Are you doing the right things at the right time? Could you be doing things better? Is your initiative on-track and meeting expectations? Where should you focus effort when time is short? These are common questions for even the most experienced manager. However, they are hard to answer objectively when you’re in the thick [...]
So, what keeps you awake at night? This is a regular introductory question in meetings with clients across Canberra. The more that governments demand “more with less” of the APS, the greater the pressure and stress on everyone involved in policy development and implementation. Recent academic research has highlighted the impact of this “more [...]
Here at Tanner James, I was recently talking to a participant on one of our PRINCE2 training courses – they are working on a nationwide project which involves a complex mix of disciplines including legal, medical, education and training. The leader of this initiative (let’s call her Sharon) has oversight of a project budget [...]
Late last year I wrote a blog about a simple way to double the transformation and implementation capacity of the APS overnight. I would now like to offer another way to dramatically increase productivity – by never having any meetings on your project. Meetings defined A quick Google search gave me the following definitions: [...]
A recent survey of over 800 state and federal employees recently conducted by Professor Peter Shergold and highlighted by The Mandarin suggested that nearly three-quarters of public servants believe the public service is too hierarchical. I agree. There is a very simple way to translate this disquiet into a dramatic increase in management capacity [...]
I believe there was a lot of good stuff in the 2016 report “Learning from Failure” by Professor Peter Shergold AC. But that was two years ago, so everyone has moved on from then, right? I sincerely hope not. In his review Professor Shergold identified 10 key lessons to be learned, the first one [...]
I was running a client briefing recently, and something wonderful happened: an unstructured conversation broke out, and I was left standing in the corner as a spectator. I abandoned the remainder of the briefing slides, and joined the conversation where I thought I could contribute. Afterwards I reflected that this should be the norm, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
