Standardizing the Prosecution System (Department of Justice)

Here are pictures of my recent work. This time, it's with the Department of Justice. I'm helping them standardize and improve their basic procedures for filing cases and complaints.

It turns out that in all these years, among all the prosecutor's offices, there was really no standard way to file cases and complaints.

I can validate this because several years back, a bus rammed into my car and I had to go through the process of filing a case. There would be days when the judge, the accused or I would not be available. Every time this happened, we had to postpone the hearing for another month. There were no options to allow us to find a closer, synchronized date. I've never heard from that case again.

I had no idea what the steps where and there was no Information Desk. Lack of clarity on processes is a fertile breeding ground for corruption. ('Nuff said).

Flash forward to today. DOJ is embarking on a project to change this. It set up a Technical Working Group (TWG) composed of senior prosecutors (aka senior fiscals) who put their heads together and steadily built the manuals from scratch. Then I reviewed the flowcharts they drew to describe their system. I also helped revise and simplify the manual that will be distributed to the administrative staff.

In revising the Administrator's Manual, the Technical Working Group asked me to simplify it further to a point where anyone can understand the steps.

Problems and realities:

• Shortage of staff in the prosecutor's offices.
  
• When they do have staff, the staff lacked the needed skills (eg computer skills, filing skills -- yes, lack of filing skills for staff who are supposed to do filing work, go figure).
  

Lessons I Learned about Government Employees:

• There are nice, hardworking government employees who are genuinely pushing for change (In most government agencies I've worked with, I've seen this pattern).
• These people are very driven, in spite of the general perception against government employees.
• In the DOJ TWG, for instance, they worked from 8:30 am until 7:30 pm for FIVE DAYS STRAIGHT. Meals and snacks were served while working. And this was not easy work -- the members had to read through each sentence to check the legality and fix loopholes.
• Despite being very driven, the fiscals and DOJ staff were actually fun to work with. They were very efficient and pleasant. We debated heatedly about the contents, but everything was kept at a professional level.
  

Lessons I Learned about Improving Processes:

• First, concentrate on mapping the whole process, from process start to finish. See the big picture first (by using boxes-and-arrows diagrams).
• Follow the steps and not the people. In DOJ, the first draft of the manual tended to follow the specific staff who were assigned to do each step. This led to dense sentences that were difficult to follow. It took me a couple of days to read through the intricacies. In the end, I simplified this by focusing on the steps, not the people.
• One sentence, one step. In the first draft of the manual, a step was often 2-3 steps subsumed in one sentence. I disaggregated these complex sentences and improved the readability of the manual.
  
• Rule of thumb: make sure that the first word of a step is a verb. (If you need to put the person who is responsible for the step, you can add this later.)
  
• Avoid complicated flowchart symbols. When drawing flowcharts, use boxes and arrows. Avoid additional "computer-based" symbols like diamonds, printouts, etc. They only add to the confusion.
  

Bad Implementation: SM Cash Card

Around 2 months ago, SM Supercenter required its fast food customers to pay through a Cash Card. Here is how the procedure was intended to be:

1. Pay P200 to a central cashier. This will load P200 worth of cash in your cash card.
2. Get the Cash Card.
3. Order in the various restaurants in the fast food center.

The fast food center issued warnings and posters saying that all customers must use the Cash Card instead of paying cash directly to the food shops. Things looked all right from there but it was a perfect recipe for disaster. Here was actually what happened:

1. The Cash Card electronic system was often offline.
2. Customers who learned that they could not pay cash were turned off. Shops lost business.
3. Customers who bought Cash Cards (like my wife and I) had to pay cash anyway, whenever the system broke down. After wating in line for several minutes and then only finding out that our Cash Card was useless, we just decided not to buy from the food shops. Again, this caused loss of customers.

Tonight, my wife and I lined up again at the food shops. Our plan was to do our groceries after supper. We were very hungry, too. So imagine our anger after learning that we could not use our Cash Card again. My wife asked for the manager and the manager tried hard to convince us to pay cash again. We insisted that they refund the P200 loaded in our Cash Card. After several back-and-forths between this manager and her superiors (they kept saying they were offline), they finally just reimbursed the P200.

The problem is that although they refunded our real cash, they caused anger and even probably made the food shops lose business (in fact this is what the cashier in one of the food shops told us -- customers got turned off at the Cash Card requirement).

SM is a very popular mall in the Philippines. In fairness, SM has been able to institute many improvements to its customer experience. However, it still sometimes implements stupid policies like this one.

• In the first place, requiring a Cash Card is an additional step that adds no value to the customer or the business.
  
• Moreover it adds a second step to HUNGRY consumers who sometimes have to line up, since the central Cash Card office has only one employee to process all customers of the fast food center.
• Also, what happens if I have a few pesos left in it? I would have to reload and I keep feeling that my money is not being maximized.
  
• Lastly, it frustrates customers, since it is also unreliable.
  

SM should rethink this Cash Card project of theirs.

Bad Transport Websites; Missing Train Schedules

I am writing a piece on Metro Manila for an online travel guide. It's pretty interesting, because I learned more about the broken services in our city.

For instance, yesterday I discovered that we do not have a website for our international airport (which our friend Urbano dela Cruz found out a year ago).

Today, I discovered how lousy our government websites really are.

But before we launch into this, let's first do some comparisons. In California, Australia, UK and other countries with rail systems, they post trip information (schedules, fares, contact numbers) in their websites. They also publish maps indicating the stops.
The picture above is of BART (Bay Area Rapit Transit) that serves San Francisco and the Bay Area in California. Let's compare:

• BART has a terminal right in the middle of the airport. Our light rail does not.
  
• BART's website, if you look closely, contains a tool for finding schedules and destinations on the upper left corner of the site, which, in usability, is a prominent location. This makes the information easily findable.
• The main buttons on BART's website are: Stations & Schedules, Tickets, Rider Guide, News, and About BART. PNR's cluttered website has: (top navigation) Services, Projects, News, Search; and a secondary navigation bar on the left, containing: About Us, PNR Officials, Directory (where the station information is hidden away), Government Links, Jobs, Feedback and Mail.
  

Even without lessons from other countries, it is common sense in any sane public service to anticipate what information and assistance the public will need, and that this information be easily accessible or findable, especially in a medium like the web.

Our 4 Rail Systems

We essentially have 4 rail systems: LRT1, LRT2, MRT3 (servicing the metropolis) and the Philippine National Railways (PNR), which traverses most of Luzon. If memory serves me right, Asia's first extensive rail system was built right here in the Philippines, to carry produce like sugar cane, rice, copra and tobacco (the first tracks resulted from a decree by the King of Spain in 1875, according to the PNR website). This linked Pangasinan, Tarlac, Pampanga, Bulacan, Manila and all the way to Legazpi in Bicol. (The first light rail in Asia was supposed to be the ones operated by Meralco in Escolta).

I remember in the 1970s that the train in our town (San Fernando, Pampanga) still brought passengers to as far as Legazpi. What happened after that? Why did our rail system fall into disrepair?

Finding Useful Train Information

I am not yet sure about the answer to the questions above. What I would like to talk about here is the difficulty of finding useful information for passengers. Ironically, I can get more info about the schedules of BART in San Francisco than our schedules at PNR or MRT3.

Web Usability of our Train Websites

The PNR website is ugly, unfriendly to Firefox or Safari (I could not even click the tabs), and largely full of useless information. Instead of giving schedules and terminals, for example, it gives out the names of its officials and its Vision and Mission. Who cares? We just want to get from A to B!


Actually, PNR does give out a list of telephone numbers for something called MLS, which appear to be stations -- but how will travellers know that this information is hidden under a button called MLS that is in turn hidden in a button called directory?

LRT1, LRT2 and MRT3 are a testament to the lack of communication, careful planning and smooth transition among our government officials and agencies. While the officials and agencies squabble, these three light rail systems do not have a unified ticketing. Nor do they have a unified website.

LRT1 and LRT2 reside on the same website, because they are operated by the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA). LRTA's website is a bit more neat in design than PNR's. It also had schedules for LRT1 and LRT2.

However, if you try a web search for "LRT2 schedules" alone, the top results do not point to the correct website.

MRT3 has a website, built no less than in Drupal, but contains no schedule. It does have a funny button named "How to Ride".
Ironically, our train schedules and destinations aren't that complicated, compared to those in other countries. Why can't PNR and MRT3 publish them?

These signs of neglect indicate a lack of commitment to providing really good service to the public, signs that may be seen in other websites like that of the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX).

Realizations from the SLEX Website

My travel piece also had a guide on SLEX and NLEX. Since SLEX is under repair, I wanted to advice travellers when the road works are expected to end. After some googling, I found the website of the South Luzon Tollways Corp (SLTC) which operates SLEX.

There were many announcements, press releases and much ballyhoo about the expansion project... but no expected completion date. This surely is a symptom of lack of commitment to complete projects on schedule!

After more googling, I finally found the expected completion date (late 2008) at Manila Standard's website.