Case Study

Two’s company for Tegan

24 Oct 2024

Learning new skills takes commitment and enthusiasm, especially when there’s a busy day job to be done alongside. Having a colleague to collaborate with, bounce ideas off, and mutually encourage gave Tegan, from the CFO3 Justice team, all the support she needed to successfully complete her Lean Six Sigma yellow belt in early 2024.

Tegan, a case worker supporting men in three Yorkshire prisons, worked with team colleague Claire on a project to minimise missed appointments by people on probation working with Ingeus caseworkers. Finding that each had different talents to bring to the project gave a perfect balance of professional skills:

“We each had different strengths, I’m quite analytical for instance, so we were able to work holistically together,” says Tegan. “We had several joint calls with the Continuous Improvement trainers and encouraged each other every step of the way. It’s easy to get distracted and let the demands of day to day work take over, so being accountable to each other also helped keep me focussed.”

The structured learning provided by the CI team also helped open Tegan’s eyes to the wider world of Ingeus.

“The Academy training really helped me consider the bigger picture,” she continues. “Thinking generically about customer expectations, eliminating waste and changes to benefit our participants wouldn’t have been on my radar in the same way before. Suddenly it all started to make sense and now I can apply those principles to my own role.”

The Ingeus CI Academy provides accredited learning in Lean and Six Sigma methodology that enables Ingeus employees to identify and implement continuous improvements. Yellow belts like Tegan learn process improvement, supporting data collection, analysis, and identifying areas for efficiency and are often contributing members to larger projects.

“I enjoy learning, it’s important for career progression, and having gained a yellow belt, that’s a recognised, transferable skill to take forward,” Tegan concludes. “Ingeus has always supported my craving to learn – even when I left a year into my job to progress a Masters degree – and then came back again.

“Resources are freely available, accessible and inclusive and I’m really glad I challenged myself to do something that I didn’t really realise the significance of – until I did it! It helped me appreciate Ingeus as an overall business as well as making meaningful changes to an issue that negatively affects our team – missed appointments.”

Tegan will graduate from the CI Academy alongside Claire in July 2024, joining a growing tide of accredited change agents across Ingeus.