As most of you know, an Independent Review of the Australian Public Service (APS) is underway. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 31 July 2018 (if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to contribute here). The review will report in the first half of 2019. The scope of the review [...]
It’s the end of the financial year. Phew. Public and private sector employees alike have all been very busy rushing to get everything done. There will, at least for some of you, be a brief sense of a slowed pace for July. And then the rush will begin again. Before you dive in, here [...]
I’ll cut straight to the point here: the way Federal government departments and agencies implement policy and reform isn’t good enough. Well-intentioned public servants operating in entrenched bureaucratic structures and traditional ways of working is failing the taxpayer. It is high time we had a serious crack at doing things differently. Does the APS [...]
On 19th March the APS review shared its interim findings in the report Priorities for Change*. Aside from the findings, which have drawn out the usual bunch of Canberra has-beens and naysayers, the report says“…regardless of the richness of ideas about what needs to happen to prepare the APS for the future, making it [...]
On Tuesday 8th May 2018 the Federal Budget will be delivered. It will be totally transformed, a budget like no other you have seen before. The delivery will change, the structure will change, the content will change and the impact on departments and agencies from 1 July 2018 will represent a seismic shift in [...]
Last month I wrote a blog alluding to the treatment of benefits as a side order. I spoke about how some individuals and companies seem to want to make benefits management a black art, and advocated the need to go back to benefits basics. To me the most important of these basics is to: [...]
“Hello, welcome to the ICT area, may I take your order please?” “Hi there, I’d like a large digital transformation, with big data, plenty of agile, and I want it now” “Would you like some Benefits with that?” “Errr, sure, why not – get someone to cook them up and put them in a [...]
This blog won’t be for everyone. If you’re not on a government project, it won’t be for you. And if you’re working on, or responsible for, a government project that is a raging success, it probably isn’t for you either. Everyone else can read on. What I’m going to do is describe a hypothetical [...]
Digital transformation is great. The world is being disrupted. All the best companies are cool, they were only founded in the last few years, and don’t sell actual products. Social media equals success. The pace of change will only get faster. These are the messages coming from the Prime Minister down, and we’re lapping [...]
“If we have been using MSP® and PRINCE2® in the public service for a while now, why aren’t we getting better at programme and project management?” That was the question out to me by an agency head recently. It’s a great question, and one I thought worth exploring. Are we getting better? My gut-feeling, [...]
