Policy & Practice | Winter 2025

Soon, like the chocolates, we have applications, changes, assessments, and reports all over the place, with only a fraction completed. Over time, deadlines get missed, the quality of the work suffers, people get burned out, and panic sets in. Often, our next move is trying to manage ourselves out of the problem. This might look like: n Working to the deadline: Anything about to miss its due date gets our full attention—but then only the oldest work gets finished. n Tracking the work differently: In an effort to better understand work loads, we may end up spending just as much time tracking the work as doing it. n Sending work to another office for help: This is like sending a burning piece of furniture to a firefighter in another state to help put out a house fire in your neighborhood. The truth is, we cannot manage our way out of a capacity issue. When work surpasses resources, we fall behind, and once we get a little behind, it’s easy to get very behind. The only dif ference between us and Lucy is that it’s not funny when a family is counting on us for help. So, what can we do? There are only a handful of things that really work to cope with a capacity crunch. First, you can hire more people. While a viable option, it’s not one readily available to most of us, as budgets are tight and people are expensive. Cost is only one factor, though. Today, there are fewer people coming into our industry and fewer people making it a career. The second option is to automate the work. Technology can enable agencies to find verifications without having to rely on the applicant or staff to track down necessary documents. In child care, new exchange technology not only matches families with providers, but can also reduce payment time and issues, allowing staff to focus on higher priority tasks that require a human touch. These systems, however, all come at an ongoing cost, and the wait to implement them can take years. The third option, and my personal favorite, is to reimagine how we work. How do we turn the 10 hours it takes to do an assessment into 6 hours without

have little to no control over the rate of incoming work. We do, however, have control over how we process and manage the work. Want to reimagine the work in a way that yields better outcomes? I recommend beginning by asking these two questions: “If I were doing only one of these, how would I do it?” and “How long would it take me to do one of these from start to finish?” The first question should get you to a purer process focused on the real tasks. I am guessing we wouldn’t build a unit to handle pending cases if we were only doing one case, because it wouldn’t be needed. I am also guessing we wouldn’t invest millions in a system that tracks where applicants are in the process because we would finish the work in a timely manner. I have asked this very question to more than a hundred teams, and the answer is almost always something like: “We would take the family by the hand, walk them through the process, and stay engaged until it was done.” I then ask, “How long would that take?” and inevitably, it is a fraction of the time it takes today. So, reimagining becomes an exercise in asking, “What if we did them all like that?” and, “How many can we do in a month if we move all the people doing ’not the work’ to doing ’the work’?” The lessons learned in those simple conversations have led to radical improvements in states like Indiana, where child welfare caseloads are 80 percent lower; New Mexico, where once overcrowded lobbies have been replaced with same-day eligi bility processing; and Wyoming, where families can connect with child care resources directly from their phone. We don’t wrap chocolates. We wrap families in safety blankets in an effort to care for our most vulnerable— whether that be through Medicaid, SNAP, child welfare, or child care programs. We know the pressure Lucy felt to get the work done, and like Lucy, we hate hiding chocolates. To reimagine the work, we must start by reimagining how we would do one case. Then, when the world yells, “Speed it up,” we’ll have a better chance of keeping up. Bill Bott is the Director of Performance Improvement with Change & Innovation Agency, a Vimo company.

The Math Behind the Chocolates

In the beginning, before Lucy and Ethel start panicking about the missed chocolates, they have greater capacity. Let’s take a look: n In the middle of their panic (between the 1:09 and 2:19 minute marks), by my best count, 22 chocolates were wrapped. That is one piece of candy every 3.2 seconds. n However, before the panic, they wrapped at a faster pace of one candy every 2 seconds, and that seemed slow enough to manage. Had they maintained that pace, they should have yielded at least 35 properly wrapped chocolates. n If you pay attention to the 2:10 minute mark, we see Lucy wrapping at an even quicker rate of one candy every second, demonstrating a potential of 140 candies wrapped.

sacrificing the time we need in front of a family? How do we slow down the conveyor belt so we can complete a full interview for 85 percent of applicants and redirect efforts spent managing chocolates into efforts spent helping people get their benefits? Reimagining how we work, whether we call it Business Process Redesign, Continuous Improvement, or LEAN, will be instrumental as we take on the challenges of the next several years. Changes to benefit eligibility alone are about to put our staff to a new test. We need to do what Lucy and Ethel could not—figure out a way to go faster before we drown in the mess. Solving this issue is easier said than done in the real world, where we Realistically, if they slowed down enough to be sure the work was done with better quality, we can imagine Lucy and Ethel being able to wrap at least 35 candies each over the same period—more than tripling capacity. All they needed to do was slow down the belt to match their capacity.

Winter 2025 Policy & Practice 21