A national process programme for Dutch local government

The situation

New national legislation changed how Dutch municipalities were required to move newcomers and status-holders into work and education. The processes that existed had been built for the old rules.

I was engaged as a process consultant through Yoros, and delivered it remotely from South Africa.

The client is the umbrella body representing all Dutch municipalities, so the work had a particular shape: whatever came out of it had to be usable by councils that differ in size, staffing and how much of the process they already had. A redesign that only worked in one municipality would have been a report, not a programme.

What I did

I mapped the end-to-end process for matching newcomers and status-holders with employment and education, then redesigned it against the new legislation. Not one department's part of it — the whole path a person actually travels, which is where the problems live and where nobody had been looking.

That path crosses organisations. Municipal departments, Work & Income, education and language providers, employers. Each holds a piece, each has its own system and its own idea of where its responsibility ends, and the gaps between them are where people stall. Most of the work was in those gaps.

I applied Lean Six Sigma process mapping deliberately, to make the result standardised and repeatable rather than bespoke — a procedure a municipality could pick up and run rather than a set of recommendations it would have to interpret first.

The data was GDPR-sensitive personal information about vulnerable people, so handling, minimisation and who could see what were part of the design rather than a compliance pass at the end.

Then I led the change with front-line staff. I had no authority over them, which turned out to be the right constraint: adoption was won through evidence and facilitation rather than hierarchy. Showing people the map of their own process did more than any instruction from above would have.

What changed

The programme produced a standardised end-to-end process that could be deployed repeatedly across municipalities, rather than a redesign that worked in one place.

There is no take-up number, and the way the sector works is the reason. The umbrella body sets the rules and builds the tools for carrying them out, and it makes those tools available to every municipality in the country — but which of them a municipality actually uses is that municipality's own decision. So a count would measure hundreds of independent choices rather than the programme, and the honest test of the work is whether what came out of it was worth picking up.

The part I would defend hardest is the adoption method. Front-line staff who had been given new rules by legislation ended up working to a process they had helped correct — which is the difference between a procedure that is followed and one that is worked around. That mattered more here than it would elsewhere: where nothing is mandated, a process only survives if the people running it think it is better than what they had.

What I'd do differently

Remote cost less than I expected, mostly because it was a team and part of that team was local. The distance was manageable. The translation was not.

The hard part was taking what a process-minded person knows and turning it into something a department can actually use. People who run a process every day hold it as judgement rather than as steps — they know what to do, and they know the exceptions, but they have never had to write either down. My job was to get that out of their heads and into workflows and schemes that would survive being read by someone in another municipality who had never met them.

That is slow work and I underestimated it. I would build far more time into the front of an engagement like this for exactly that translation, and I would validate it earlier — put the draft workflow in front of someone who was not in the conversation that produced it, and watch where they get stuck.