Category Archives: customers

30 – ‘The better things are, the worse they feel’. How so?

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                                         700 words

This is the title of a chapter in Richard Farson’s rather interesting book Management of the Absurd – Paradoxes in Leadership. Farson is a psychologist, author, and educator. He co-founded the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in 1958. His article on the ‘Failure-tolerant Leader’ is included in the HBR’s 10 Must-Reads on Leadership. He is a guy worth reading.

The idea that things feel worse when they are actually getting better appealed to me because of something a colleague said to me at work recently. Continue reading →

29 – Local government shared services. Is it the silver bullet for rate capping? – Part 2

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                                         950 words

In the previous post, I discussed economies of scale and the cost savings possible through shared services. This post continues the discussion, starting with the implications of front and back office separation.

The history of ‘back office’ and ‘front office’ separation is worth some discussion. According to Seddon, it began with an article by Richard Chase in the Harvard Business Review in 1978. In the article, Chase recommends separating the ‘high customer contact’ and ‘low customer contact’ elements of the service system because of the different operations involved. Low customer contact operations are more efficient and, as a result, have lower costs and it makes sense to isolate them from the disruptive effects of customer interactions if it can be done without sacrificing service effectiveness. However, service effectiveness is exactly what Seddon believes has been lost in many of the cases he cites. Continue reading →

26 – The first 25 posts. What have you missed?

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                                              1100 words

Writers have posted 25 times since the start of the year. A number of themes and ideas have been discussed. This post provides a brief overview.

The goals are set out in post 1 – track current issues and discuss the issues that are ‘everlasting, widespread and insoluble’ (using the least amount of words). A range of issues have since been covered from the daily media, day to day work life, and the things people often talk about but seldom resolve.

Post 2 and 5 discuss local government services – what we do and how we can define it. The conclusion is that local government needs to provide services that fit within legislated requirements, are responsive to broader community needs and expectations, and meet the individual purpose for each person receiving a service. Each service can be defined as a cross-functional process or value chain.

In post 3 the complexity evident in local government is discussed, including the involvement of customers in service delivery, the variability they introduce, the difficulty measuring service quality or setting service goals and measures, and the impossibility of separating service delivery from politics.

The impact of training on performance is discussed in post 4 in response to media criticism of the Australian government public service for its spending on training. The post suggests that understanding, documenting and improving processes would yield more benefit than providing more training for most councils.

In post 6 the differences between customers, clients, citizens, residents and ratepayers are discussed. Understanding which role someone has chosen to take in an interaction is important in determining the value they expect. This can be useful in differentiating between public and private value expectations.

Post 7 looks at public service job cutting and the link to productivity. Some key messages from the Centre for Policy Development report False Economies: Unpacking public sector efficiencies are discussed. The post identifies the importance of defining public value so that any changes to resource levels can be made in the knowledge of the impact they will have on the value produced.

Post 8 presents an imaginary script for an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ in which he assesses the performance of local government as if it were a restaurant.   Hopefully it is both entertaining and thought provoking. What would Gordon Ramsay say?

In post 9 some emerging characteristics of people and councils are discussed. Obligatory empiricism, oblivious narcissism, and consensual lying are put forward as reasons why councils always seem to learn everything from scratch, leaders set out to meet their own needs first, and why people tell others what they want to hear for the sake of convenience.

Post 10 draws a ‘line in the sand’ with a discussion of the changes that have impacted in Victorian local government since the 1990’s. Part history lesson and part explanation of the present, the post concludes that the most influential change has been to the tenure of the CEO and their increased dependence on the goodwill of their council for survival .

Planning in local government gets a thorough airing in posts 11, 12, 18, 19, and 20. In posts 11 and 12 the current organisational planning processes is critiqued. Posts 18 and 19 suggest ways to better integrate planning. Post 20 discusses the role of the Council Plan.  All posts provide commentary on how to develop plans that are realistic, achievable and focused on delivering the value expected by the community. Constraints identified include the need to work within legislated requirements and the need for leadership to really understand ‘the business’ to be able to implement a ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ planning process.

In post 13 the role of policies and strategies is discussed. Are they becoming convenient but ineffective solutions to difficult problems, devices to avoid doing something that needs to be done, or just a way to be seen to be doing something?

Post 14 is an attempt to explain why councils stick with conventional organisational structures and avoid dealing with cross-functional processes; why systems seek to control risk and increase compliance without regard for producing public value; and why council culture encourages people to avoid making decisions. The discussion centres on what an organisational culture survey, an ABEF organisational self-assessment, and the Executive’s risk appetite can reveal.

Four books that should be read by every leader in local government are discussed in posts 15 and 17. The books are Recognising Public Value by Mark H. Moore, The Whitehall Effect by John Seddon, Improving Performance – How to Manage the White Space on the Organisation Chart by Geary A. Rummler and Alan P. Brache, and The Leaders Handbook by Peter R. Scholtes. Each book has a different focus and there is a mixture of public sector and business reading.

Post 16 discusses the rate capping proposed for local government in Victoria. The history of rate capping in Victoria and the long-term effects of it that are apparent in NSW provide a backdrop to a discussion about what councils can do in response. This post covers the potential for shared services and the potential impact on capital and operating budget cuts.

In post 21 the way councillors feel about their role is discussed. Do they feel inundated and manipulated or respected and influential? The difficulties they face as volunteers and in becoming skilled in their role, working together in an adversarial system, and coping with very demanding workloads, are covered. The message is stop complaining and support them more effectively.

What does a high performance local government organisation (HPLOGO) look like? In post 22 a methodology is proposed to define and create a HPLOGO. Based on the work of Andre de Waal, a set of characteristics of a HPLOGO are described (as actions) and prioritised.

Post 23 is a bit tongue in cheek. It is an attempt to pick up on the ‘chip on the shoulder’ prevalent in some parts of local government. Is local government a plaintive country tune or a majestic aria?

In post 24 an article by Frank Ostroff from Harvard Business Review (Change Management in Government) is discussed in relation to making high performance happen. He describes four unique barriers to change in the public service related to leader skills, leader tenure, rules that create inflexibility, and stakeholder resistance to reform.

Finally, post 25 looks at local government budgeting and how it is focussed on the past and has difficulty coping with improvement and innovation.   The need to balance investment in compliance with improving customer service and developing new services is discussed with reference to Christopher Stone’s work on public sector efficiency.

24 – High performance in local government. Part 2 – How can you make it happen?

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In Part 1 I talked about what a high performing local government organisation could look like. In this post I look at how you can improve performance to become high performing. Change management is a buzz phrase in local government at the moment. Everyone in leadership seems to accept that there is a need for change but they can’t agree on how to do it.

Frank Ostroff has some good advice for change agents in the public sector. He says that sustained performance improvement isn’t hampered by failure to identify solutions; indeed, he suggests they are often straightforward. In Part 1 made a list of 24 actions that you could start with to create a high performance local government organisation. Why not just implement them? Part of the answer lies in what Ostroff describes as the four unique obstacles to change in public services.

  1. Leaders are not appointed on the basis of their commitment or experience in reform. Instead, they are appointed for their ‘command of policy, technical expertise or political connections’.
  2. Leaders are appointed for relatively short periods and have limited time to see reforms through to conclusion. Therefore, they tend to focus on quick policy reforms.
  3. Rules covering activities such as procurement, personnel, and budgeting put in place to prevent wrong-doing have made government inflexible. The penalties for failure are also greater than the rewards for exceptional performance.
  4. Everyone has a rightful stake in government activities. Almost any reform is likely to meet with resistance.

I know he is talking about government in the US, and there are some significant differences in Victorian local government. But there are also strong similarities. His four obstacles are just as prevalent, even if it is for some different reasons.

Ostroff provides some insights into the characteristics of successful public service reforms. He describes five principles and illustrates them in some detail with cases. His first principle is to ‘improve performance against mission’. This resonates with the work of Mark Moore about the creation of public value. As with Moore, he says that the mission should be the focus. Improvement in performance achieving the mission (i.e. creating the required public value) needs to be the fundamental objective of the reform program. This makes a lot of sense in local government, where the ‘why’ often becomes unclear or generic.

His second principle is to ‘win over stakeholders’. This is important within and outside your organisation to create a broad support base for reform. His third principle is to ‘create a roadmap for reform’. He suggests three phases; identify performance objectives; set priorities; and roll out the program. It is essential to formulate a vision and set a clear path for reform.

The fourth principle is to take a comprehensive approach. He relates reform to organisational redesign involving integration and alignment of leadership, structure, processes, infrastructure, people and performance management. This concurs with Rummler and Brache and their thinking about the ‘infrastructure’ required for sustained performance improvement, as opposed to episodic campaigns. This involves seeing the organisation vertically and horizontally. They talk about the various levels of an organisation (vertical) and the performance needs (horizontal). I have reproduced their ‘nine performance variables’ diagram below.

the 9 performance variables

The performance needs must be met by the organisational leadership to ensure that work flows smoothly across boundaries. I think that taking a comprehensive approach is particularly good advice for local government, which seems to naturally form silos based on disciplines or functions. Failure to integrate or align is often the reason that reform is necessary.

The last principle is about the importance of being a leader, not a bureaucrat. Ostroff believes that public service managers are inherently respectful of barriers and may hesitate to remove them. There needs to be a readiness to demolish barriers to reform. He says that they are also likely to have to establish trust and demonstrate their sincerity. The failure of successive reforms often leads to cynicism, which needs to be overcome.

Ostroff cautions of the need to be aware of present realities, respect the complexity of what you are trying to do, and to hold people accountable for both results and their commitment to the reform effort. These are key points for local government reform. Present realities include organisational culture and its resistance to change. The complexity inherent in local government activities presents special challenges during a period of reform. Finally, the lack of effort to measure performance and use results to improve seems to be a hallmark of local government. In a reform process there must be accountability if it is to endure once the reform has been implemented.

In a nutshell, formulate your vision, take your present situation into account, seek the support of your stakeholders, set a clear path, be mindful of the complexity in what you are doing, and hold people accountable. Good luck.

Lancing Farrell

Ostroff, Frank   2006. Change Management in Government, in Harvard Business Review, May.

Rummler, Geary A., and Brache, Alan P. 1995. Improving Performance – How to Manage the White Space on the Organisation Chart.

8 – ‘Local government nightmare’. Or, what might Gordon Ramsay say?

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After watching an episode of ‘Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmare’ I was tempted to write a brief script for an episode based on local government being a restaurant. I think it would go something like this (language moderated) …

GR:                         So, tell me, what is the name of your restaurant?

Response:           Local government.

GR:                         Is that it? Isn’t it a bit generic? How will patrons know what to expect?

Response:           We will give them what they always get.

GR:                       So, they get whatever they got the last time they visited local government? No point of difference from other local government? Are you sure?

Response:           Yes.

GR:                        OK then. So, tell me, what cuisine do you offer?

Response:           All of them.

GR:                        What?

Response:           We offer all cuisines. We will serve any type of food that patrons want. They name it, we make it.

GR:                         If that is the case, how do you create atmosphere, give your patrons a great experience and ensure that you have the quality right, if you will try your hand at anything?

Response:           We do our best. Our staff are well trained and they work very hard.

GR:                         I see. At least you will get points for effort! Can I see the menu?

Response:           We don’t have one.

GR:                         What!

Response:           We did have one but there are too many items to list. It was like a book. It had chapters in it!

GR:                         So, tell me then, how do people order? And how do they know what it will cost?

Response:           Well, everyone pays an annual fee. Then they turn up and just tell us what they would like, how they want it prepared, and we do our best to deliver it.

GR:                         There must be a lot of dissatisfied customers. How do you know whether or not you have met their expectations and provided them with what they wanted? How do you manage your kitchen to have the required ingredients? How do you have chefs able to cook each of the cuisines well?

Response:           There are problems with customers. Some of them are just impossible to satisfy! When they tell us they are not happy, we just try again. We do have to stock lots of ingredients and we do need a lot of chefs so that we can cater for the range of orders received. I can’t really see any other way of offering a service that meets the needs of everyone.

GR:                         This is amazing. I haven’t seen a restaurant like it before. To be honest, I can’t see how you run this place at a profit. You must waste a lot of time and ingredients.

Response:           We do.

GR:                         Then how do you keep operating and why do people keep coming back?

Response:           Well, we are the only restaurant in town.

GR:                         …

posted by Whistler

6 – Customer, client, citizen, resident or ratepayer. Who are we dealing with?

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In previous posts I have talked frequently about the customer. It is fundamental to the way I think about my work. At this point, it is probably important to explain what I mean when I use the term ‘customer’. In simple terms, a customer is someone requesting and receiving a service. Typically, this occurs in a ‘transactional’ setting where the customer pays for the service when they receive it. This happens in local government for some services, for example entry to an aquatic facility. When the payment has been made at an earlier time through taxes, and the service is free at the point of consumption, the relationship changes. In these circumstances, it is not uncommon for people receiving services to be called clients. Sometimes they are referred to as end-users or service consumers.

In local government, these people can also be citizens of the municipality. They may be franchised to vote (if they are over 18 years of age) and then they are constituents of the councillors who represent them. They may be resident in the municipality and receive property services paid for by the ratepayer. They may also be the ratepayer. As you are probably starting to see, an individual can be a fee paying customer, and a client, and a resident, and a constituent, and a ratepayer, and a citizen. Or they could be only one of them. This might be starting to seem like an esoteric discussion. After all, why does it matter who we are dealing with?

I think it is essential to understand the capacity in which you are dealing with a person. Depending on what the person wants, they may have different rights and responsibilities. They may be after different forms of value. If you believe that the purpose of local government is to create and provide value, then understanding the type of value being sought is integral to success. Mark Moore describes ‘degrees of publicness’ regarding value, which change from essentially private value sought by individuals, perhaps as a customer or client, through to public value sought collectively by ratepayers or citizens. I have reproduced a version of his diagram below.

Moore degrees of publicness

A key point is who the arbiter of value is. This is also picked up by John Seddon in his writing. He doesn’t refer to value directly and uses ‘purpose’ instead. It is the same concept. People have an expectation of what will happen when they receive a service. There is a need to be met. In Seddon’s view, it is essential that the service deliverer is not the arbiter of value. Everything must be described and managed from the customer’s point of view. Councils deciding that they know what is best and what constitutes value for their community or customer unfortunately happens too often.

When dealing with someone on an issue, I always try to work out what capacity they think they are dealing with me and the value they expect. Then I work on helping them to understand some of the other points of view about the service they are after. Mostly, people get it. They understand that what they want is sometimes in conflict with broader community needs or expectations. Often, they are prepared to modify their request accordingly.

Lancing Farrell

Moore, Mark 2013. Recognising Public Value.

3 – Local government and complexity. Is there a simple explanation?

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The last post talked about why services are offered by local government and some ideas relevant to determining what should be offered. That whole post may have seemed like an over simplification. After all, if it was that simple, each local government would have a list of the services they offer and it would be straightforward to communicate to the community which services will or won’t be offered. In practice, it is not that easy to be definite about the services available because almost any service request will be considered and councils are reluctant to say no.

This post is an effort to explain why that is so by discussing the complexity that exists in public services. For some of the ideas I acknowledge posts on the blog site ‘Flip Chart Fairy Tales’.

To begin with, services are complicated by the involvement of end users (customers) in the delivery process. Customers are not consuming something that has been made earlier. They play a voluntary and virtually uncontrollable role in producing a service. And, every customer has different needs and preferences. Therefore, processes for service delivery are not as predictable and controllable as they are in activities such as manufacturing. Despite this, many of the theories and methods for productivity improvement used in local government come from manufacturing. For example, lean.

Next, because of the nature of services, it is easier to measure cost than quality and it is more difficult to make productivity improvements than in manufacturing. Service quality is subjective and depends on the perceptions of the customer. As a result, it can be difficult to tell whether a reduction in cost has led to a reduction in quality. The cost-cutting programs so common in local government often wreak havoc on service quality but it goes unnoticed or unmeasured. In comparison, in the private sector, service businesses have a fail-safe measure of performance – their customers will leave if the quality drops. In public services that are free at the point of consumption and where there is little or no choice of provider, this measure is not available.

Public sector organisations also have to deliver services to whoever comes through the door. Price is not a ‘gatekeeper’ for access to services. And, the people receiving services can come from all parts of society and may have limited education and language skills, making their impact on the service delivery process more significant. Customers introduce variability that complicates service delivery.

Frances Frei describes five types of variability introduced by customers:

  1. They want a service when it suits them.
  2. They can ask for a range of services.
  3. They vary in their ability to do what they need to do in order to receive a service.
  4. They will expend varying degrees of effort to get a service.
  5. They have different opinions about what it means to be treated well.

This adds complexity and unpredictability to delivering services and public service organisations often respond by trying to standardise processes to reduce costs and improve productivity. In practice, this often means ‘designing out’ the source of complexity, i.e. the customer. In public services, the process of standardising service delivery can lead to ‘failure demand’ and increased costs.

John Seddon describes failure demand as ‘demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer’. It is a particular problem for public services. Because services are free at the point of consumption, if needs are not met people are easily able to re-present or escalate their request, which creates extra demand and increases costs. For example, Seddon estimated that more than 80% of the demand in a health and social care system in the UK was failure demand and that it took 400 hours of work to create 100 hours of value. This may be an extreme example, but it highlights the potential.

The workings of public services are further complicated by the environment in which they operate. It is harder to nail down strategic goals and specific measures for public sector organisations. Local governments often have difficulty defining and measuring what they actually exist to do. That is why their mission statements can seem so nebulous and public value can be so hard to define. Then there are the numerous obstacles to change, including complexity, political resistance, cultural resistance, size and scope, and lack of experience managing change. Improving productivity is difficult and transformational change processes are common.

Restructures seem to follow every change of CEO. Functions are re-assigned and re-named. However, costs are incurred in the processes for delivering services and significant efficiency savings can only be made by improving the way the service delivery processes operate. Geary Rummler and Alan Brache say that an organisation is only as good as its processes and that process improvement presents the greatest improvement opportunity for most organisations. However, improving processes can require a lot of detailed work and knowledge about work flows. Change is more likely to involve ‘incremental adjustment’, which takes more time and effort than the career plans for many executive will allow.

Finally, it is impossible to separate public services from politics. This is perhaps more true in local government where the politicians are highly accountable to their constituents. The competing financial, social and policy objectives can make decision-making much more complex than in the private sector.

Lancing Farell

Flip Chart Fairy Tales. https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/why-is-the-public-sector-so-complex

Frei, Francis X. 2006. Breaking the Trade-Off between Efficiency and Service. Harvard Business Review, November.

Rummler, Geary A., and Brache, Alan P. 1995. Improving Performance – How to Manage the White Space on the Organisation Chart.

Seddon, John 2014. The Whitehall Effect.