Our process improvement
As part of our focus on improvement, we continued to use agile techniques to review, pilot changes and launch improvements to our processes.
Here are a few of the highlights from the many improvement projects we undertook in our 2020-21 year.
Some projects were about realising the benefits of a world fundamentally changed by a shift away from in-person and paper-based working. These included:
- Conducting more mediations by video and telephone
- Taking advantage of the growth of electronic files in the legal sector to explore simultaneous investigations with the Law Society of Scotland
- Internally, testing and deploying changes needed to adapt to remote working, including a new telephone system, dual screens for working from home and more use of online internal forms.
We also continued our focus on improvements that benefit our customers and lead to greater efficiency, including:
- Researching, piloting and refining a new approach to improve how we respond to customers when a complaint is ‘premature’ (when it has not yet been made to the law firm), based on direct feedback from service users
- Reducing delays at investigation by making full use of our powers to demand information and files
- Making more staff flexible to work between different stages of our process, so we can react more swiftly to changing workloads
- Reducing paperwork at the handover points between different stages.
Keeping this focus on improvement, testing and refinement is now a core part of how we do business. We continue to see clear benefits from it in terms of our reported performance and our customer service.