Clear goals and cross-agency working

How do we get government organisations to work together effectively in pursuit of broad governmental goals? This is one of the major challenges of governing and, of course, not a new one. The US Government has announced its Clear Goals initiative which sets out a series of cross-agency goals - fourteen in fact - which seek to drive improvements in governmental performance. The goals range from energy efficiency through to the cybersecurity and sustainability.

I'll be visiting Washington DC in April-May with colleagues as part of the Strengthening the Performance Framework project we are undertaking with the Australian Public Service Commission and will have the chance to talk with people about how these cross-agency goals trickle down into individual agencies, and then into the performance management of individuals and groups.

The practitioner and scholarly literature is full of stories of the complexity of doing this in practice; of how the goals of the agencies tend to take priority, especially where what we have called the supporting architecture of the public sector system reinforces such behaviour (see my article with colleagues You Win Some, You Lose Some which reports on attempts to engender inter-agency collaboration in the Australian context). Having clear goals, a common purpose, or a shared mission is critical to enacting cross-agency working; however failure to address the systemic barriers that other aspects of government systems and structures embed can lead to an inability to deliver on the broader goals of government.

Such issues will be central to the new book I am working on for Routledge titled Crossing Boundaries in Public Management and Policy. This will bring together authors from across the world on the to address the theory and practice of working across boundaries.

Joining-up: Experiences from the US and Australia

One of the great highlights of 2011 was the chance to work with G. Edward DeSeve, former special advisor to President Barack Obama and Adviser to Vice President Biden. Ed oversaw the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which involved spending near to US$800 billion to stimulate the US economy. Ed has written of his experience in a great report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government and you can download it for free here.

Ed spoke with a group of senior public servants from the Australian Public Service in a Crawford Inaugural Masterclass about how he used a network approach to deliver public value and how he managed the oversight of spending through an innovative web-based model. You can see this in action at recovery.gov where every dollar spent, every grant made is able to be tracked.

I spoke about Australian experiments with joined-up government, largely based on the large research project I have been involved with, and reflecting particular on a recent publication on the success and failure of this in relation to Indigenous Coordination Centres which was published in 2011 in the International Journal of Public Administration,  and available from my webpage here.

In addition to learning about the various aspects of his role and his deep and rich experience in serving in several administrations in the US, one of the favourite stories of the day for the participants was Ed's sparring with the satirist Stephen Colbert. A quick summary is here and Colbert's site has video.

This was the first of a series of of Masterclasses that will run at the Crawford School via the Australian National Institute of Public Policy. The next one that I will be involved in will be on Capability Reviews in the Australian Public Service later in 2012.

Rethinking Public Service Delivery

The big news for 2012 is that the book that I have co-authored with John Alford from the University of Melbourne and the Australia and New Zealand School of Government will be published by Palgrave in May.

Rethinking Public Service Delivery: Managing with External Providers considers how government organisations work with external providers in service delivery and covers the full range of contributors (from clients, volunteers and regulatees through to private, non-profit and other government organisations) and the various modes of engagement (from collaboration and contracts through to co-production).

Many books on public service delivery tend to focus on a single aspect - collaboration or contracts, or working with a specific type of provider, but in our work we have covered a greater range of these providers, developed a contingency framework to guide how and when to engage, and set out the organisational capabilities needed to manage a portfolio of providers. This, we argue, is on the of greatest challenges for 21st century public managers - how to manage the full portfolio of providers simultaneously in pursuit of organisational and governmental goals.

We've had great feedback on the book and are looking forward to finally having it in print.

Performance Management in the Australian Public Service: Designing a High Performance System

Managing performance is one of the most challenging, yet necessary parts of effective public management. As part of the Ahead of the Game Blueprint for Reform of the Australian Public Service there is a commitment to strengthening the performance framework. To do this the Australian Public Service Commission has created a research partnership which involves a group of academics spanning three universities. The team includes Deborah Blackman and Fiona Buick from University of Canberra, Michael O'Donnell and the University of New South Wales and myself from the Australian National University.

This is an exciting project where we will get to work collaboratively with the APSC to look at what is happening around the world in terms of high performance systems, do some local experimentation, and then devise the principles for the new framework for the Australian Public Service. The potential of high performance systems is well known, but so are all the of problems, challenges and barriers to actually doing this in practice, so this is a challenging project, but also one that can potentially provide great payoffs for the APS. As we progress through the project I'll be setting out some of the findings.

Relaunch!

It's been two years since my last post, but I have decided to try again and get blogging about public management issues in Australia and around the world, as they develop.

A colleague of mine suggested asking others to post and this is, I think, a great idea.

So as October develops expect some stories about what is happening in public management circles in Australia. Also some thoughts on a couple of big projects about to begin.

Questions are also encouraged as a way to start some debate so send them through if you have them.

All the best,

Janine

Reform and the Role of Public Managers

This morning I participated in a seminar with several schools in the PolicyNet group. At some stage the visual of the seminar will end up here for those interested. Schools from Japan, China, Singapore, Canada participated so we had a great mix. Our local moderator was one of my star students Adeline Kooi and she did a terrific job as well as having some of the most challenging questions of the day.!

I started off with a short lecture explaining public managers and public management, setting out the eras/generations of reform, pointing to the current challenges facing public managers, and the emerging contenders for the "next big thing". It was a great chance to test out some of these ideas, and engage with students from across the globe on how these ideas resonate in their specific contexts. Nothing like several rooms full of bright students to keep you on your toes!!

Participants had some thought-provoking and insightful questions which got to the core of enduring debates in the field: what is the proper role of public managers? where is, or should be, the line of separation between politics and administration? how do we make reform and change "stick"? how do we overcome resistance to change? what tools can public managers use to gauge what the community wants? how does this approach fit into a developing country context? when does the backlash come to spur fundamental reform and what are the critical transition points? how do public managers balance competing demands from political and community domains? what happens when they get stuck between levels of government?

At the end of our two-hour session we had covered lots of ground and I was pleased to get such a great range of questions. These have take me back again to this enduring issue of politics and management - who does what, when, what is the proper role and so on. I am gearing up for a session in a few weeks an the Third Annual ANU Leadership Workshop where I will talk in some detail about these issues in an ethical context.

On 18 September I acted as MC at the Crawford School Alumni and Friends Dinner. It was a great chance to meet some past students and hear from Kim Beazley on current issues in politics (under Chatham House rules sorry!). Beazley has a long history in Australian politics and he took up the role of Chancellor of the ANU earlier this year. A couple of days prior to the event it was no surprise when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced Beazley would be the next Australian Ambassador to the United States.

Alongside Beazley, newly retired Liberal Brendan Nelson has also been fingered for a diplomatic post. Nelson will take up the role of Australian Ambassador to the European Union. It is an interesting fact that Rudd defeated Nelson's coalition at the 2007 election and that he beat Beazley in a leadership battle within the Australian Labor Party.

Picture (L to R): Michael Costello, Kim Beazley, Ian Buchanan and Graham Bradley.