Text
Background
Cadent Gas traces its roots back 200 years to the start of the gas industry in the United Kingdom. In 2017 Cadent was officially created when the UK’s National Grid sold its gas distribution business, as part of the de-regulation of the energy industry in the United Kingdom.
Cadent has over 4,000 employees and brings gas to 11 million homes and businesses throughout the United Kingdom. Their gas network covers the North West, West Midlands, East Midlands, South Yorkshire, East of England, and North London.
In addition, Cadent manages the National Gas Emergency Service on behalf of the gas industry and provides an emergency response service to people who suspect they have a gas leak.
Challenges and Opportunities
Shortly after assuming ownership of the UKs largest gas network (2016) Cadent realised that they were failing to meet productivity and cost reduction targets. They were persistently ranking in the bottom third on the Regulator’s key performance measures which was damaging their brand reputation. Without immediate redress the implications for the business, the shareholders and the leadership team were of paramount concern.
Cadent leadership diagnosed that the root cause of their underperformance was the highly centralised operating model inherited from National Grid. The model had become embedded in the culture of the organisation and resulted in ineffective work allocation systems, uncollaborative silos and working methods that undermined cross-team collaboration, damaged staff morale and productivity, and produced wastes.
Cadent attempted to solve the problem by transitioning operational responsibility from the centre to depots. By late 2018 and despite significant investment in leadership skills development, the transformation programme was seen as a failure and Cadent was faced with an additional crisis of plummeting morale.
VISION APPROACH
VISION Consulting Group is a company that drives increased productivity and financial benefits through cultural transformation. VISION was contracted in 2019 to help reverse the negative impacts that were firstly inherited and then accentuated by the operational transformation initiative.
VISION’s insight was to recognise that fundamental to any improvement was replacing a culture of fearful resignation with one of entrepreneurial hope amongst leadership and employees so that they believed that could work more efficiently and effectively and that would positively impact on customer satisfaction.
Along with forward-thinking colleagues at Cadent, we created and embedded a new culture of collaboration and trust. This culture was characterised by the breaking down of silos to build one team at depot level. It bought together Repair, Emergency and Planning in a new relationship of professional respect and pride in their collective work.
Key Members of the VISION team:
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VISION’s delivery approach is methodical and underpinned with a clear goal, in this case to demonstrate a sustainable operational transformation by achieving an increase of 20% in Repair Crew productivity by March 2020 (14 months) and deliver a recurring cost saving of at least £10m per annum.
Root Cause Analysis, Diagnosis, and Recommendations
Over four weeks the VISION team’s investigations revealed that previous initiatives failed because Cadent was unable to mobilise the new ways of working fast enough to produce real productivity improvements. For Cadent to realise its goals, the transformation to sustainable productive improvements necessitated that the depot manager adopts an entrepreneurial mindset and run the depot as they would their own business.
With this insight VISION designed the transformation programme to meet the goals by overcoming the deep feelings of resignation in the workforce and instilling a growth mindset in depot managers.
Signature Practices
VISION’s engagement began with a high-level design of ‘signature practices’, including Commitment-based Management ™ (CbM), Rolling Planning, Make Work Ready, and promise-based Operational Reviews. A selection of these signature practices is briefly described, below:
Commitment-based Management ™: Commitment-based Management (CbM) is the most successful management discipline to emerge in the last four decades. CbM puts accountability and coordination at the centre of producing results. It has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review among other periodicals and is currently taught in the London Business School.
Rolling Planning: This is a collaborative-planning practice introduced by Lean that is designed to dissolve the tensions that arise when top-down planning encounters the actual day-to-day circumstances on the ground. In Cadent VISION implemented a weekly Rolling Planning practice between the central Planning Team (who had a long-term view of what was required by the regulator) and the Repair Team which got work done, often in the face of unexpected storms, resource constraints, and other issues such as lack of site access.
Make Work Ready: This is a dependent activity/critical path collaborative r
Background
Cadent Gas traces its roots back 200 years to the start of the gas industry in the United Kingdom. In 2017 Cadent was officially created when the UK’s National Grid sold its gas distribution business, as part of the de-regulation of the energy industry in the United Kingdom.
Cadent has over 4,000 employees and brings gas to 11 million homes and businesses throughout the United Kingdom. Their gas network covers the North West, West Midlands, East Midlands, South Yorkshire, East of England, and North London.
In addition, Cadent manages the National Gas Emergency Service on behalf of the gas industry and provides an emergency response service to people who suspect they have a gas leak.
Challenges and Opportunities
Shortly after assuming ownership of the UKs largest gas network (2016) Cadent realised that they were failing to meet productivity and cost reduction targets. They were persistently ranking in the bottom third on the Regulator’s key performance measures which was damaging their brand reputation. Without immediate redress the implications for the business, the shareholders and the leadership team were of paramount concern.
Cadent leadership diagnosed that the root cause of their underperformance was the highly centralised operating model inherited from National Grid. The model had become embedded in the culture of the organisation and resulted in ineffective work allocation systems, uncollaborative silos and working methods that undermined cross-team collaboration, damaged staff morale and productivity, and produced wastes.
Cadent attempted to solve the problem by transitioning operational responsibility from the centre to depots. By late 2018 and despite significant investment in leadership skills development, the transformation programme was seen as a failure and Cadent was faced with an additional crisis of plummeting morale.
VISION APPROACH
VISION Consulting Group is a company that drives increased productivity and financial benefits through cultural transformation. VISION was contracted in 2019 to help reverse the negative impacts that were firstly inherited and then accentuated by the operational transformation initiative.
VISION’s insight was to recognise that fundamental to any improvement was replacing a culture of fearful resignation with one of entrepreneurial hope amongst leadership and employees so that they believed that could work more efficiently and effectively and that would positively impact on customer satisfaction.
Along with forward-thinking colleagues at Cadent, we created and embedded a new culture of collaboration and trust. This culture was characterised by the breaking down of silos to build one team at depot level. It bought together Repair, Emergency and Planning in a new relationship of professional respect and pride in their collective work.
Key Members of the VISION team:
<missing the infographic>
VISION’s delivery approach is methodical and underpinned with a clear goal, in this case to demonstrate a sustainable operational transformation by achieving an increase of 20% in Repair Crew productivity by March 2020 (14 months) and deliver a recurring cost saving of at least £10m per annum.
Root Cause Analysis, Diagnosis, and Recommendations
Over four weeks the VISION team’s investigations revealed that previous initiatives failed because Cadent was unable to mobilise the new ways of working fast enough to produce real productivity improvements. For Cadent to realise its goals, the transformation to sustainable productive improvements necessitated that the depot manager adopts an entrepreneurial mindset and run the depot as they would their own business.
With this insight VISION designed the transformation programme to meet the goals by overcoming the deep feelings of resignation in the workforce and instilling a growth mindset in depot managers.
Signature Practices
VISION’s engagement began with a high-level design of ‘signature practices’, including Commitment-based Management ™ (CbM), Rolling Planning, Make Work Ready, and promise-based Operational Reviews. A selection of these signature practices is briefly described, below:
Commitment-based Management ™: Commitment-based Management (CbM) is the most successful management discipline to emerge in the last four decades. CbM puts accountability and coordination at the centre of producing results. It has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and MIT Sloan Management Review among other periodicals and is currently taught in the London Business School.
Rolling Planning: This is a collaborative-planning practice introduced by Lean that is designed to dissolve the tensions that arise when top-down planning encounters the actual day-to-day circumstances on the ground. In Cadent VISION implemented a weekly Rolling Planning practice between the central Planning Team (who had a long-term view of what was required by the regulator) and the Repair Team which got work done, often in the face of unexpected storms, resource constraints, and other issues such as lack of site access.
Make Work Ready: This is a dependent activity/critical path collaborative r