Service Overview - foundry4/fsa-field-ops-discoveries-overview GitHub Wiki

Consolidating the end-to-end service

In the Field Ops discoveries completed between August 2019 and August 2020, five service blueprints were produced. These captured the 'jobs to be done' that made up the service and identified touchpoints with people, technology and governance across the service lifecycle.

The blueprints were created in the knowledge that each area of discovery (e.g. Timesheeting; Approvals; Resourcing) did not function in isolation and that they were part of an overarching service to delivery the official controls.

Each blueprint remains valid when reviewing the corresponding component of the service.

The Service Overview has now been produced to create a consolidated, end-to-end view of the service. Click to open the service overview in:

Finding the commonalities

To assist with service design between Field Ops and Digital, the Service Overview presents a simplified view of Operations. The first aim is to establish a common baseline before adding the known variables across each of Dairy, Meat and Wine inspections. The second aim is to start rethinking Operations, less in terms of which team does what and more in terms of the process and data flow required to manage the official controls with each FBO from start to finish.

The simplified service lifecycle comprises eight core processes:

  • Engagement - stakeholder management activities.
  • Onboarding - setting up a new FBO and adding them to the programme of official controls.
  • Plan operations - long term inspection regimes and resource management; short-term scheduling.
  • Change operations - updating inspection regimes, resource management and scheduling in a timely manner.
  • Verification - Audit, Inspection, and Sampling & Testing activities.
  • Enforcement - managing incidents and non-compliance with the official controls.
  • Offboarding - stopping the deliver of official controls.
  • Assurance - leveraging information to enable reporting, data sharing, business planning, business intelligence, and continuous improvement.

Using the service overview

The service overview shows:

  • The stage in the service lifecycle.
  • The relevant service 'practice' - e.g. stakeholder management, change management.
  • Process - the high-level processes that make up part or all of the service.
  • Job to be done - the tasks that need to be completed to deliver part or all of the process.
  • Success criteria - the main objective for carrying out the task.
  • Value - How completing the task adds value to the FSA and/or the FBO.
  • Baseline requirements - The essential user needs to complete the task.

Tick boxes show whether the task is relevant to Dairy, Meat, and/or Wine. This does not mean processes and tools should be developed for single domains; it simply marks out the primary use case but may be extendable to all domains. This supports the idea of building processes and tools for Field Ops as a whole and customising field-level details where necessary. The result should be greater efficiency from having a wider user base, and more joined-up data across Field Ops that is easier to extract and re-use.

The service overview also shows a list of current jobs to be done, extracted from the previous discoveries and aligned to show similar tasks across Dairy, Meat and Wine.

Finally, the overview shows where the current task sits in the Service Value Chain originally defined by Deloitte in 2018 as part of the Ops Transformation Programme. The value chain reflects the current, predominantly team-based responsibilities rather than the process-first, end-to-end journey approach being advocated in this consolidation project.

Next steps

We know that each of the eight core processes contains a number of workflows - the steps to achieve a specified outcome (e.g. Create an inspection report; Update a rota).

We mapped some of these workflows as part of the previous discoveries, particularly for Approvals where we mapped 16 sub-process workflows. Workflow mapping should be completed across the service lifecycle. For each food domain, the starter questions should be: "Do we carry out this process?"; "What tasks do we carry out to complete the process?"; and "How do we carry out those tasks?".

Mapping to this level makes it easier to spot and discuss where a process could be improved and/or where the cause of a bottleneck or problem might lie. The process can then be 're-wired' and improved either through process redesign, revising working practices, using technology, or a combination of these.

The process and workflow maps become an ongoing reference for continuous improvement, and a tool for bringing new team members up to speed. Diagrams should be iterated in sync with process and technology changes. They can become a core part of the Field Ops toolkit.