Medium sized group of workers (about 20). Location within a site and co-location in an office. Focus on the way in which routine interruptions from the public, agents and so forth by phone or at the public front desk generates extra work. This provision of high quality service adds to paperwork, gets in the way of completing other work, has an adverse effect figures and is not visibly recorded.
The work carried out in dealing with interruptions often is not recorded in any way, particularly if it is advice or information on planning applications prior to them being submitted. Other interruptions related to problems with submitted applications may only be recorded by way of notes, post-its and phone messages. They are often related to work to enable an application to keep active rather than being sent back to the applicant. If this was not carried out the application would be sent back and would take longer to process. Unfortunately the work to keep cases active means that the gross measures of processing time - that are used to assess performance - are longer.
One worker sits at their desk doing paper work while the phone rings and a client arrives at the front desk.
Placing work in an interruptible state and picking up work from where one left off constitutes an extra time overhead. Workers are assigned to front desk duty on a rota system. However, dealing with interruptions often depends on determining the person best suited to deal with a query. Workers utilise their local knowledge to determine who has the expertise, experience, case knowledge or so forth to deal with the particular query. They will also make general inquiries to the whole room.
Inter organisational group of workers in a council planning department undertake various interactions with outside clients and each other.