Lack of Organisation is a Waste of Time and Money

By Stephen Vinall of PIPC

The Times, 19June 2009

We have witnessed a period of year-on-year increases in budgets across the public sector. With this trend now set to reverse there will be demands for projects and programmes to be slashed to save money. Such cuts are often seen as the simplest way to remove big numbers from budgets fast. But is this the right answer?

Improvements in public services are often the result of successful projects and programmes of change. They are demanded by an expectant public and instigated by governments keen to win over the electorate.

Calls for change do not fade easily from the political agenda. So, we have constrained budgets on one hand, demand for change on the other. In this equation something has to give. The public sector needs to examine how it can deliver change better.

Although we can point to some improvements in the way change is now delivered in the public sector, there are still too many examples of public sector programmes failing to deliver the anticipated benefits.

But the public sector is not the only one. PIPC's latest global survey on project management shows that in the private sector, a staggering 50 per cent of projects also fail to deliver the promised results. The difference is that the best private companies have used the preceding years of plenty to invest in change practices designed with efficiencies in mind. Conversely, over the same period, many “‘improvements” in public service delivery have simply been a result of increased resources - which looks great to the customer, but isn't sustainable when the organisation needs to adapt to decreasing budgets.

Public sector organisations need to accept the need to adapt services so that they are better designed for their customers, rather than seeing change as an inconvenience that distracts them from doing their day job. They need to structure themselves to manage constant change and realise that everyone has responsibility for making change happen and for embedding it into the day to day business. That means putting change into job descriptions and into objectives - it has to be embedded in the culture. Everyone in the organisation should understand how their work is either delivering or improving services to the public.

This, together with a clear focus on more strategic commissioning, will lead to the services that the public expects. Organisations need to start by listening to their customers' needs, designing a strategy that will meet those needs, then ensuring the business is enabled to deliver the right outcomes. They must incorporate the outcomes of the change process into an improved business as usual way of working and be able to measure the difference.

It sounds simple, but the public sector is not structured to do this well. Cue headlines on misaligned programmes under-delivering while their costs spiral. This is not always the case and there are success stories, but until public sector organisations organise themselves to deliver the improvement that their customers demand, they will continue to waste resources and disappoint rather than innovate and impress.