Patricia Martinez has a heck of a task ahead of her.
Two months into a 2009 budget year marked by debilitating spending cuts, the director of the R.I. Department of Children, Youth and Families is grappling with a mass exodus of retiring workers.
Martinez noted recently that DCYF started fiscal 2008 with 793 employees; by the end of September, that number is expected to stand at 718.
Beyond Cash Donations: How New Forms of Giving Are Transforming Not-for-Profit Accounting
Evolving Funding Landscape for Not-for-Profits Not-for-profit organizations are being asked to do more with less,…
Learn More
It is much the same at other state agencies. Droves of state employees are deciding to leave ahead of changes in health insurance coverage for retirees. And after leaders struggled mightily to pass a balanced $6.89 billion state budget, it is clear there is little money to fill vacancies.
In response, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri’s administration has decided to rip a page from the corporate world’s management handbook.
Last month, top administrators from a dozen of the state’s largest agencies attended Six Sigma training sessions at Providence-based global conglomerate Textron Inc., getting a crash course in the business-management strategy that has been widely adopted to identify defects and errors in manufacturing and business processes.
The idea: Give department directors and their underlings some methods for dealing with the reduction in the state’s payroll, which has shrunk by more than 1,000 jobs in the last year.
“We’re faced with an excessive amount of retirees – that’s fact No. 1,” said Beverly Najarian, the governor’s deputy chief of staff. “Couple that with the fact that we have a severe budget crisis. How do we go about determining which of those retirees are replaced? How do we cope with that?”
In full-day sessions led by Textron Six Sigma experts late last month, 75 state administrators picked through state government functions and processes, locating inefficiencies, prioritizing services, determining where job openings need to be filled and what needed to be streamlined.
No agency was exempt. Najarian said the R.I. Department of Corrections, the R.I. National Guard and the State Police had representatives at the sessions.
The R.I. Department of Health also underwent scrutiny, with tasks assigned varying priorities, from issuing birth certificates and marriage licenses to monitoring restaurants and drinking water quality.
From that list of priorities, Najarian said, directors could better determine where to shift workers or where to ask for new hires.
“You always will get the cynics and the skeptics,” Najarian said. “But for the most part, people understood. It got them to think differently about how to approach the problems. There’s no quick and easy solution.”
In DCYF’s case, Martinez said officials pinpointed at least one inefficient use of specialized employees: Social workers appear to spend an inordinate amount of time transporting children for visits, in some cases four or five hours in a day.
“I’d rather have my social workers spending their time meeting with families and working with them,” Martinez said. “That’s what they went to school for. Not transporting people.”
Officials realized that transportation tasks could be more cost-effectively handled by lower-paid staffers.
“If we have three less social workers, maybe having more child support technicians would help while keeping the bottom line the same,” Martinez said.
The idea of trying Six Sigma gained momentum after Najarian contacted a friend at Textron earlier this year who referred her to Michelle Johnson, executive director of Six Sigma at Textron’s headquarters.
Johnson said the company has offered its Six Sigma expertise to other organizations, such as City Year, in the last three years as part of an effort to be a good corporate citizen. This is the first time Johnson has worked with the public sector.
Nationally, other governments have borrowed from corporate-efficiency methodologies.
In 2004, for instance, Iowa state government introduced LeanSigma, a mix of Six Sigma and lean, another management strategy. Since then, state leaders have credited it with helping the state to effectively streamline government services.
In Rhode Island, Najarian insisted that it is not just a feel-good move by the Carcieri administration.
The administration is developing “templates” for each state agency based on the results of the Six Sigma sessions.
Najarian said each department director will be required to come before a reorganization committee – of which Najarian is a member – with the filled-out template in hand to justify hiring any replacements.
“This is real; it’s got to be justified,” Najarian said. “If [the directors] don’t do it, they’ll stay with whatever employees are left. …They’re going to say, ‘Everything we do is important,’ and there’s validity to that. But some things are more important than others and when they’re forced to put them down on a piece of paper and give some impact statements to each of those, they might be surprised at the results.”
Johnson said Six Sigma training is typically a much longer process, so her staff is also planning to follow up, working one on one in some cases with departments that may be struggling with running more cost-efficiently.
Martinez said that won’t be a problem at DCYF, noting that she has had experience in a nonprofit organization with doing more with less.
While the impact of retirements has been “pretty much across the board” at DCYF, Martinez said, Textron’s Six Sigma experts helped highlight areas of possible savings.
“Now we’re saying, ‘OK, knowing what we know, what are the efficiencies that we could create?’ ” Martinez said.
That’s exactly what Najarian wants to hear.
“We wanted to give them a tool to [make their case] as they’re going through this process because there is no way they’re going to be able to replace people, one for one,” she said. “Absolutely, positively not.” •
