Tag Archives: performance

293 – IT investment: Dangerous Enthusiasm or Due Diligence? Use evidence to decide.

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2200 words (20 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

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Credit: ChatGPT

In a nutshell…

This post explores the risks and pitfalls associated with large-scale IT investments in local government. It argues that councils often rely on technology and automation to fix financial deficits or service inefficiencies without first optimising their underlying processes. Drawing on expert theories, the post suggests that these ambitious projects frequently over-promise and under-deliver by ignoring the complexities of human-technical systems. To avoid failure, Parkinson recommends that leaders adopt a skeptical mindset, demand evidence-based service studies, and implement incremental project stages. Ultimately, Parkinson emphasizes that improving service design from a resident’s perspective is more effective than simply digitising outdated methods.

Introduction

“I voted for the IT project because the business case promised the budget would balance by year four. But no one told us what we’d do if the savings didn’t arrive. In the end, we automated our inefficient services instead of fixing them. It has now cost us more money than we have saved!

We should have demanded a service study to improve services first, limited the project scope, put a ‘kill-switch’ in place, and made sure the CEO had an effective early warning system in place for failure.”  

Councillor

The lesson?

Big IT doesn’t fix services; it just automates them. You can make governance improvements to reduce the odds of an expensive disappointment.

Why councils are betting on IT

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292 – Check–Plan–Do or Plan–Do–Hope?

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600 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

When reading local government plans, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Secret (2006) was a management manual: “ask, believe, and receive”. It is hard to see how some councils think they will make a difference from the way they plan.

To be fair, I agree that councils usually aren’t intentionally stupid or reckless. They’re juggling rate caps, grant uncertainty, ageing assets, and a community that wants more of everything. They are under pressure, and when it comes to their long-term plan, the temptation is to plug the spreadsheet gaps with “efficiency dividends” and “future asset sales” and hope it all works out.

But that doesn’t make it strategic. I call it Plan–Do–Hope.

Council plans

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290 – The Capability Trap: How Budget Cuts Damage Councils Long Before Anyone Notices.

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3100 words (15 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

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Credit: ChatGPT

Summary

  • Councils under rate caps are being pushed into a capability trap: cutting investment in how work is done, while demanding the same (or more) output.
  • Doing more with less works for a while, then it quietly destroys the ability to deliver safe, reliable services.
  • Escaping the trap means shifting from “work harder” to “work smarter” – investing in process capability, not just pushing people to do more.
  • This piece explains the trap in plain language and offers advice to avoid it.

Introduction

After ten years of “doing more with less”, many council roads managers describe their world like this:

“Today, I barely recognise our roads program. Every budget cycle we cop another efficiency dividend, another round of ‘temporary’ cuts to inspections, reseals, heavy patches and drainage repairs. On paper the program still looks coherent thanks to some clever rephasing and optimistic assumptions, but out on the network the cracks are literal.

We’ve gone from renewing assets at the right time to stretching them well past their use-by date. Crews that used to do planned maintenance now spend most of their time chasing potholes and complaints. We’ve sweated the plant so hard that breakdowns are normal, and cut training and supervision to the point where we’re relying on a few old hands to hold everything together.

What hurts most is knowing this was avoidable. Every ‘saving’ we booked was borrowed against the future condition of the network. We’ve lost capability in quiet ways – trainees we didn’t take on, engineers who left and weren’t replaced, inspectors who no longer have time to inspect, relationships with contractors hollowed out by always taking the lowest price.

The community still expects the same level of service, but we’re no longer set up to deliver it. We’ve traded investment in capability for short-term budget wins, and now the bill is arriving as risk, backlog and a network that’s deteriorating faster than we can look after it.”

This isn’t a story about lazy workers or bad managers. It’s what it looks like when a council slides into what Repenning and Sterman call the capability trap – without realising it.

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288 – Want to improve performance? – ask your local footy club.

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300 words (2 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

Podcast option:

We are just over halfway through the 2025 AFL season (the major league playing Australian rules football). The premiership contenders are starting to appear.

I figure it is a good time to recap on the AFL-themed posts that have been posted on this site.

First cab off the rank was Tim Whistler with a tongue in cheek look at what it would be like if football was run like local government (and visa versa). Sometimes humour exposes something we otherwise fail to see. The post featured a guest appearance and commentary from Captain Council, our very own council super hero.

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287 – The council goal posts

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550 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

Credit

Lancing has highlighted a key problem with many council services. I used to call it the ‘lowest common denominator effect’ (i.e. performance gets reduced to the lowest level tolerated) but I think the Taguchi Loss Function makes the point in a way that helps you to fix the problem.

Imagine that the diagram Lancing used to show the target value that a customer or citizen wants as fitting between two ‘goal posts’, to instead show a set of Australian Rules football goals. For those non-Australians, I have helped you imagine that with the diagram below.

If you aren’t aren’t familiar with Australian Rules football, when the ball is kicked between the two centre posts it is a goal and scores 6 points. If it is kicked between a centre post and the post either side, it is called a behind and scores 1 point. If the ball is kicked outside all the goal posts it is out of bounds on the full and there is no score and the opposition gets to kick the ball back into play.

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285 – Our first podcast: Challenges, solutions and future directions in local government.

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1800 words (18 minutes reading and/or 20 minutes listening) by Colin Weatherby

I recently found out about Notebooklm and asked it to analyse the entire Local Government Utopia website and answer a set of questions about challenges, solutions and future directions for councils.

The question and answer is below. First, a bit about Notebooklm.

Notebooklm

Notebooklm is a new AI product that takes a specific source or sources nominated by you and provides a summary, or answers to questions you ask about the source or sources that you have uploaded. I loaded the URL for localgovernmentutopia.com but could have loaded pdfs or other types of sources (or combinations of sources). You can load up to 50 different sources with a maximum of 500,000 words.

The person who told me about it had uploaded a manual for their camera as a source and then asked how to change the camera battery. Instead of leafing through a massive pdf manual online, Notebooklm explained how to change the battery with a link directly to the relevant section in the manual!

It also produces podcasts, primarily to help listeners understand complicated topics by hearing a discussion between two people about the source or sources. I was interested in this feature, so I had a go!

Podcast

I asked Notebooklm to make a podcast addressing this question using the Local Government Utopia website as a source:

“What does Local Government Utopia say about what a local government putting the wellbeing of its constituents first looks like; what issues are important and currently not acknowledged in local government; what are current research or policy gaps in local government; any thoughts around recent Commonwealth or Victorian parliamentary inquiries into local government; and finally, what thoughts are there on where public policy might be able to make a meaningful contribution.“

Here is the podcast.

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284 – The Public Service Chain Reaction.

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1700 words (18 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

The Deming chain reaction

Tim Whistler cuts straight to the chase. In the case of his latest piece, I think he could do with a little nuancing of what he is proposing. His description of the disruption to ensue if councils can’t manage their finances with a rate cap is probably accurate, but also, avoidable.

I have been talking to executives at councils and it is true that they are grappling with defining and agreeing on what they need to do. Everyone involved in leadership seems to be pulling in a different direction – Finance wants direct funding cuts to balance budgets now; Directors want efficiency drives to fit services into budgets as soon as possible; Councillors want to cut services they think the State should provide and avoid electoral backlash when they stand for re-election in 2028. It is a vicious cycle.

I have a more immediate approach, which neatly fits with Whistler’s focus on infrastructure as the big service, allocating capital first, and, most importantly, reducing expenditure where you should, not just where you think you can.

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283 – Celebrating 10 years

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Lancing Farrell

117 – ‘Captain Council’. A local government superhero, posted on June 15, 2015

Local Government Utopia is 10 years old.

Yes! Our birthday was in January this year. We have been too busy writing to reflect on what 10 years of commentary on local government might contain. I have looked at the very first post and what we set out to do. I think we have been true to our aim.

See what you think…

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282 – An elegy for local government

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350 words (3 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

Professor Joseph Drew has produced his annual analysis of local government expenditure in NSW. He has also looked at the reasons for the latest large rate increases being sought by councils. Professor Drew gives his usual clear and calm description of the findings.

I think his videos have become an elegy for local government.

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279 – ‘Guerilla volunteering’ – a response to risk aversion and red tape?

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1200 words (12 minutes reading) by Colin Weatherby

A recent article in the Melbourne Age by Alan Attwood, entitled ‘Red tape’s strangling volunteering – creating more casualties than you’d think’, is timely in drawing attention to a growing problem in Victorian local government. Risk aversion and red tape are making it difficult for people to volunteer in their own community or even get a job at their council. This focus on playing safe seems to be counterproductive.

As Sidney Dekker and Georgina Poole point out succinctly in ‘Random Noise – Measuring Your Company’s Safety Performance‘, most organisations don’t exist simply to be safe; they exist to provide a product or service. It is unfortunate that many councils seem to be starting to think otherwise. Dekker uses the term ‘safety theatre’ to describe the superficial and often misleading efforts that organisations put into safety. I can’t help thinking that some of the risk management red tape making volunteering more difficult fits that description.

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