A case study of Liverpool City Council's Speke One Stop Shop and South Liverpool Housing partnership arrangement: Is it successful from an employee's viewpoint?
Abstract
In 1999 a new Chief Executive was appointed to Liverpool City Council (LCC). The nine original directorates were stream lined into the five current portfolio areas. LCC has dramatically changed and improved the way it delivers its services to the customer, which has been developed through the introduction of the Customer Contact Strategy (CCS) Through the CCS there are a number of contact channels, which give a first point of contact choice of access to a citizen. A key component of the strategy is the development of a network of fourteen One-Stop Shops (OSS's) across the city. There are currently ten in operation. The Shops provide face-to-face contact for customers for council and partner services. This study focuses its attention on the partnership arrangement between the Speke OSS and South Liverpool Housing (SLH), who are a registered social landlord (RSL). Staff based in the Speke OSS share the same building and counter facility with staff from SLH. Both organisations are located in the Parklands Building, which is a Public Finance Initiative (PFI). This is a unique partnership in England and Wales and the first of its kind in delivering "joined up" services. From the findings of the initial research, the author proposes and introduces a model named the "CHANGED" model. A contrasting merger between Chester College and Warrington Collegiate Institute is examined as a case study in appendix 7. In order to further test the validity of the aforementioned model, the author has carried out further research with a focus group of LCC 2nd year MBA students. The findings of which are described in Chapter Five. Adopting both qualitative and quantitative research methods, this research aims to treat the partnership arrangement as a "case study" to establish the success of the partnership: where success is taken to mean a process beneficial to staff in meeting organisational goals. The research aims and questions that are to be explored in this study are: 1. How has the partnership arrangement managed to enable staff to provide a seamless service in dealing with customers? 2. What evidence is there to suggest that a single culture has developed between staff from both organizations? The study illustrates the investigation and analysis of data, tests the data against established theory, discusses the findings and uses the results as a basis to identify possible recommendations. These recommendations could be incorporated into the development of a tool kit (CHANGED model) or similar model, which may be adopted in the success of future partnership arrangements which LCC may choose to embark upon.Publisher
University of ChesterType
Thesis or dissertationLanguage
enCollections
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