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’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 [...]
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, [...]
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 is what the Minister wants – that’s the business case”. I wish I had a dollar for every time a senior public servant has said that to me. It is almost invariably provided as the explanation as to why the project they are directing doesn’t have a business case. It is also almost [...]
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 [...]
Last month I wrote about one critical feature of the PRINCE2® 2017 update – tailoring, and specifically the fact that if you aren’t tailoring PRINCE2 you aren’t using PRINCE2. My blog really seemed to resonate with people, and I received feedback that many of you working in Canberra departments and agencies feel they are [...]
