Tag Archives: local government

20 – Plan, promise or accountability tool. What role does your Council Plan play?

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I am always interested in documents called ‘plan’. Add ‘strategic’ and you really have my attention. I suppose it all depends on definition of a plan. Here are a few of my thoughts to add to the posts on planning by Lancing Farrell (posts 11 and 12).

I take a plan to mean a document containing your intended actions to achieve an outcome. If circumstances change, the plan will need to change accordingly. It is a mechanism for a group of people to come to a common understanding of what they are going to do and it helps communicate that to others. It guides decision making and the allocation of resources. It is a reference when you need to confirm the direction you want to go in. You probably have your own definition.

In local government, however, plans tend to take on other roles. They become public promises about actions to be taken and the objectives that will be achieved. It is the yardstick to measure the performance of the Council and the organisation and hold them accountable – have they kept their promises? Politicians keeping their promises has become a bit of an obsession in Australia. The Council Plan is the main document that fulfils that purpose in Victorian local government.

Actions from the Council Plan ‘cascade’ into department work plans and the performance plans of individuals, who are then measured on how well they achieve them. Accountability for delivering the plan – implementing the actions and producing the outputs – is then embedded. But what if circumstances change?   What if the plan you started with is no longer a good one? It does happen. As Keynes is reported to have said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Unfortunately, in local government, changing your mind about your plan is often seen as breaking promises or avoiding accountability.

This is a simplistic view of the world. Sometimes the plan needs to change in order for the same outcomes to be achieved. When the outcomes start to change all the time without a process to ensure it is what the community wants, it probably is an accountability problem. I have observed councils sticking to plans and implementing actions that everyone knows are no longer relevant, but they continue to be implemented because ‘we said that we would’. Often this happens because lead time to get an action into the plan has made it obsolete or another more relevant opportunity for action has emerged.

The emergence of a new and better way to achieve the same outcome can be the most difficult to deal with. The Council Plan is not readily amended and the amendment process is public, which opens the door to accusations of breaking promises. It is difficult for a council to take risks in producing value for the community if those risks are to be embodied in the Council Plan. There is usually a process to double check on the ‘doability’ of any actions proposed for the Council Plan – unless we are sure we can do it, it often doesn’t get included. Imagine a business only planning to do the things that it already knows it can do.

The risk is that the plan becomes a controlling document full of risk-free and relatively easily achieved actions.

Is there a solution? The flexibility of a plan to effectively guide action in achieving outcomes must be balanced against the public demand for accountability from their elected representatives and the council. The planning structure and the process to develop and review plans is probably the key. At the moment a lot rides on the Council Plan. In the absence of lesser organisational plans that capture actions and accountabilities of the organisation, they are being incorporated into the City Plan, which is essentially the plan made by the councillors for their term in office. As such, it necessarily has a political focus.

A better planning process, which is possible within the legislated planning framework, would seem to be the answer.

Colin Weatherby

19 – Integrated planning in local government. Some questions and answers. Part 2.

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As discussed in the previous post, integrated planning involves each level of planning occurring in the correct sequence with goals cascading between plans to create alignment.  Here are some further thoughts.

An integrated planning process starts by effectively linking organisational strategy with planning.  Stace and Dunphy say that a ‘well argued, well documented strategic plan’ is not a strategy.  Instead, they say strategy is an ‘active process of thinking and communicating, generated at the corporate and strategic business unit levels, by which leaders gain the intellectual, emotional and behavioural commitment of their people in stretching the limits of the corporation’s ability to achieve success’.  It is the set of understandings that guide the direction and behaviour of the organisation.  Mankins and Steele believe that often strategic direction is established in spite of the strategic planning process, not because of it – “… with the big decisions being made outside the planning process, strategic planning becomes merely a codification of judgements top management has already made, rather than a vehicle for identifying and debating the critical decisions the organisation needs to make to produce superior performance”.  In local government, strategy arises from long term community plans and the day to day activities of the Council and the Executive.

So, integrated planning enables the continuous review and creation of strategy to influence plans.

An integrated planning process has one agreed set of organisational priorities. Resources are allocated to those priorities and the collective effort aims to implement those priorities and measure success in doing so.  Building an organisational plan by adding together the strategies and actions from multiple, independently created plans is unlikely to achieve this outcome. A top down approach is initially required to set high level parameters (i.e. the strategy) that planning then takes into action.  Each part of the organisation can use those parameters to create plans that cover their contribution towards achieving organisational priorities.

So, integrated planning occurs when each planning unit is working within shared parameters to achieve common strategic priorities.

An integrated planning process will link actions across functional areas.  The ‘silo’ effect commonly described in local government, needs to be overcome to achieve high performance.  If each department plans separately without clear strategic priorities and shared high level parameters, there will be a functional bias as each department optimises their activities.  There will be competition for the resources available within the common resource pool.  A focus on cross-functional processes when planning will help to integrate the work to be done in implementing strategy.  This will require processes to be identified, understood and owned, so that they can be properly considered in plans.

So, integrated planning recognises and reinforces cross-functional processes.

Planning isn’t integrated simply because we all do it at the same time, and integration isn’t achieved simply by joining together multiple independent plans.  A planning process is required that is top down and bottom up, and driven by functions (or departments) and processes.  The planning framework prescribed in NSW local government is a really good starting point.

Lancing Farrell

Mankins, Michael and Steele, Richard 2006. Stop making plans, start making strategy in Harvard Business Review, January.

Stace, Doug and Dunphy, Dexter 2007. Beyond the Boundaries – leading and re-creating the successful enterprise.

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).

17 – Interested in local government management? Four books you should read and why. Part 2

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This post continues my discussion about the books that I discovered in 2014 that I think should influence management in local government.

3. Improving Performance – How to Manage the White Space on the Organisation Chart by Geary A. Rummler and Alan P. Brache. Published in 1995, this book is quite different to the other two books recommended. It is not about the public sector and it is a hard core management book. The authors have developed a way of thinking about organisations and their performance that is very relevant to local government. Topics covered include managing processes and organisations as systems, linking performance to strategy, redesigning processes, and designing a performance measurement system.

Rummler and Brache apply their systems view by discussing the interdependence of nine performance variables shown in the diagram below.

the 9 performance variables

The levels of performance and the performance needs are described:

  • Organisation level – the organisational strategy, goals, and organisational structure.
  • Process level – how work flows across functions in the organisational structure.
  • Job/performer level – the people doing the work in processes.
  • Goals – the customer’s expectations of service quality, quantity, timeliness or cost, etc.
  • Design – of the organisation, processes and jobs to achieve the goals.
  • Management – the practices in place to ensure goals are current and being achieved.

It is a simple and powerful way to think about organisations vertically and horizontally. In a diverse organisation like local government, understanding the performance variables is critical to improving cross-functional services and reducing the ‘silo effect’ in which functional goals are put ahead of the goals of processes that deliver services to customers.  Read it if you are interested in cross functional processes and improving service delivery.

4. The Leaders Handbook by Peter R. Scholtes. Published in 1998, this book is also a serious management text. Written in an engaging way with lots of diagrams and case studies to illustrate points, it is accessible and easily read. So, don’t be put off. For someone who believes in systems thinking, it contains gems, such as this one below written in the context of performance appraisal and why Scholtes believes it isn’t effective;

“Successful work requires having a consistent and reliable set of systems, processes, and methods by which you and your people design, develop, and deliver what the customers need when and how the customers need it. Systems are created, sustained, and improved by insightful and interactive work on the system, not by using carrots and sticks. Measurable goals do not improve systems. Improving systems improves systems (p.303).”

Chapters cover a wide range of topics including, systems thinking; giving meaning, purpose, direction and focus to work; leading by asking good questions; and performance without appraisal. It is clear that Scholtes (a colleague of W. Edwards Deming) values systems and statistical thinking, relations with people, and learning to master improvement. He sees organisations as ‘complex systems of social networks and technical processes in which simplistic approaches will not help resolve complex problems’. He identifies 6 leadership competencies:

  1. Systems thinking – understanding the difference between systems and structure or policy; and seeking systemic causes, not culprits.
  2. Variability at work – knowing the difference between common cause and special causes of variation.
  3. Learning – understanding when a statement is theory or opinion versus fact, and acting accordingly; and knowing the difference between change and improvement.
  4. Psychology and human behaviour – understanding and applying the concepts of internal versus external motivation and demotivation.
  5. Interactions – seeing the interdependencies between systems thinking, variation, learning and human behaviour.
  6. Vision, meaning, direction and focus – providing clarity of purpose and developing and continuously communicating a clear sense of direction and focus.

Scholtes sets out a new paradigm for leadership for complex socio-technical systems.  Local government, with its political and organisational challenges, is nothing if not complex (as discussed in post 3).

I challenge you to read these books and then decide whether you think about your organisation as a system and if it is really focussed on creating public value by fulfilling customer-defined purpose through effective and efficient processes where variation is understood and performance is measured.

Lancing Farrell

13 – Salvation, obfuscation or simply tokenistic? What roles do policies and strategies play in your organisation?

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I was talking to a colleague whose Manager has recently joined Victorian local government for the first time, to understand her initial impressions. He said that she had commented on the large number of policies and strategies, and whether they could possibly be effective given the difficulties coordinating them and avoiding conflicts. It started me thinking.

When I first started working in local government we had policies and strategies. They were important documents that guided action. We didn’t have many and they weren’t changed without very good reason. Making a new one or changing an existing one, wasn’t a regular way forward on issues. That has certainly changed. Today, policy fills a number of roles, one of which is still to guide action. The other roles are worth some brief reflection.

Policy and strategies have increasingly become a source of salvation for CEO’s and senior managers faced with elected representatives wanting to pursue political goals that are unpopular, unaffordable, unachievable or unnecessary. It can be a way of saving politicians from themselves. Rather than committing to action on the initiative, a process to develop a policy or plan is commenced to ‘map the way ahead’. The fact that it often doesn’t lead to movement anywhere seems to go unnoticed. The last time I completed a stock take of strategies it revealed that the majority of actions hadn’t been acted on (in some cases after 20 years, although the strategy was still live) and the actions were not implemented for very good reasons. They just weren’t a good idea.

In fact doing the stock take revealed that the review schedule for policies and strategies was logistically unachievable without significant extra resources. If you look at the number of policies you have, the scheduled review interval (typically 3 to 5 years for policies and 5 to 10 years for strategies), and do the maths, you will realise that the organisation can’t actually do it without stopping delivering services to re-allocate the required resources to policy and strategy review.

Policy and strategies have also become a way to obfuscate. Instead of acting on an issue that has an obvious but difficult or expensive solution, a policy or strategy is created that hides the real significance of the issue and provides and easy, cheap and ineffective ‘way forward’. I have heard officers talking about policies or strategies that have been implemented and had no effect. The outcomes are still the same. Surprise, surprise. Sometimes the creation of policy or strategy that has this effect is not intentional– it has become almost innate and part of the modus operandi of some senior people.

One of my ‘favourite’ examples of strategies is one that deliberately failed to specifically address a critical and contentious issue. When I questioned the officer responsible for developing the strategy, he said that it was a deliberate decision on his part. Because he believed consensus was not possible and this would have delayed agreement to the strategy, he left it ambiguous so that it could be ‘sorted out later’. The ‘later’ happened to be when I became involved and there was a budget for works and no clarity about what to do. Thanks. He was a senior policy officer and it was his standard approach.

Policies and strategies have become increasingly tokenistic. In a recent post on the Pannell Discussions, the topic of ‘tokenistic policies’ was discussed. The focus was on government actions that are tokenistic, and as a consequence, unlikely to make a real difference. David Pannell asked, ‘why do governments do this, and how do they get away with it without provoking public anger?’ These are good questions and they apply to local government as much as any other level of government in Australia. I have seen policies that everyone knows are infeasible but it solves an immediate political issue in a way that minimises any future organisational commitment.

Pannell suggests two reasons for tokenistic policy. The first is to be seen to be doing something, even though they know that is unlikely to be successful. This is better to be seen to be doing nothing. His second reason is ignorance. People think it is a good idea and they don’t have the technical knowledge to know that is poor policy and will achieve little. His most interesting commentary is in relation to how governments get away with it. He cites four reasons:

  • Complexity – even experts would have trouble working out an effective policy response and most people can’t judge whether or not it is good policy and they end up trusting that the government is doing what it says it is.
  • Time lags – the effects of the policy won’t be known for some years, and by then it is hard to connect the results to the policy.
  • Intractability – some problems can only be solved at exorbitant expense or not at all. Implementing a low cost policy limits the waste of resources.
  • Communication challenges – it is just too hard to discuss the issues in terms that most people will comprehend.

I am not suggesting that all local governments are creating policies and strategies that are simply convenient but ineffective solutions to difficult problems; devices to avoid doing something that everyone knows should be done; or simply a way to be seen to be doing something with no intention of it being effective. However, there are occasions when they obviously do.

I suppose, we all need to ask ourselves the question.

Colin Weatherby

Pannell Discussions, http://www.pannelldiscussions.net/2014/10/274-tokenistic-policies

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

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.