Superior Client Service Through Teams And Visual Management
Teams Work: Lessons From Successful Organizations - 2001 - By Stewart Liff
To the people in the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), there are no more important clients than the armed services veterans and their families who depend on us, and no mission is more important than serving them. We try to serve them well, and we think we are doing a good job now. But for years we had lost sight of both the veterans and the mission. We had to achieve a major turnaround in the way we deliver services, and moving to a team form of organization has been critical.
Our team owes their success to the comprehensive support systems we have provided. In particular, we have applied concepts of visual management to keep teams constantly focused on the clients, the mission, the behaviors needed to accomplish the mission, and real-time performance. We make our goals clear and understandable and our systems easy to use.
Our transformation has led to savings of about $2 million, and we accomplished it all - including a very important transformation of the physical workplace - with very little money.
Background
America's armed services veterans and their families are the primary clients of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. On their behalf, the DVA administers three primary component areas: hospitals, cemeteries, and benefits. Most of the money paid out by the DVA is for benefits - about $24 billion to $25 billion a year.
The Los Angeles Regional Office has 300 employees, with representation by the one union, the American Federation pf Government Employees. We serve about 1.2 million veterans with three primary business lines: compensation and pension benefits, vocational rehabilitation, and the home loan guarantee program. This case study concentrates on compensation and pension benefits.
When a veteran files an injury claim, the compensation and benefits people in our office determine whether there truly is an injury, whether it is connected to military service, and if so, to what extent the claim is payable. Since the payment might range form $90 a month to $2,000 a month or higher, the impact on people's lives can be enormous. Our office alone pays out approximately $600 million a year in compensation and pension benefits. In the process we receive about 50,000 claims for benefits and 350,000 phone calls every year.
