Springtime for leadership!

The sun is beginning to feel warmer, flowers are beginning to bloom and my willow tree is laden with leaves about to burst... it's Spring! 

So as Nature wakes up again, what kind of leadership do we need this coming year? Please complete the sentence: 

A leader is someone who... 

To help your sap to rise, below is a list of response to my question "What three words sum up the kind of leadership we need for 2010?" on Linked In (and there is more on my blog here too):

• Murad Salman Mirza: persevering, invigorative, visionary 
• Mark Orr: Honesty, integrity, definition 
• Ger Bargerbos: integrity, empathy, visionary 
• Dean Fygetakes: duty, honor, country 
• Josh Chernin: imaginative, open-minded, decisive. 
• Jørgen Brøndum: determination, will, hard work (believe that is one too many, but found it relevant enough to take the risk...) 
• Trevor Durnford: Host Not Hero (This originates from a powerful article written by Mark McKergow of Solutions Focus Fame (www.sfwork.com) 
• Adrian Snook: not Gordon Brown 
• Michaela Kassar: honesty, integrity, innovation (of a longer list) 
• Abdul Rahim Hasan: lead by example 
• Phil Johnson: authenticity, service 
• Samir Sharma: creative, connected, collaborative 
• Rajib Lochan Pathak: passionate, humility, flexibility 
• Raju Swamy: country, business, productivity 
• Michel Langelier: strategic, committed, enabler 
• Rohail Alam: basics, trust, communities 
• Souri: empathy, integrity, ability 
• Wayne Patterson: responsible leaders needed 
• Gaurav Bhargava: vision, integrity, commitment 
• Sam Whitten: innovative, proactive, impressive 
• Lou Storiale: integrity, accountability, performance 
• Wallace Jackson: creativity, optimization, applicability 
• Dave Maskin: listen, learn, open to change (OK, so #3 isn't one word)... 
• Judy B. Margolis: decisive, diplomatic, wise 
• Peter B. Giblett: collaboration, brand intervention, revenue opportunities 
• Larry Ellis: humble, accountable, experienced 
• Kevin Kuhl: adaptable, humble, aware 
• Kenneth Strong: ethical, proficient, action 

(Thanks to all those people) 

So again, here we are at the beginning of Spring 2011: 

A leader is someone who.....

 

(more entries on my blog too)

Seeing David Cameron in person: an afternoon at the Treasury (Simplifying procurement)

Last Friday, I attended a meeting at the Treasury about SME procurement. It was fascinating, memorable and useful, not least because I got to see David Cameron, our Prime Minister, in person for the first time. 

This was the (first?) “SME Strategic Supplier Summit” and it was hosted by Francis Maude who is Minister for the Cabinet Office. The aim of the afternoon debate (which included about 100 representatives of small and medium sized suppliers to the government bodies, as well as press and senior members of the civil service) was to: 

• Cover what the Government is currently doing to progress SME-friendly procurement practices;
• Report back on comments received from the SME feedback facility hosted on the No10 Downing Street website;
• Seek our views on what reforms and actions the Government should be prioritising to make the marketplace more attractive to SMEs

Seated in cabaret style, the meeting began with the PM and Francis Maude entering to open up the debate and make some initial speeches. Baroness Eaton, the LGA Chairman also gave a presentation. A number of key initiatives were announced (see here, here, here and here for Government and press reports of them). Also attached is the document we were given to help seed the debate. 

The essential message from all the presentations is that the Government is thoroughly committed to making Government procurement more ‘SME friendly’. Their ambition is that around 25% of all government contracts will be with SME suppliers (although one person later questioned whether this was as a % of contracts or a % of value). 

People who read my blog will know, I have some strong opinions about procurement! (My humorous rant against the excesses of procurement, my suggestion for what makes an excellent procurement function and the need for more commercial leadership can all be accessed from those hot links.) And so, it was a real pleasure to hear about the Government’s plans to make procurement less onerous and more effective. Moreover, it was great to hear that I am not alone in my views! I was also very impressed that the Minister stayed for the whole afternoon, engaging in the table debates that occurred.

Some selected comments from Francis Maude: 

• “We will make it easier for SMEs to do business with government: that is an absolute commitment” 
• “Hold our feet to the fire to make sure we follow through on this” 
• “Demands for public services are as great if not greater than ever” 
• “This is the end of the era of big state, this is now the era of the Big Society” 

And very interestingly

• “We are not friends of the idea of framework contracts”

I am watching this space with interest and I have already subscribed to the new and free one stop shop for Government procurement (Contracts Finder). I would recommend all suppliers and buyers do likewise. I am happy to report that SMEs were involved in the development of this new service (we were told this at the event in answer to my question). 

So what now? Naturally, I am a little sceptical, although I do not doubt the verve and commitment of David Cameron and Francis Maude. I am sceptical because I have seen much of this before with the Glover report which seems to have only had marginal impact. (As a small example, I am still sometimes asked to provide paper copies of tenders when this report specifically recommended doing away with this.) 

I am also cautious in my optimism because I think there are a number of very big dilemmas the Government has to handle in driving forward on this strategy. They will need to find a way to balance: 

• The economies of scale with the desire for localism (what might be called the “Sir Philip Green factor”)
• The desire by central government to control and direct with the desire to develop bottom up solutions from SMEs and third sector suppliers
• Big business interests (who currently hold many of the cards with some very large contracts) with the small business aspirations of SMEs who want to slice the marketplace in smaller chunks
• The interests of big third sector suppliers (such as NACRO and Age UK) with small local consortia of SMEs, small charitable bodies and the whole Big Society
• Procurement professionalism with procurement centralism (and what I perceive sometimes as their ‘control freakery’)
• Single client/customer focus with a multiple stakeholder ‘whole chain procurement’ approach (see below)
• Transparency with commercial confidentiality
• Supporting and developing progressive commercial practices (such as encouraging women owned business or ones that have visionary aspirations for health and safety) with making procurement too ‘politically correct’ and insufficiently concerned with bottom line VFM for the public purse
• Suspicion with openness, (or how not to see all commercial suppliers as smooth tongued snake oil sales people and more as partners with whom to collaborate openly, even when some commercial suppliers are...)
• The prevalent idea of submitting one final bid with the (often common in the commercial world) practice of negotiation over a number of iterative conversations
• Fixed and concrete specifications with ones that recognise complexity and change such that service contracts need to allow for emergent solutions rather than ones fixed in aspic
• Due probity and essential risk management with bureaucratic and unwieldy demands
• Methods to provide assurance against corruption with the institutionalising of risk averse and Byzantine processes (I noted that David Cameron mentioned the ‘nobody got fired for buying an IBM’ factor in procurement...)

I could go on (and already this blog post is probably far too long: so thanks for reading to here!) but I will end on one thought. And this picks up on a constant theme of my blog – the need to take a whole system perspective. One point I made at the event, which Francis Maude said was a good one, was the need to involve the end user in the procurement process. I used the example of a soldier sitting for the first time in a newly procured and sparkly tank: the soldier knows immediately that it will not work as well as it should and could have done.

• How many soldiers (and, of course, many other frontline public service officers) are still never involved with a procurement process?
• How many of their insights and ideas could contribute ££ millions in savings and other improvements if they were given the opportunity?
• And indeed, how much more could be achieved if the people who will be receiving the service (the citizens, clients and customers of public services) were also given the chance to offer their ideas?

What we need is (to coin a phrase) “whole chain procurement” that brings people together to co-design and thence procure the services we all need to create a civil society: one that is creative, ambitious and fair!

Investing in the Big Society

The Big Society idea has been under scrutiny & challenge ever since it began. Most recently Liverpool City Council have withdrawn their involvement in being one of the four pilot areas for the idea. (BBC news link here). Just a day ago, the outgoing head of the Community Service Volunteers (Dame Elisabeth Hoodless) voiced her concerns about how cuts are destroying the Big Society idea (BBC news link here). 

As a consequence I have been following Lord Nat Wei's blog with interest - he is the Big Society 'Csar' who has been promoting the idea from its early beginning. This morning, I was prompted by his most recent post entitled: Local Authorities and Big Society in the Age of Austerity (link here) to respond. 

Below is what I have posted on his site - although as of now it is yet to appear: 

If the Big Society is about anything, it must be about inclusiveness and bringing people from outside the tent into the inside. In this respect, your partisan opening comment of ‘Labour’s huge deficit’ does you no favours. If anything calling it simply ‘the huge deficit’ would help to build some bridges which the Big Society idea badly needs right now. 

I do like and appreciate the Big Society concept, by the way. But I am in this debate as a critical friend as well as advocate. Politics and economics aside, if the Big Society can do anything to mitigate the public service cuts which are being made, then I support it wholeheartedly. 

Where I am very concerned is where the Big Society is being invoked, without trial, test or evaluation, as the way in which severe cuts will not really be felt. This is what is happening in Buckinghamshire at the moment where the County Council is slashing (disproportionately) the youth service budget. (See ‘Keep the spirit of Big Society alive’). As far as I can see, they are not investing in the kinds of capacity building you outline. The likelihood is that without enough structures in place, there will be less volunteering in the future, not more. 

Certainly the best public services have been engaging their citizens/customers/users/clients for some while – long before the ‘Big Society’ existed as a concept. It is certainly something I have been talking about for many years. (At this event, I talked about the evidence based citizenship: http://tinyurl.com/sureypaagm2005 and there more on my blogs at: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/empowered-citizenship.html and here in the context of income generation: http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/2009/04/thinking-about-income-generation.html) So getting the users of a service to do more while saving resources being spent is old – as old as when we began filling our own fuel tanks at filling stations, at least. 

Yes, there is a great need to get more users/citizens/customers involved in picking up the litter (to use your example – although better not to drop it in the first place!), and there are huge cultural impediments within local authorities towards doing this more (not least the risk averse culture fuelled by the ‘no win/no fee’ lawyers hanging around on street corners). But all of this will not happen by magic or by merely hoping that the invisible hand of the social market place will result in volunteers and philanthropists rushing into the vacuum left by the public service cutbacks. 

Certainly core costs can be reduced further and perhaps part time working could be a way ahead. I don’t know if any councils or other public service agencies are considering this. However, when commercial firms did this to survive the recession, as you cite, they did this as their order books were down. There was less demand on their services or products. The comparison to public services does not work in quite the same way unless you are suggesting that the police say to their public that they are going on short working so please could crimes now not be committed between the hours of 2 and 6 o’clock in the morning....? 

Partnerships are also not new. As you know most local authorities have been developing their compacts with their local third sector agencies and have been looking to extend partnership arrangements with them over many years. But to repeat... this requires investment and indeed time. The time is critical as without it trust cannot develop. As you well know, partnerships do not work without trust. Is there the time to develop further trusting partnerships now before the cutbacks begin to really bite? 

In sum, yes there is a need to be pragmatic and tenacious about making the Big Society work and I am not in the group of people who are urgently looking for it to fail (from both the right and left of the spectrum). My overriding concern is that the investments in Big Society development are not being bold or strategic enough. There is insufficient recognition that the transition to a Bigger Society and a Smaller Government is one that cannot simply happen. Shrewd investment and good local leadership will be critical

Police: who will be the leader?

There is now draft legislation to replace Police Authorities with elected Police Crime Commissioners. As we await the passage of the legislation into law, the debate is continuing about how these new PCCs will work - or indeed whether they should happen altogether. Today the Civil Service Live Network put up a debate between a past Home Secretary and a think tank Chief Exec about the pros and cons of this new policy. You can access it here. 

It is a debate that I felt moved to add my six pennyworth - here is what I wrote: 

Not being able to name the chair of local Police Authority is not a powerful argument. Not even knowing that such a body exists is perhaps more convincing. Certainly, despite their best efforts, the awareness of Police Authorities is still very low amongst the general public. But there again, how many citizens really understand how all public services join up and are governed? 

Quoting the research about public satisfaction with the police is not best placed since that has far more to do with how members of the public feel treated by police officers & staff (sadly) following a crime that it does about concerns about the setting of overall priorities. 

The gap between reality (crime has been going down significantly in recent years) and perception (fear of crime & antisocial behaviour is still high) is notable. I ran my own one person campaign to get fear of crime included in the responsibilities of the local Crime & Disorder partnership legislation (1998) but failed. I do wonder, had it been in there whether things would be different now? 

The gap is down to many factors not least the media coverage of crimes, the doubt over 'statistics' (lies, damned lies etc) and the ability of many in and involved with the police to really 'connect' with the public. PCSOs have been doing a remarkable job here and local PC led neighbourhood teams have been making real inroads. But, how many of these structures will survive austerity measures is yet to be seen. I do worry that expectations on these new PCC's will be so high whilst at the same time front line services will be cut back (there is only so much money to be saved by reducing the IT department to one person and an electronic dog) - that a perfect storm will be created. And in this storm, the perpetrators of antisocial behaviour and broad acquisitive crime will have a field day. Crime and fear of crime will rise together. I hope not, of course, but the omens are not good. 

But on the other hand, over the years I have been working with the police as an independent adviser / coach / facilitator - I have seen the police HQ car parks grow and grow... 

I don't think the last Government 'chickened out' - I think they ran out of legislative time. By the same token, one could argue that this Government has chickened out of a national restructuring and moving away from 43 independent police forces in E&W. Interestingly though - Scotland and possibly Wales are moving towards whole country forces in each case. 

It is vital "that local people had a real say over the policing in their area" but I am just not sure that PCCs alone will be the answer. They may be part of the answer - but on their own - almost certainly not. I speak as someone who has lived and worked in the Thames Valley Police for nearly all of my adult life. It is a very large patch which extends from Milton Keynes to Witney to Reading to Slough to Eton and so forth. The idea that all these geographically (and otherwise) diverse communities could all feel represented by a single person is a stretch of the imagination. What will be critical, assuming the draft legislation becomes law, will be to elect a person who has a very clear and convincing plan for how to 'stay in touch' with the broad sweep of the area. I can only hope that the preferential voting system that the Government is proposing to use for electing these PCCs will be able to ensure that the best possible people - politically and otherwise - become the new PCCs. I also hope that the rigour of scrutiny and challenge that must happen as part of the selection processes and subsequent campaigns of all the candidates will tease out the wheat from the chaff (ie the really committed, knowledgeable and citizen focused people from the 'place people' that the central political parties may try to parachute in).

Once these people are in place - yes there will be some very tricky issues around governance and relationship with the Chief Constables to resolve. On its own, I don't think that is an argument against having the new PCCs. However it is an argument for some very clear thinking about roles and boundaries before the PCCs are elected. Perhaps some simulations, thought experiments and the like would not go amiss. This is not wholly new terrain since PAs have had the lead responsibility for Best Value while the CC is operationally independent. It was never really tested when (say) the PA decided the 'Dogs Section' should be closed down on BV grounds while the CC said that it was an operational matter over which he/she had complete autonomy. This was never tested. 

So it is a big debate - which will only kick into gear when / if the legislation is passed into statute. When that happens, I hope that Civil Service World will host more debates like this (on and offline) to flesh out just how this new leadership role will operate in the context of 150+ years of policing. 

Debate: Elected police and crime commissioners

http://network.civilservicelive.com/pg/pages/view/535437/ 

I am left pondering on how the new PCCs (assuming it becomes law) will impact upon leadership in the police service - not just at the chief officer level but also throughout the organisation.

Original blog post

 

Transparency: or is that transpocracy, transporency, transpruriency or transapparency?

I write as a tax payer and a citizen who wants a world which is more ambitious, creative and fair. I also write as someone who has been working in and around public service organisations for the last 30 years as a civil servant, an adviser, a challenger, a listener and facilitator. I would like to talk about my hopes for what transparency should lead towards. I also have a couple of fears too. 

It is my earnest hope that these new transparency arrangements will mean that citizens and taxpayers become more confident that their money is being spent wisely on the projects and services that make a difference. In other words that there will be a greater sense of ownership and accountability about what councils, central government departments etc. do and achieve. To coin a phrase, that we will have ‘transpocracy’ – where transparency is adding to (and not subtracting from) democracy.  

I also hope that we get ‘transporency’ too, such that the information that is published under the transparency guidelines seeds ideas, actions and initiatives by all concerned (politicians, providers, service users and media observers) that helps all to build the Big Society that our government is committed to developing. I believe we already have a big (hearted) society where everyday millions of people do something for a friend, neighbour or family member. But we can have an even bigger society if transparency helps a thousand flowers bloom.

I am concerned though that all this transparency could feed a growing number of cynical armchair voyeurs. To coin another word – I fear we may be at risk of creating ‘transpruriency’ where a legion of self proclaimed ‘auditors’ and ‘researchers’ are only interested in the costs of public services and not in their value. 

In my more cynical moments, I also fear that the sheer volume of the data which is being published and the ways it is being uploaded onto the internet will bamboozle & overload far more than it will enlighten and inform. In other words (and this is my final ‘new’ word) that we will get a great deal of ‘transapparency’ where a semblance of transparency is created but which is actually nothing of the kind. There will be a lot of ‘sound and fury signifying nothing’. 

So, how can we ensure that we get plenty of transpocracy and transporency, whilst ensuring that we keep transpruriency and transapparency in check? For me there is a simple one word answer to this question: strategy. 

In this context, I speak as an organisation development and change facilitator who has seen lots of public services lurch into policy implementation without considering what they want to achieve other than baseline compliance. So my challenge is this – what do you want to achieve with transparency and how will you evaluate whether you are getting closer to (or further from) your goals? 

Transparency could achieve so much. I hope it will help reconnect people with their public services and make those services more accountable. It can and should help boost value for money and spread wise spending practices from one public agency to another. It must not become bureaucratic, opaque or inaccessible. 

In my view, how each council (or other public agency) develops their transparency strategy will help it to be successful or not. If the strategy is developed by just a few accountants and IT people sitting in a darkened room, I think it won’t work very well. 

It is not that I have anything against accountants and IT people, I hasten to add. It is simply that if transparency is for the public then I think the public need to be involved in shaping the strategy and designing how transparency is rolled out for them. I know that some councils have done this – but have they all? (I note that the website guidance:http://data.gov.uk/blog/local-spending-data-guidance Local Spending Data Guidance does cover items such as ‘file formats’ and ‘data content’ well but makes no mention of involving the public...) 

How are you developing your transparency strategy?

 

Advert: Conference on transparency - I am on one of the panels: 

The Future of Transparency in Local Government

Tuesday 7th December 2010
Westminster Studio, London SW1

http://www.neilstewartassociates.com/sa268/agenda.php

Dancing man - a lesson in change

Just clocked this post from a colleague - a brilliant video (do watch it to the end - it is well worth it) and some excellent comments on the blog too.

http://corporateinstinct.blogspot.com/2010/07/lessons-in-leadership-from-dancing-man.html

UPDATE:

A friend and colleague has just sent me this link - which has a very useful commentary on it as well - about the importance of the first follower in particular!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ&feature=player_embedded

Enjoy!

Radical Efficiency: Different, better, lower cost public services

Went to a fabulous session this morning which launched a new report from NESTA about 'radical efficiency' and how to make it work. The point was well made that delivering public services in a radically different way is no longer just very important or even critical - it is an imperative! Here is a link to their excellent report:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/home/assets/features/radical_efficiency

The launch had some excellent presentations and questions - which prompted lots of ideas in my head about how to make effective and efficient innovation happen. I will write more later - but here is quick summary which I have already tweeted (of course!):

• Use the common wealth to create more common wealth...
• Look for ways to connect consumers together to create new expertise resources
• Stop blaming central govt and just get on with taking radical action locally
• Break accountability 'rules' and give authority to the point of service delivery
• Lead so that you enable risk taking, not to close it down
• Get everyone in one room so that professionals can 'hear' the voices of consumers directly!
• Think of doing more with more (not less) - but redefine what you count as your resources
• Create a culture where structure & passion coexist sublimely to achieve real results

My huge thanks to everyone involved with the report and indeed present at this morning's event. (I wish we'd had the whole day to debate the issues emerging... perhaps NESTA would like to organise such a day....?)

Original blog post: http://tinyurl.com/radefficiency

Tackling the financial crisis: What is your ‘legs eleven’?

The challenge is on to find ways to reduce costs, maintain essential frontline services and do what can be done to protect jobs.  However as the general election campaign continues to unfold, the true scale of the reductions in public funding are becoming ever clearer. Soon we are probably going to be in ‘another country’ where the usual efficiency measures simply won’t be enough. To quote a politician from the last few days (and I forget who!) “it can’t just about reducing the paper clip budget, wishing for an end to bureaucracy and freezing a few empty posts”. New and starkly different ways thinking & acting are going to be required.

And so I came to wondering how the beliefs about how to do ‘more with less’ might need to change. I came up with 10 ideas – 3 beliefs to stop, 3 beliefs to start & 3 beliefs with which to carry on. The 10^th idea is about stepping back and the 11^th poses a radical ‘why not...?’. In my view, we need to:

 

1. Stop believing that inefficient embedded cultures & engrained practices are impossible to change (Yes, it won’t be easy. But now is not the time for pusillanimity: the public services who will thrive through this turbulent times will be the ones who grasp nettles and robustly put delivering sustainable value to citizens / customers / clients / taxpayers very centre stage)
2. Stop believing that there is heaven in the closely & rationally argued detail (The age of 356 page strategic plans is surely over! The endless iterations of turgid guidance should now also be history. This may not [yet?]be the time to throw caution to the wind, but it surely is the time to let it float on a breeze while people are encouraged and allowed to make bold decisions based on shrewd intuition and just a little less than endless ‘due diligence’)
3. Stop believing that yet more ICT is what is required (Without doubt ICT has enabled and streamlined much of what we do. But I also remember a time when word processing was meant to do away with lots of tiresome clerical tasks. The documents are prettier, cutting & pasting has become a fine art for people who have never done it with real glue but we still have yet to reach that mythical kingdom where people don’t have to key in an address several times over. Perhaps it is time to call a halt, or at least a moratorium, on purchasing that next ICT fix)
4. Start believing that citizen engagement can deliver efficiency, effectiveness, economy and empowerment (Cuts or no, we still need public services to educate our young people, to care for older people, to tackle crime, to maintain our roads. But how many of these services that are done for, or even to, citizens would be better off being done with the public? Once upon a time a forecourt attendant filled up our petrol tank: now we do it ourselves. Is that so bad? What public services must go a similar way?)
5. Start believing that there is real and immediate value to had from collaboration and mergers (I have sometimes seen obvious collaborations staring people in the face but then well argued reasons are found to prevaricate or even block such changes. On the other hand, I have seen organisations take the view that “where there’s a will, there’s a way” and drive through a successful collaborative structure. This is a time for such bold action. It is not the time for pickiness, preciousness and posturing to stop progress)
6. Start believing that radical reforming, reframing, redesigning & rethinking services can happen without a legion of expensive consultants (It is my belief and experience that within every organisation there is a huge reservoir of small, and sometimes large, creative ideas for improvement. Often these reservoirs are left untapped whilst the same organisations pay buckets of money to large consultancies who then either plunder the ideas or impose inappropriate models of change on the client or both. I would argue that far more needs to be done to create the leadership and organisational cultural environments whereby these ideas are allowed to flourish like poppies in a field of corn. (Please see my blog: http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/ for hundreds of examples of such ideas)
7. Carry on believing that the employees are the best asset any organisation has (Sadly it is inevitable that there will be redundancies from these cutbacks. I would argue that the way that this is done is critical to the ongoing health of the organisations left behind. There will be much to do to plan wisely and humanely about how this should be done with the staff who will be directly affected. This will also wash over the staff who are left behind. In my view, everything that can be done to make the process as respectful and supportive as possible for all involved is both ethically and financially imperative)
8. Carry on believing in the vital importance of leadership through all of this (These turbulent times will demand superlative leadership that will ensure that strategic, rather than knee jerk, actions are taken. Good leadership will also ensure that cuts are taken intelligently tackling the areas of ‘quick fix’ waste rather than imposing, say, a 15% cut across all budgets, even the ones that are of most value and efficiency. Excellent leadership will mean that the organisations come out the other side of this process even stronger, more flexible, and ever more tuned to citizen demands & aspirations.)
9. Carry on believing in the worth of evaluation to evidence what works, what is most efficient and why (There is no point ‘throwing good money after bad’. There never has been. And now we certainly cannot afford to do so. Whilst it will be easy to cut budgets for evaluation, I would argue it is now even more critical to understand what is working and why, as well as understanding what is not. Evaluation is an investment in efficiency, economy and effectiveness)
10. Step back, explore and challenge all our other beliefs & assumptions that may be costing us dearly (One story I am reminded of is from a council in Yorkshire that investigated its processes for fixing street lights. They found that when a member of the public phoned in to report a defective street light they sent an engineer to verify the report was correct. Usually it was and then they sent another engineer to fix it. They made a remarkable discovery. If they changed their assumption from not believing the members of the public to believing them – they saved themselves a whole lump of resources. How many assumptions do we make that cost us huge amounts of money?)
11. And why not, stop cumbersome procurement and start smart negotiating instead (Have you tested the value of procurement as against old fashioned negotiation? It strikes me that vast amounts of time go into ‘feeding the procurement beast’ that are simply not accounted for when it comes to evaluating the worth of the process. The people who iterate endless specifications, produce impenetrable invitations to tender and then allocate many person days to the process of scoring the bids might be far better off if they simply sat the existing suppliers down in a room and just haggled a bit. There is more I could say on this subject as regular readers will know: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2009/05/13-ways-to-ensure-that-procurement.html But... why not?)

 

What ‘legs eleven’ ideas would you put forward?

What ideas / beliefs / activities / services / processes / politicians (!) / etc. would you stop, start, carry on, step back from and challenge with a ‘why not’ ?

 

Original post: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/04/tackling-financial-crisis-what-is-your.html

Customer Journey Mapping: New Workshop!

Will Haywood from Stoke-on-Trent City Council has kindly emailed me to say they have organised another workshop about their CJM approach. It is on 28th May starting at 10.00am. If you wish to go - please email him either by clicking here or here 

Details of previous workshops and their approach can be found by clicking on these links here:

• Customer Journey Mapping Workshop: the results!
• Customer Journey Mapping Workshop
• Customer Journey Mapping

I have also blogged about this too - if you have an interest: 

• Customer journey mapping and attendance allowance

Some questions I would pose about CJM are:

• Can too much mapping lead to exhaustion? (see thispost for further ideas on this)
• Can mapping get in the way of exploring?
• Is it appropriate to use the term 'customer' when financial restrictions will mean that partnering with local citizens becomes an economic necessity (seehere for more about this debate)
• Is CJM on its own enough? What other organisational development is required to make the most of the insights and ideas gained?
• How hard is it to engage executive and political leaders in CJM? What else needs to be done?
• How much danger is there that CJM sanitises the frustrations and ambitions of local citizens by turning it into a 'map'? How direct, face to face and authentic conversations between service users & providers (at all levels) built into the process?
• What change of culture is required to make the most of CJM? Or does CJM itself stimulate a change in culture?
• How should the investment in CJM be evaluated? How has it been evaluated already? 
• In these increasingly stringent times - is CJM a niceto do or a need to do? What are the key arguments to assert its value?

Just some thoughts. As always I wish Will and his colleagues all the best with their forthcoming workshop!

Whole systems in pictures

Can't make the pics fit!

So please have a look at: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/2010/04/hub-spoke-which-method-is-best.html

Help wanted: Community safety / cohesion

Hallo

I am trying to track down Associations of people involved with either (or both) community safety and community cohesion. Is there (say) an Association of Community Safety Managers / Practitioners ? Or similar for Community Cohesion?

(I am doing some work with the Department for Children, Schools and Families and I want to contact people from these associations to be involved in some intervention design work.) 

Many thanks!

Jon

jon@jonharveyassociates.co.uk

+44 (0) 7771 537535

+44 (0) 1280 822585

www.jonharveyassociates.co.uk