This past week has been eye-opening for residents of Brighton, where Alliantist’s office is comfortably nestled. As the binmen went on strike over a pay cut, residents of the city were able to watch as all of the rubbish they produced stacked up on the streets around them. It’s been a shock to observe exactly how much waste a city produces in one week. And the same could be said of an office environment. The concept of the “paperless workplace” has made its way into mainstream consciousness in recent years as a way to keep an “eco-friendly” office. While reducing paper consumption on a large scale is definitely good for our ecosystem, the benefits of going paperless extend beyond environmental responsibility.

Paul Gotts from Merseyside Probation Trust, with the help of Tracy Abernethy, has realised the benefits of paperless working by managing Board meetings with pam – the platform for achieving more. In the pam Masterclass Group – an area that Paul started on the platform in order to share best practice within the larger pam community – he recently shared how working in an agile fashion has saved time and money, and has diminished security risks. By using a pam Programme to pull together the sixteen key Board meetings for Merseyside this year, Paul notes that they can now “do without the massive logistical exercise of photocopying, enveloping and postage for all of our key strategic meetings, and to do this in a more secure environment.” Ultimately, this has resulted in better work for his team that is done on time rather than at the last minute.

In order to extend the way they use pam within the Trust, many members and Senior Managers have recently received tablet devices that they use to access the platform at any time. These tablets have largely replaced paper for Board working because members simply refer to the shared information uploaded onto pam prior to meetings. “In summary,” Paul notes, “through pam, members have an increased ability to read and discuss issues prior to their meeting so that on the day, their focus is on decision making rather than document review.”

An additional benefit of doing work on pam is that the Trust will be using KPIs and Scorecards to further develop the Board. This means they can measure benefit realisation with these tools, and the growths and successes will be transparent for everyone involved. A lot of the waste often involved with high-level working processes (time, money, resources) becomes more apparent and easy to manage when working in a fashion like that of Paul Gotts and his colleagues in Merseyside. And several of our other customers, such as Cheshire Probation Trust run by Chief Angela Cossins, have already gone paperless with their work through pam.

In terms of communicating across partners in a secure way, pam has facilitated not only a decrease in the amount of paper in the shredder, but also an increase in shared ideas and actions. Rather than going to a meeting with stacks of secure documents that can be easily lost or stolen, partners are able to share secure information through pam in an instant. The waste has been minimised in a very significant way, and the ecosystem – particularly the public sector ecosystem – is benefiting. Now that the binmen strike is coming to a close and the amount of waste produced in Brighton has been displayed, perhaps residents might take a page (or a tablet) from the efficiency of Merseyside Probation Trust and cut down on some waste of their own.

*If you’d like to get involved in sharing best practice through the pam Masterclass Group, get in contact with Paul Gotts or Tracy Abernethy via the Community area on pam.