A Public Service Manager speaks out

A compelling guest blog from an anonymous public service manager at Public Address. It is a must read for those who do not understand the culture of the public service. Some extracts:

On top of that, we’ve seen lots of Head Office bloat in the last few years. Rooms of endless meetings going on and on about “Vision” and “Strategy” … interesting how the best private sector firms don’t stuff around with all that. I have a feeling that we felt a bit inadequate because we didn’t have all the things that CEOs in big private businesses get to play with – you know, HR strategies and Corporate Compliance units. We just had a thing called The Law, which we have to carry out.

I saw this thing in a book once about how people in the institutional banks in the UK used to get posted if they weren’t doing too well: FILTHK (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong). I have to wonder if people who fail in the private sector sometimes end up being posted to Wellington (and it is a noticeably Wellington issue…). To be clear, I don’t think these people are malicious or stupid. I just think they are, well, a bit distant from reality. They’ve started to believe the management books and “Best Practice” guides.

It is a culture issue. Wellington has a very peculiar culture in terms of workplaces – very very risk averse.

Another good example is all the law around careful management of public money. Great intentions, but combined with a culture that says “the auditor is always right [and believe me, they’re not most of the time – if you can’t do, teach. And if you are really crap, become an auditor] then you end up in a situation where stupid rules are put in place so that rather than have someone take responsibility for a decision, a committee is formed and reports are written. This means there’s a thing called an ‘audit trail’ so you can completely fail to identify who stuffed up if something goes wrong.

We call it “all hold hands and make a decision”.

Decision making by committee.

I recently heard of a situation where a project was completed ahead of schedule, on time and under budget. Much of this was that the person running it didn’t bother waiting for pointless meetings and reports. Instead he just got on and did it, thereby saving the taxpayer two hundred thousand dollars. The audit report on the project flagged it as being very “high risk” in a number of areas. The best bit was the audit report was completed after the project was finished! So they knew it had worked at the time of writing! Did this guy get a medal for being pragmatic and sensible? No, he gets called in for a Stern Talking To. Will he ever try and do anything like that again? I doubt it. And we’re all poorer.

I can’t emphasise how absolutely focused the public service is on risk – to the detriment of most other things. Risk management and mitigation  is very important, but one can’t operate without risk.

Here’s one of my favourites. There was an article in a law newsletter recently that held up a case of a sacking by the IRD as a perfect example of how to get rid of a useless employee. I’m guessing they went through committees and panels to appoint him in the first place. I expect there were several people who thought he shouldn’t have been hired, but they hired him anyway, because after all they’d followed “The Process”.

Reading between the lines, when they realised he simply couldn’t do the job they started The Process of sacking him. It took three years, and then another four years in court. Eventually he lost. But this is held up as the perfect way to sack someone! If it had been the private sector he would have been out on his ear and awarded a few grand by a tribunal. On our side of the fence we spend (I’m guessing) hundreds of thousands of dollars on The Process, because the CEO (and minister) might get beaten up in the press over the payout.

Sacking someone for incompetence in the public service in near impossible. You can soend years documenting every mistake they make, and you will still have to fork out money to stop them taking a personal grievance.

When we buy stuff, there are laws to say how it must be done. These have been around for years. They were designed to reduce the cost of stuff ups. Interestingly, what they’ve done is replaced the chance of a cost blow out with a guarantee of spending far more than necessary on paperwork and “Governance”. In the private sector, a typical project budgets 15 – 30% of cost for management and administration.

In the public sector it starts at 30%. Because the rules a blindly applied, it means there’s a minimum set of paperwork for everything. These aren’t meant to be applied across the board, but woe betide you if you get caught out trying to save some money and then an Issue arises. Years of habit and cover-your-arse have developed a generation of public servants who live by meetings, committees and reports. And a bunch of auditors who NEVER say “it was pleasing to see that processes were not followed unnecessarily, thereby saving the taxpayer X million dollars”.

I think National is going to make some difference with public sector spending. But I doubt it can change the underlying culture as it is too ingrained.

Worth reading the full post.