Tag Archives: measurement

273 – Can councils learn from the local football club?

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1300 words (14 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

 Great Coach 2.0

Some time ago I wrote a post about council performance measurement being like a dashboard on a car. I used the image of a dashboard like the one on my 1962 Morris Mini to keep it very simple. I noted that the car dashboard had evolved over many years and been refined to be a distillation of information to the minimum required for a driver to be in control of their car. It didn’t tell the driver where they were going or if they were on track to get there. I was hoping it would be an example councils could follow. Lately, I have turned my attention to sport.

Australian rules football and statistics

It is football season in Australia, and I was reading about how footy clubs, professional and amateur, are using data and statistics to measure and improve their performance. It started me thinking. Every council in Australia must have a local footy club. Perhaps they can learn something from them?

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248 – Some recycling.

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700 words (8 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell with ChatGPT

In the best traditions of blogging, I have started recycling some early posts. To add value I have asked ChatGPT to analyse three posts (Post 103 – Classic paper – ‘Managing Government, Governing Management’ by Henry Mintzberg, Post 229 – Coronavirus and local government – time for a new O/S?, and Post 231 – A New City O/S – Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman) and re-write them as one post.

Mintzberg challenges traditional perspectives on government organization and management, Goldsmith & Kleiman’s book complements Mintzberg by proposing a comprehensive transformation of local government operations. Both identify the need for flexibility and adaptability in addressing the challenges of governance.

Here is the ChatGPT analysis.

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231 – A New City O/S – Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman.

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875 words (4 minutes reading time)                                                               by Lancing Farrell

distributed network

I have also been reading Goldsmith and Klein’s book ‘A New City O/S. It is a very interesting treatise on a potential future model for local government, particularly the argument for distributed governance. As Colin Weatherby has described, it is a researched and expert work.

I found the concept of distributed governance quite interesting. In some ways, all councils already operate using a version of this model for some services. Typically, this would be in community services where the council, State and not-for-profit organisations often combine to provide a facility, grant funding, and the actual delivery of the service. I think it would be a big challenge for many councils to adopt distributed governance across all services because of the loss of control. 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 →