WESTERN AUSTRALIA POLICE CASE STUDY

IDEASCALE

Western Australia Police is one of eight police jurisdictions in Australia and is responsible for policing the world's largest single geographic jurisdiction. Covering 2.5 million square kilometers, WA Police is made up of 11 districts and 157 police stations, with a unique spread across a major capital city (Perth), regional towns, rural areas and vast remote locations.

The population of Western Australia is growing at a rate that will likely see demand for policing services exceed resources. To address this, WA Police launched Frontline 2020, a major reform program that continues to examine all aspects of policing services in order to become even more efficient, productive, and locally-focused.

A key element of the Frontline 2020 initiative was the establishment of the Continuous Improvement Team (CIT) to source and select ideas from a workforce of 8,000 officers and public servants. This team used IdeaScale to develop a Frontline Innovation Portal to capture and promote those workforce ideas, particularly those around reducing ‘red-tape’ and unnecessary process. The CIT was able to launch the first version of the portal within a day on IdeaScale and present it to the executive team that evening, allowing the project to be fast-tracked.

WA Police approved all members to its community by asking them to sign on with their work email address and disabled anonymous submission in order to encourage transparency.

To start the conversation, the CIT promoted their IdeaScale community in a weekly newsletter, in workshops with senior leadership and the CIT, and changed all work desktops to show an invitation to the Frontline Innovation Portal. Finally, members who logged into the system received a chance to win small incentives (like movie tickets).

Every idea submitted to the community receives a response from a dedicated CIT member. This wasn’t always the case, but when the team instituted this best practice it led to increased activity in all areas: new users, more ideas, more comments and votes.

The team then filters ideas through an IdeaScale stage-gate process: 1) The most promising ideas are triaged to a small team; 2) The team conducts a small amount of research to determine whether or not it

should be forwarded to subject matter experts; 3) The subject matter experts conduct a high-level estimate of costs and value; and 4) After assessing the value of an idea that will be put into practice, the idea is moved

to completed or “on hold” if it requires more refinement.

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Western Australia PoliceGiving ownership of innovation to a workforce that covers 2.5 Million Square Kilometers

3IdeaScale Case Studies

In order to generate confidence in the system, the CIT fast-tracked a few feasible, easy-win ideas at the outset and communicated their success to the workforce. Thereafter, all staff members were able to see that the system worked and this also increased membership and usage. This tactic continues, with regular updates in the weekly staff newsletter and intranet site. Some of the biggest wins include:

• A legislative change allowing police officers to place arrested suspects in detention, saving 46,000 frontline hours each year.

• Streamlining procedures for Use of Force reporting, saving 8,000 hours annually. • A policy change to remove duplication of effort in recording final rosters. • Removal of the need for officers to serve warrants in person to juvenile offenders in

custody, saving thousands of hours in travel time.

These were all ideas that came directly from officers. The Frontline Innovation Portal has been a significant contributor to a complex change management system instituted by WA Police. Now anyone, anywhere, can offer an idea or improvement regardless of their rank, breaking down some of the previous hierarchical barriers, and fast tracking ideas to the corporate table. The results speak for themselves:

• More than 1,600 ideas from 4,851 users (60% of the workforce) who produced more than 11,000 comments and over 93,000 votes.

• More than 1,100 ideas moved to completion, including legislative changes that originated as IdeaScale ideas.

• Estimated savings in excess of $2 million dollars and significant savings in man hours which is reinvested into frontline services.

• Cultural and morale improvement due to enhanced process for award nominations and commendations and the portal also presented new opportunities for peer education and provides a collaborative agency wide approach to the reduction of red tape and reallocation of resources.

Deputy Commissioner Stephen Brown said IdeaScale provided a platform that was actively being used by the majority of a large and varied workforce. “This solution has proven to be an amazing way to engage our people in reform,” he explained. “The Frontline Innovation Portal has given our people a platform for raising their ideas on better ways of working, solving problems, and identifying the things that make it hard for them to get their jobs done – often things that are easy to fix if we know about them. It gives them the opportunity for real ownership of our reform program and hands-on involvement in shaping the future of WA Police. From the outset we wanted to avoid a purely ‘top down’ reform program, and the Frontline Innovation Portal has exceeded our expectations in generating workforce involvement.”

The Frontline Innovation Portal will continue to gather ideas and be a daily collaboration tool for WA Police.  

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