city of Fort Wayne, Indiana (population, 250,000) is credited as being the first city within the country to implement Lean Six Sigma (LSS) on a city government-wide basis. This was done in February 2000 under the leadership of its then mayor, Graham Richard. Mr. Richard was very familiar with the successes in using LSS that had been achieved by such notable private corporations as General Electric, Raytheon and ITT Industries. He believed that if costs could be reduced, productivity increased, and the quality of products improved in these companies; then the same benefits probably could be achieved in government entities as well.

Approach
LSS implementation began with establishment of an executive council that would serve as the deployment team. Mr. Richard also created the position of quality enhancement manager and appointed the first city employee to complete formal Black Belt training to fill it. Training was a key component of Fort Wayne’s overall approach. In addition to the Black Belt training, other training included a two-day session that was attended by the city’s division and department managers and served to introduce them to the basics of LSS. One member of the executive council took Green Belt training (which is a precursor to Black Belt training).

Next, the city embarked on addressing problems that were pressing in terms of visibility and concern to citizens. The intent was to select projects that were not only problem areas for the city, but were also high profile and would provide noticeable results when completed. Mr. Richard believed that any employee uncertainty regarding LSS or resistance to using it would be overcome once the results of these projects became known.
The first two projects selected were for issuing building permits and fixing roadway potholes. Regarding building permits, Black Belts used flowcharts and maps to highlight redundancies in the existing system.  For the pothole problem, data was studied to determine the locations where potholes happened most often and, therefore, where improvement efforts should be focused. Nobody in city government actually knew how long these processes were taking because prior to LSS, no one actually collected and analyzed such statistics. Gathering both old and new data regarding these problems was part of the work done under the projects.

Results
Before LSS, it was determined that it took an average of 50 days to get a city building permit. After LSS, this was reduced to 11.5 days (a 77% reduction). For pothole repair before LSS, the process took up to four days to complete. Mayor Richard, at the start of the LSS effort, took it as a goal to get potholes repaired within 24 hours. Despite the tremendous skepticism that accompanied this goal, after LSS, the pothole repair process was decreased to less than four hours for most occurrences (96% reduction).
Between 2000 and 2004, city workers completed 58 other LSS projects which saved more than $10 million.

Some of these results include:
** Bottleneck reduction and elimination of variation which enabled fire department inspectors to perform 23% more re-inspections annually without staff increases.
** Reduction in the number of complaints from citizens regarding the need for tree trimming by 33%.
** Improved accounting in the transportation engineering department which freed $150,000 that had previously been tied-up due to inaccurate project cost estimates.
** On-the-job injuries decreased to one of the lowest in the country.
Key to all of these improvements has been the change in thinking that Mayor Richard brought about; namely that public agencies are not bureaucracies, but rather, service providers. He understood that governments should be run as businesses which helped revolutionize city government in Fort Wayne. (1)

(1) L. Smith, Six Sigma Goes to Washington, Quality Digest, May 2005.