Category Archives: value

43 – Developing a dashboard for performance measurement. A case study.

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                                         1000 words

mini dashboard

I was recently asked to create a dashboard for my unit with the intention that it function like the dashboard on my car (no this is not my car). This is to be done in the absence of an organisational dashboard or scorecard or performance reporting system. There have been a few posts on this topic by Lancing Farrell (here and here) and this post discusses the application of some of the theory.

I started by listing all of the current measures that are in place from external and internal sources of accountability. This included legislation, sector-wide improvement programs, customer satisfaction surveys, occupational health and safety accreditation audits, internal audit programs, culture surveys, organisational policies, and financial reporting. Some of these measures are applied continuously, some are annual and others occur periodically. All of them have some organisational or public reporting of performance. This list was very much a list of things that other people think it is important to measure about the performance of the department. For whatever reason.

Then I made a list of all of the things that I think it is important to measure to know work is being done properly. Continue reading →

42 – How do you listen to the ‘voice of the customer’ in local government? It can be done.

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                                              740 words

This post follows an earlier post Customer, client, citizen, resident or ratepayer. Who are we dealing with? It takes the concept of value further by proposing some tools that can be used to understand what customers expect and whether those expectations have been met.

I will start with Peter R. Scholtes and his views on the ‘customer-in mentality’, which he says is characterised by ‘thoughtfulness, responsiveness, empathy and altruism’. Customer-in thinking increases the likelihood that customers will get what they need – and need what they get. Listening to the customer is the beginning. Scholtes says we can start to do this by paying attention to what customers say when they contact us to make complaints, ask questions, or request services. Councils typically count the number of resident contacts. Some differentiate between service requests and complaints. Few actively evaluate what customers are asking about or saying to obtain qualitative data to guide service improvement.

Alternatively, or in addition, we can initiate contact with the customer to solicit information through surveys, interview or focus groups. Continue reading →

37 – Risk delegation. Who has it at your council?

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                                                         480 words

Have you ever wondered who has the formal delegation to accept risk on behalf of the organisation? I know that you probably spend most of your time dealing with systems that seek to reduce or eliminate risk, but what happens when risks must be taken? How do you assess and accept those risks?

My bet is that there is no system to accept risk and that your organisation has little understanding of the risks that are being taken by managers each day. I think that the absence of a system to formally assess and accept risks is the reason there are endless systems to get rid of it. I am not talking about the Risk Register and the big strategic or operational risks that are obvious to everyone. I am talking about the daily risks that arise when something hasn’t worked out the way you would like it to but work must go on. Continue reading →

35 – Accountability in local government. Who are we really accountable to and why does it matter?

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                                              650 words

The demands for accountability in local government are continuous. The challenge is that they come from many different places and focus on different aspects of performance.   Sometimes they create conflicts. For example, strict adherence to procurement policies can remove the flexibility required to respond quickly and meet complex community needs. But it keeps the Audit Committee happy. A community interest group gains political support for a project that hasn’t been included in the budget. But the councillor and their constituents are happy. I am sure you can think of other examples. Continue reading →

34 – Middle managers in local government: the ‘scrapers of burnt toast’?

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Posted by Colin Weatherby                                                        620 words

burnt toast

This is the phrase used by Peter R. Scholtes in The Leaders Handbook to describe the work of many middle managers as ‘expediters or troubleshooters’ in organisations that have yet to eliminate waste and create ‘efficient, smooth, uncluttered flows of work’.   He says that in a ‘flat’ organisation the layers of middle management have been removed as part of the focus on eliminating waste. In an efficient system, they are unnecessary and non-value adding roles. I am sure he doesn’t think that middle managers aren’t required.  You just need less.  It is an interesting idea.

Scholtes says that removing layers as part of improving organisational performance reduces opportunities for promotion. As a result, people leave to find less efficient organisations where their skills in ‘expediting and troubleshooting’ are required to deal with inefficiencies and waste to make the system work. I started thinking about my role and the role of colleagues in middle management, and what we spend each day doing. What do we talk about when we meet in the corridors? Are we mostly adding value or just spending our time making dysfunctional systems work? Continue reading →

33 – Developing an organisational performance measurement system. Some ideas.

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                                     820 words

I have been thumbing through ‘Improving Performance – How to Manage the White Space on the Organisation Chart’ by Geary A. Rummler and Alan P. Brache, in particular the chapter about performance measurement. In it they describe measurement is the single greatest determinant of an organisation’s effectiveness as a system, and as the primary tool for ‘communicating direction, establishing accountability, defining roles, allocating resources, monitoring/evaluating performance, and taking improvement action’.

I haven’t seen a local government that has actively used performance measurement this way. Instead, it tends to be driven by external accountability requirements. We use the performance measurement that we do to convince others that we are doing what we should. Continue reading →

31 – Measures, targets, KPI’s, KRA’s and CSF’s. What are we talking about?

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Posted by Lancing Farrell                                                                              740 words

There is a lot of talk in the public sector about measurement. Some people say that you ‘can’t manage what you can’t measure’ or, ‘what gets measured, gets done’. There is no doubt that measurement is inextricably linked to the pursuit of better performance and greater accountability. In local government, we seem to be desperately looking for things we can measure that will tell us how well we are doing. But are we measuring the things that count? Continue reading →

15 – Interested in local government management? Four books you should read and why. Part 1

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I like to read. I know that not everyone else does and when you know someone who reads and likes to talk about it that it can be a bit painful. Nonetheless, I am going to do it again. This post is about the books that I discovered and found interesting in 2014 – books that should influence management in local government. I think they contain relevant and useful ideas to improve what we do. Ideas from all of them feature in posts.

1. Recognising Public Value by Mark H. Moore. Published in 2013, this book expands on the thinking in his earlier book Creating Public Value (published in 1995) in which he described the aim of managerial work in the public sector as ‘creating public value for the community’. This is the equivalent of managers in the private sector creating private value for shareholders.   He says “… it is not enough to say that public managers create results that are valued; they must be able to show that results obtained are worth the cost of private consumption and unrestrained liberty forgone in producing the desirable results. Only then can we be sure that some public value has been created.”

In his latest book, he takes this idea further to show how public value can be recognised and measured. The central idea is that the public sector can create an equivalent to the ‘bottom line’ available to the private sector. To achieve this, Moore has developed the ‘public value scorecard’, based on the idea of the balanced scorecard, containing a ‘public value account’ (a clear, explicit and measurable statement of the public value they have created and the costs involved in creating that value); measures of the organisations standing with the stakeholders providing social legitimacy and authority; and measures of the organisation’s ability to deliver the outputs required to achieve the desired public value.

In developing his case for the public value scorecard, Moore covers a wide range of issues, including discussion about private and public value; arbiters of value; costs of using public authority; sources of accountability for the public sector (very interesting reading); the public value chain; and the importance of performance measurement. Both of Moore’s books use case studies to illustrate his ideas, which makes the practical application of his thinking easier to understand. This book should really be compulsory reading for anyone in a leadership role in the public sector because it provides a practical, high-level framework for thinking about why a public organisation exists, what it intends to achieve, and how that can be measured.

2.  The Whithall Effect by John Seddon. Published in 2014, this book consolidates much of John Seddon’s writing about the public sector. If you have read his earlier book Systems Thinking in the Public Sector (published in 2008) you will be familiar with many of the ideas. There are five sections in the book. The first covers the ‘industrialisation’ of services and the many misconceptions that Seddon believes are evident in current service design and improvement, especially those borrowed from manufacturing. The second covers his approach, including his ‘Vanguard Method’ used to understand the current situation before improvements are made. The third section is a critique of government ‘reforms’ of public services that have not produced the results expected. The fourth section addresses current ‘ideology, fashions and fads’ in public services. The last section has his recommendations for change in Whitehall to improve public services in the UK. Overall, the book covers a lot of material, much of it supported by case studies.

Seddon is highly opinionated and critical of failings in government policy and action. This doesn’t detract from the fundamental messages in this book; services need to be understood as a system and there are (more) effective ways of doing this; interventions in service systems should be planned and use knowledge of customers, demands and work flow to inform them; measures must be relevant to the customer and used by the people delivering the service.

In a very practical way, Seddon provides tools for taking Moore’s ideas about public value into action. Seddon is much more focussed on private (customer) value, or the customer-defined purpose, and would no doubt argue that fulfilling purpose is a form of public value. In a way, I think ‘public value’ is just ‘purpose’ writ large. This book should also be compulsory reading for all leaders in the public sector. The ones who read, anyway. Firstly as a tale of what happens when changes to services are predicated on political, and not customer or public needs; secondly to provide a way to understand services as a system; and lastly to reinforce the importance of effective measurement of performance.

More books in Part 2.

Lancing Farrell

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.