Category Archives: services

18 – Integrated planning in local government. Some questions and answers. Part 1.

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This short series of posts follows earlier posts on local government planning (see posts 11 and 12).

First to the questions. Is planning integrated simply because we each make our plans at the same time and tell each other what we are doing?  Is integration achieved simply by joining together multiple independently created plans into one plan? This approach can be seen in many councils. When everyone prepares their plan at the same time, even when they share information with each other about their plans, I would hardly call it integration.  When the 20 or more departmental plans are completed and then joined together, I wouldn’t call that integrated either.  In fact, both approaches are likely to result in the opposite of integration if they create competition for resources and a focus on goals at a local level that is not aligned with organisational goals. So, what can integrated planning look like?

Integrated business planning has been described as connecting the planning function across the organisation to link strategic planning and operational planning with financial planning.  The objective is to improve alignment (thank you Wikipedia).  This makes sense to me, especially in a diverse service organisation like a council where between 20 and 200 services (depending on how you define them) are delivered to customers using resources from a common pool.

Price Waterhouse Coopers have a handy booklet on their web page on integrated business planning that focuses on process integration and functional integration (http://www.pwc.com.au/consulting/publications/integrated-business-planning.htm).  They say that the extent of integration will depend on the size of the organisation, the operating model it employs, the inherent complexity of the organisation and the industry.  Again, this makes sense and picks up on the need to look at your organisation vertically and horizontally to achieve high performance.

Some local governments have been getting in on the act.  The Australian Centre for Excellence in Local Government (ACELG) has released a study on strategic planning frameworks across local government in Australia (http://www.acelg.org.au/news/strategic-planning-australian-local-government).  If focuses on strategic planning (i.e. trends and issues in the locality) and corporate planning (i.e. the administration of the council’s own activities).  It identifies a number of practical, conceptual and resourcing challenges for councils in undertaking effective strategic planning.  The most advanced planning framework identified is in NSW, where the Local Government Amendment (Planning and Reporting) Act (2009) has the goal of strengthening the strategic focus, streamlining planning and reporting processes, and encouraging integration between the various plans of councils.

The ACELG study says that in comparison with other states, the NSW Planning and Reporting Guidelines for Local Government provide a very detailed structure for integrated planning.  A ten year ‘community strategic plan’ is the highest level plan, and it sets out the community’s main priorities and aspirations for the future and actions required to achieve them.  Some actions are the responsibility of the council while others are the responsibility of other levels of government or community organisations.

It is accompanied by a ‘resourcing strategy’ that focuses in detail on the council’s responsibilities and includes a ten year financial plan, a ten year asset management strategy, and a four year workforce development plan. The next level plan is the ‘four year delivery program’, which covers the main activities to be undertaken by the council to implement the ‘community strategic plan’ within the resources available under the ‘resourcing strategy’. Lastly, an ‘annual operational plan’ supports the delivery program and sets out the projects and activities to be undertaken to achieve the commitments made in the ‘four year delivery program’.  This planning framework should ensure that plans are relevant, feasible and integrated.

Lancing Farrell

ACELG, 2013. Strategic planning in Australian local government – a comparative analysis of state frameworks (http://www.acelg.org.au/news/strategic-planning-australian-local-government).

Price Waterhouse Coopers, 2011. Integrated Business Planning (http://www.pwc.com.au/consulting/publications/integrated-business-planning.htm).

16 – ‘Council rates capped from mid-2016’, The Age, 21 January 2015

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‘Council rates will be capped next year with the state government forcing councils to justify any increases above the rate of inflation. Councils must now send their budgets to the Essential Services Commission for permission to raise rates above inflation. Inflation – as measured through the consumer price index [CPI] – is currently running at 2.3 per cent. Last financial year rates increased by an average of 4.23 per cent.’

Some people will be thinking it is about time that municipal rate rises are curbed. Nobody likes paying more taxes. But is it a smart move?

Rate capping has been in place in NSW for more than 30 years. In 2013 the NSW Treasury Corporation reported that a quarter of the state’s 152 councils had a ”weak” or ”very weak” financial sustainability rating. If not corrected, half would be ”very weak” financially within three years. In 2014 the number of councils requesting rate increases above the 2.3% cap set by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal almost doubled. The requested increases ranged from 5.5% to 11%. The increases reflect the financial realities confronting local government and ‘catch up’ increases to cover lack of revenue

NSW councils have responded to the rate capping in different ways. Ryde Council has created an RSA-type animation that neatly explains to residents the choices that need to be made.  It illustrates the implications of the demands for growth in services and infrastructure when revenue is declining.  New works are less possible and maintenance and cleaning standards have to be reduced with long term impacts on infrastructure.  Ryde is having to define ‘core’ services, i.e. what is essential versus what is nice to have, and balance reducing service levels with increasing rates.  It is a simple and effectively told story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR_BJKAo0dA).

The overall effect of rate capping seems to have been a reduced ability to provide services to the community, accumulated backlogs in infrastructure renewal or replacement, and increased reliance user charges for revenue. According to Brian Dollery and Albert Wijeweera the increase in rates in NSW since 1995 has been about half the increase that has occurred in Victoria and council rates per capita are lower that every other state and only higher that the Northern Territory.

Councils in Victoria experienced enforced rate cuts and capping for a period of time in the 1990’s. The Kennett Liberal/National coalition government capped rates in 1995 and imposed a cap of one percentage point below inflation. The cap was lifted in 1997 to allow increases of up to 3 per cent – with Ministerial approval. In 1999 the Bracks Labor government scrapped the cap altogether. The councils unable to draw on financial reserves or liquidate assets were profoundly affected and the impacts, similar to those now evident in NSW, were enduring.

The arguments in favour of rate capping are worth some discussion. They revolve around preventing councils from abusing monopoly powers in delivery of services; stopping expenditure on services or infrastructure that the State government regards as ‘non-core’; reducing the risks of poor governance; and limiting the ability of councils to provide services that are better provided by the private sector. Essentially, it reflects a lack of trust by the State government – councils won’t make sensible decisions without supervision.

In practical terms, what is it likely to mean for Victorian councils from day to day?

For a start, some councils are talking about entering into shared services to reduce costs. This has been a popular idea with CEO’s for a while that has failed to take effect. But will shared services really help? The evidence suggests that the savings are seldom as great as people think and there are initial costs involved in making those savings. John Seddon writes eloquently on the shortcomings of shared services. More in a future post.

What else can councils do? Reducing expenditure on capital works to enable funds to be used for recurrent operational expenditure is one likely response. In the short term this is fine if there are not pressing asset renewal demands or community demands for new assets. Cutting back expenditure on new assets will be easier for developed municipalities. It will not be as easy for developing municipalities where population growth is creating demand for new assets to meet community needs. In all municipalities, reduced expenditure on asset renewal will ultimately result in reduced fitness for purpose and increased future costs.

What about cutting recurrent operational expenditure? This is much more difficult because the community is likely to immediately lose services. There will be opposition from those who no longer receive the benefits of a service that is cut. The typical council operational budget is about 60-70% salaries and wages, 10-30% contractors and materials, and 5-10% plant and equipment. There will need to be a reduction in staff numbers for the cuts to be meaningful. This is likely to result in industrial disputes. If staff numbers are not reduced, there will need to be big cuts to expenditure on contractors and materials and/or plant and equipment, which impacts directly on the ability of staff to be productive.

Reducing expenditure on contractors is probably the easiest cut to make, especially if it doesn’t directly impact on delivery of services to the community. For many councils, this type of cut will impact on major maintenance/minor renewal of assets, which often sits outside the capital budget because the amount is below the threshold for capitalisation or the works do not increase asset life and cannot be capitalised. In the 1990’s it was cuts to this type that had long-term impacts when assets failed and needed premature renewal because of inadequate maintenance.

Rate capping has been shown to reduce the ability for councils to respond to community demand for services and to adequately care for physical infrastructure. It takes away the potential for local communities to determine the amount of funding they want to provide for council activities. It might drive administrative efficiencies, but at what cost? More than anything, it says that the State government knows more about meeting local needs. In every respect, it is just wrong.

Colin Weatherby

Dollery, Brian and Wijeweera, Albert 2010. An assessment of rate-pegging in New South Wales local government, in Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, Issue 6: July (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/cjlg/article/view/1619)

Seddon, John 2014. The Whitehall Effect.

The Age. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/council-rates-capped-from-mid2016-20150120-12tz7k.html

10 – What has changed in local government in Victoria since the 1990’s?

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Much has changed in Victorian local government since the reforms of the Kennett Liberal/National Party coalition government in the mid 1990s. It is worth reviewing some of those reforms for the benefit of those people who have entered the sector more recently. It may explain why some things are the way that they are.

The context for these reforms is relevant. There had been limited change in local government structure or function for decades. Voluntary amalgamations were resisted. Some regional resource sharing initiatives had been put in place, mainly in rural areas. The organisational structure had changed in the 1980’s from the traditional ‘two headed’ Town Clerk and City Engineer model, to a corporate structure headed by a CEO. A number of new functions had appeared, for example information technology, human resources and occupational health and safety. The focus on ‘roads, rates and rubbish’ had begun to change, but only just and only slowly.

The Kennett reforms accelerated the rate of change. Indeed, many onlookers would say that they ‘threw out the baby with the bath water’ in their haste. The reforms were driven by the public choice ideology evident in other conservative governments, most notably that of Margaret Thatcher in the UK.   This involved use of private sector management approaches in the public sector, creation of pseudo-markets for public services, and privatisation. There was a very strong view that local government needed to change quickly to become more efficient and accountable, and that councils were unwilling to change unless compelled.

The objectives of the reforms are much easier to see with hindsight – decrease costs, improve efficiency, reduce the size and scope of the public sector, and, importantly for the Kennett government, reduce the influence of trade unions. There was a focus on councils becoming ‘enablers’ rather than service providers, creating competition for delivery of public services, and separation of policy making from service provision in accordance with the now infamous ‘steering, not rowing’ concept from Reinventing Government by Osborne and Gaebler, which had been published in 1992.

The legislative changes introduced included electoral reform, senior management contracts, municipal amalgamations, rating controls, compulsory competitive tendering, and a 20% rate reduction. As you can imagine, this raft of changes created turmoil. Overall, the combined effect was to diminish local government and limit its role. In subsequent reforms, little has been done to re-establish local government as an effective level of government. Indeed, the rate capping currently proposed by the Daniel’s Labor government further diminishes it.

There have been some benefits. The forced amalgamations resulted in larger and more powerful local governments capable of more efficient service delivery. Amalgamation has provided economies of scale, especially for some of the very small urban or rural municipalities who were joined to their larger neighbours. In addition, there is now more responsiveness to customers and the community. This is the result of a number of the reforms, most notably the need to reduce rates by 20% and competitively tender services. Councils needed to start talking to their communities about services that would be withdrawn, reduced or otherwise changed. The formation of new council organisations during amalgamations facilitated the implementation of major IT systems and significantly improved the capabilities of councils.

Some of the disbenefits of the reforms are also evident. The electoral reforms moved councils away from annual and partial council elections to periodic and whole of council elections. This has increased the potential for episodic and transformational changes when large numbers of councillors change at an election. The linked reform of planning processes has locked councils into planning cycles integrated with the election cycle. It is now difficult to effectively think or plan further ahead than the next election. For some councils the forced rate reduction was unsustainable. Residents have suffered from reduced services since and, in real terms it has taken these councils 20 years to recover their revenues. Cost cutting and competitive tendering ended many careers prematurely and resulted in a ‘brain drain’ from local government. Council organisations also became much flatter (to copy the private sector and be more competitive), which has reduced career development opportunities.

The fixed tenure of senior officers, especially the CEO, has had a significant impact. Survival and success for the CEO is now dependent on their relationship with the council. Many CEO’s have not had their contract renewed and some have been terminated because their relationship with their councillors deteriorated. For most CEO’s this is now their highest priority. In response to this new pressure, they have tended to appoint senior officers who will support them, and the needs of the organisation or the community have become secondary.

In summary, the reforms of the 1990s decreased the resources available to local government and service levels in many areas, particularly those that are resource intensive, have declined. This has had impacts on the sustainability of infrastructure for with reduced capital funding available for asset renewal. Competition has increased in service delivery. And there is now much more competition in thinking about policy and strategy. It is no longer the sole domain of the administration and this has led to some new thinking and innovation. The focus on customer service has made the ‘voice’ of the individual louder than ever, which has improved customer service, but has also created some conflicts with preferences expressed by the broader community. Most influentially, organisational leadership now depends much more on the goodwill in their relationship with the councillors for success.

Parkinson

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

5 – Local government services. How to define them?

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In the last of this series of posts on services (see posts 2 and 3), I discuss ways to define services. The complexity described in the previous post will be evident here too. Unfortunately, nothing in local government is as simple as it could or should be.

You often hear councils described as ‘service organisations’ or being in the ‘service business’. As previously discussed, one of the main reasons local government exists is to ensure that a wide range of services are available to a community. This often means that the council delivers those services. What you don’t often hear about is a concise description of those services, a ‘service catalogue’ if you like. A list of services that helps everyone to understand what services the organisation will provide (and by implication, what services it will not provide). Knowing this should be a key element of organisational strategy (along with who are or are not customers, and how services will be provided efficiently).

Defining services should be straightforward. After all, we are delivering them every day and, in most cases, have been doing so for many years. In Victoria, councils are being asked to define services as part of a sector-wide asset management improvement program. A simple survey of councils revealed very different ideas about what constitutes a service. One council said that it had about 20 services, each defined by a department of the council. Another said that it had about 40 services, each defined by a unit within the council organisational structure (typically several units will form a department). A third council said that it had over 300 services, each defined by a cost centre in the council budget. The assumption seems to be that the organisational structure or budget defines services. This is expedient, but have they really defined services?

The Australian Centre for Excellence in Local Government conducted a review of service delivery reviews in 2012. They found that the ‘interpretation of the term ‘service’ for the purpose of reviews varied considerably between councils. Some councils defined services at a broad level and selected about 40 service groups or packages. Others broke them down into as many as 200 to audit and analyse their services at a detailed level’. Most councils differentiated between services to internal and external customers, and between those required to be provided due to a statutory obligation from those where there was discretion over provision. No criteria for defining services were identified in the report.

Geary Rummler and Alan Brache say that the work flow across functional boundaries is ‘how work gets done’. They contend that organisations produce their outputs through numerous cross functional work processes. If that is the case, then services are cross functional processes. Defining them according to functions is unlikely to be accurate.

I think that a useful definition of a service in local government is ‘an ‘end to end’ process that delivers an output to an identified customer’. The service could be part of a set of services that combine to deliver an output or outcome, which is probably better described as a value chain.

There are challenges in defining services as value chains or cross functional processes. To begin with, it challenges conventional thinking about how local government organisations work. Traditional power bases can be threatened if one disciplinary group no longer has control over a service. There will be a need for customer-focussed and process driven performance measures that are aligned with measures of the contributions of functions to the service. Rummler and Brache suggest appointing process owners, who they describe as the conscience, evaluator and champion of a process.

Thinking of services as processes will require fundamental changes in the way the organisation operates but it is more likely to result in high performance in service delivery.

Lancing Farrell

Australian Centre for Local Government Excellence 2012. Service delivery reviews in Australian local government.

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

Addendum 5 February 2023

A recent insight into use of a service catalogue has revealed that there need to be two catalogues – one that is external facing and used to help customers know what is available and another that is internal facing so that employees know what they are supposed to do. Someone I know who is studying to be a chef highlighted this difference for me. Their initial training was in how to prepare a meal from end to end as it appears on the menu. This gave them fundamental kitchen and cooking skills. Then the training moved to ‘station’ based food preparation where they are learning to work at a station with another chef to prepare one part of the meal. They are now contributing to a process organised and overseen in the kitchen by the head chef. The menu means nothing now and the work is determined by the service design in the kitchen.

Catalogue number one is the menu (i.e. steak and salad) and it is displayed in the restaurant. Catalogue number 2 is the organisation of work (i.e. work at the grill or the salad station) and it is known only to the workers.

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.

2 – Why do we provide the services that we do in local government?

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For some practitioners this is a question that is unasked and, therefore, unanswered. For me, the answer is critical in developing my practice and managing for high performance. This is my attempt to provide an answer applicable to any local government.

To begin with, we have legislative guidance. Former local government CEO Catherine Dale, in her thesis for her Doctor of Philosophy, says the functions of a Victorian local government include advocating; planning for and providing services and facilities; providing and maintaining community infrastructure; undertaking strategic land use planning; raising revenue; and making and enforcing local laws. These functions are mostly very broad and open for each municipality to implement according to their community’s needs and preferences. It is a starting point for understanding why services are provided.

Specifically in relation to public services, Mark Moore argues that governments provide public services to create public value. He defines public value as the collective view of the public or community about what they regard as valuable, especially with regard to the use of public money and authority. He says that public managers (i.e. elected representatives and bureaucrats) need to try and understand what constitutes public value for their community so that they can set out to deliver it through their operations and be held accountable for their performance. Moore sets out four key requirements of public managers in creating public value. They must:

  1. Articulate a clear, complete and compelling idea of the public value to be produced.
  2. Develop a set of measures to record performance in producing that value.
  3. Invite and embrace external accountability for defining and creating value.
  4. Create management systems that distribute internal accountability for value creation across managers and employees so that they feel motivated to perform in the short-term and to innovate and learn over the long-term.

A process is required to determine what constitutes public value for each community that includes ways to check in periodically to stay in touch and be responsive to changes in needs and expectations. This could be one of the key objectives of community engagement programs. Too often, community engagement seems to occur so that the council is seen to be doing it, or to consult over a single project or plan. A serious focus on public value would help determine the operational capability required to deliver valued services and to design those services to meet expectations.

In contrast to Moore, John Seddon is less directly focussed on the concept of public value or value in general, and says that ‘purpose’ should be the main focus of services. He argues that it is in the interests of all taxpayers when services are delivered in the most efficient way to meet needs.  Accordingly, Seddon says that understanding the customer or citizen purpose in interacting with the organisation is the key to ensuring that services meet customer needs and expectations. In this model, the services offered and the way they are delivered would be determined by the service consumer and their private value expectation. Seddon places significant emphasis on the worker delivering services and their role in responding to customer–introduced variability and tailoring service delivery.

I think local government is expected to deliver whatever services are required for the community to be safe, healthy and fulfil its potential. This is expressed in many different ways. One council says that its mission or purpose is simply to make the municipality ‘a better place’. Obviously there is an inherent community expectation of value. People are paying taxes and giving authority to the council. They want something in return. As Moore explains, understanding what they want and how it constitutes public value is essential to high performance and success. It should determine the policy settings for services. At the point of a customer receiving a service, understanding their purpose in seeking the service becomes paramount if they are to be satisfied. As Seddon points out very effectively, failure to fulfil purpose leads to ‘failure demand’ and inefficiency.

In a nutshell, the services offered by each local government need to fit within legislated requirements, be responsive to the broader community needs and expectations, and meet the individual purpose for each person receiving a service.

Lancing Farrell

Dale, Catherine 2008. The Role of Local Government for a Contemporary Victorian Community.

Moore, Mark 2013. Recognising Public Value.

Seddon, John 2008. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector.