Small Creative Ideas: 300+ ways to improve VFM

This blog has just passed through the 20,000 page load barrier - so again (as with my other blog) - here is a collected digest of all the ideas (some 300+) on the blog. These are ideas sourced from local government and many other places - usually invented by frontline staff - to generate ways of delivering more with less. 

Please search, peruse and plunder ways that will enable you to make the most of diminishing resources. 

Navigating the three ‘C’s

A short questionnaire to test how successful your organisation will be over the next 18 months 

The most successful organisations are ones that balance 

 

• Creativity
• Commitment and
• Complexity

 

Every organisation needs innovation to delight their customers/citizens/users, stay ahead of policy changes and to keep driving down costs. Creativity is the fuel for innovation and many public service organisations are brilliant at not recognising when it is needed, or worse, crushing it out of people. 

With the commitment (or engagement, as it is often called) of everyone involved in an organisation, everything becomes that much more possible. People work smarter and more steadily: not just harder and harder (and harder). 

In our frenetic world where new technologies, new demands and new ideas approach us from all angles, and clients / citizens want that something different and bespoke: managing complexity is critical. If a public service cannot handle the complex demands it faces, it will quickly transform into Kafkaesque bureaucratic whirlpools. 

Are you and the other key leaders of your service balancing these three C’s well enough? Try this questionnaire and see how you score: 

(Score how much do you agree with the statement - where 1 is ‘not at all’ and 7 is ‘totally’)

 

1. I can easily remember the last time one of my team had a brilliantly creative idea that added to our overall performance.
2. In fact I can remember quite a few times before then too when people around the organisation have come up with new and fresh ideas.
3. In my (part of the) service, we do things very differently now to three years ago – new pressures mean we have had to change
4. I usually come away from a meeting with colleagues or partners with at least one new idea.
5. When my team and I sit down together, I just expect there to be creativity and there usually is.
6. Often at work, I am delightfully surprised by the ingenuity of the people I work with
7. In my organisation, there is no effort needed to sell the new strategies, people know what they need to do already – and are doing it
8. People all face the same direction in my service, not in some regimented way, but with a clear focus on the future
9. I enjoy coming to work and so do all my colleagues: we work hard, but we also have fun
10. Staff appraisals are not the turgid box ticking exercises I see in other places, in ours we have lively conversations about the past and future
11. The plans in our service don’t just gather dust in filing cabinets, we use them to handle the pressures we face
12. In fact we don’t really have large planning documents, instead we have a community of people who all understand what we need to do
13. Just like a good military general, I don’t spend all my time in the valleys, I am often up on the hills looking further & beyond the current challenges
14. I read newspapers, magazines & journals to spot the trends that are coming our way – there are patterns in most things
15. My team and I are able to work the detail as well as we work the big picture – we can link it all together
16. I use every chance I get to talk with my stakeholders about what changes they are seeing, or would like to see
17. Things are much more complex than they used to be, but I think we have managed to have big enough conversations to handle these changes
18. Sometimes I get scared when I think about everything the service needs to achieve but I know I can rely on everyone to bring their piece of puzzle
19. Come the end of the week, I am able to relax and know we are surfing the waves of change rather than being drowned by them
20. I spend a good chunk of my time managing the future and not just to reacting to the present day challenges

 

If you scored 140, you need to bottle what you organisation is doing and sell it! Certainly if your score was somewhere above 110, your service is probably far more creative, engaged and strategic than most. You will enjoy coming to work. Between 60 and 109 is probably around average – but is average enough these days? How might you up your score? And if your score was below 60, there is probably room for some change – you, your organisation or both. 

This, of course, is not a scientific survey but merely one to prompt reflection. The ideas underpinning it though are – the best public service organisations are the ones where creativity, commitment and complexity are blended well together. 

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

Achieving excellent procurement (Update)

How do you know if your procurement / purchasing function is doing a better job than (say) this time last year – how do you measure success? How do you know if the service is VFM? 

I ask the question because:

• most procurement processes frustrate me to bits – in recent days, I have even had a friend in the same business tell me that she is losing the will to live after having written x bids over recent weeks. (You may have already read my – hopefully humorous – rant about the excesses of procurement in my field  - click here if you haven’t)
• I have been offered a complementary place at a forthcoming conference on public sector procurement (see here) for which I am most grateful. The least I thought I could do was do some further thinking about the subject – hence this blog post
• the influence, scope and size of procurement in the public services is set to grow even further – especially of Sir Philip Green has his way (see here for the main story). Government services must practice excellent: efficient, effective & economic procurement as a consequence.
• it isn’t just suppliers who lose sleep and hair over procurement so do the clients want to source a particular service. I know of several instances of where a client wants Z but because of the procurement process enforced upon them, they get Y. And from the work I did years ago supporting a firm which developed systems for the Ministry of Defence – I know that the end user (be it frontline member of the armed forces in that case or a citizen / customer in many other cases) just does not get a look in, usually.

So what is to be done? I offer this checklist below as my ‘starter for ten’ attempt at what I would expect to see evidence of in an excellent procurement function. Please feel free to add more points or make the case to tweak or even delete some of my suggestions. I have written this without any reference to any published standards (of which their might be legion!) 

For me, an ideal procurement function would: 

1. Have systems in place to understand and respond to trends in client satisfaction with its services
2. Have established a productive way of listening to feedback from suppliers / bidders (successful and unsuccessful) involved in the procurement processes they manage
3. Benchmark their processes with other procurement functions, both inside and outside their industry or sector, to look for ways to improve what they do
4. Collect the information and be transparent about all the resources spent on procurement processes: by the function themselves, the client who wishes to source a supplier and (radical idea perhaps) all the bidders. (It is a standard clause that clients do not pay for the effort that goes into writing bids. Fair enough. But that resource has to be paid for some how.) This overall data would also be a crude measure of how ‘elegant’ a procurement process is.
5. Have developed an easy to grasp method for measuring whether the cost benefit analysis of the procurement processes are improving or worsening.
6. Have practices in place to ensure that the ‘voice of the customer’ – the end user, citizen or frontline person who will be the final recipient of the new service / product being sourced – is evident at every stage of the procurement process and is heard loudly & clearly.
7. Make efforts to connect people together across the supply chain so that the procurement function does not attain disproportionate power by being the sole knowledge holder and (more crucially) that procurement is done ‘whole system aware’ (see here for further information about this).
8. Although it is harder, always look for ways to procure on outcomes or overall objectives rather than outputs or processes. (All too often, I see tender documents that specify what I know to be a less than satisfactory ‘going through the motion’ type process which will be lucky to achieve any lasting outcomes. Magic can happen if suppliers are given the scope to propose a process that may be outside the prescribed ‘usual’ way of doing things but which will still achieve the desired for outcomes.)
9. Run procurement processes in ways that inspire potential suppliers to be innovative and think of ways to achieve the desired outcomes with more efficiency and effectiveness.
10. Have accrediting procedures which do not involve the uploading of numerous policies and strategies but merely state that the winning bidder will be expected (then) to show that they have these in place.
11. Have established shrewd ways of sorting the bidders into ‘wheat and chaff’ involving (perhaps radically) asking the bidders to state what questions or measures they would pose to the other bidders to help achieve this result.
12. Led strategically, mindful of the key purpose of procurement within the overall strategy of the host organisation.  

I probably could go on!  

But what do you think? Do you agree with the points above? Would you add any more? Would you subtract some of the points above?

-----------------

Just spotted this interesting and related article: 

http://www.supplymanagement.com/news/2009/nao-slams-government-purchasing-capability/

9 November 2009 | Jake Kanter

"Significant weaknesses" in procurement skills are jeopardising value for money on major projects, according to the UK's National Audit Office (NAO).

The spending watchdog's latest report, Commercial skills for complex government projects, said the public sector lacked commercial capability in areas including contract management, commissioning and risk management....

The critical leadership role of middle managers in these austere times

Public service middle managers will experience heavy loads of stress as the implications of the austerity measures are rolled out in coming months. They will be the people tasked to deliver the redundancy bad news to staff. They may well have little say in the decisions being taken. These managers will probably see the shape of the services they have helped to build, reshaped and reduced before their eyes. And they too may suffer a redundancy fate at the end of it all. 

Throughout all this, these managers may well seek to juggle their deep commitment to the value of the service they manage & the people they serve, their need for ‘survival’ in this employment climate (& not put their heads too far above the parapet) and their desire to keep work & family life in some semblance of balance. 

It is a gross understatement to say that this will not be easy. 

But this is not an article to plead on their behalf – there are many others who will suffer too, not least the many (often vulnerable) citizens who will be getting lower of levels of critical services in the future. Instead I want to put forward some ideas about how these middle managers might play a critical leadership role as these looming cuts are rolled out. 

For me the most important challenge to face in these coming months will be whether the cuts are used to simply reduce / ‘salami slice’ the existing services or whether bold & creative decisions will be taken to mitigate the cuts (as far as possible) by doing things differently. I contend that middle managers are best placed to do the latter while senior managers may well be under huge pressure (from their governance bodies) to do the former. 

Middle managers know their services inside out. And whilst they may have a strong attachment to the current ways of doing business, their inside knowledge means that they have the potential to see some fresh green saplings instead of the old big trees. Whether this potential is realised or not will depend upon the leadership role that they adopt. 

If the middle managers pursue a compliant style of leadership and seek only to implement the demands for resource cutting, there is little chance of innovation and new ways being found to deliver more with less. These middle managers may gamble on saving their own jobs by being good soldiers. But this will be a gamble. (I once met someone who was instructed to make his whole team of nine people redundant. He spent 10½  hours that day talking with each person, doing what he could to make the ‘brown envelope’ an opportunity and not a curse. Finally at around 7.30pm he returned to his own office to find his own brown envelope, just left squarely on his desk. He set fire to his filing cabinet.) 

There is an alternative leadership role. (And from the discussions I have had with middle managers, many are and will be seeking to adopt this approach. I wish them well.) This approach seeks to create the room for manoeuvre to find the new ways of doing business. These might be radical innovations or just simple small changes that can lead to much higher performance, such that services and possibly jobs can be saved. This is not a leadership style for the faint hearted. 

This leadership involves:

 

• Being as strategic as the senior managers through understanding the past, present and future of the organisation, grasping the particular pressures which are being faced and having a vision of what could be.
• Having the courage and deft footwork to challenge and question decisions from higher up the organisation, in ways that make the people who have made those decisions wriggle, but not squirm.
• Being prepared to practise an inspirational & facilitative style of leadership which enables and encourages junior staff to think creatively and express their own bold ideas which will finesse the resources and find superlative efficiency & effectiveness
• Deeply knowing what the public want and need, and being able to show clearly how proposals for newly redesigned services will come far closer to meeting their requirements and delivering social outcomes.
• Maintaining honesty and transparency throughout, so that even if there is no job at the end, everyone will observe that the manager will still have their integrity. (In the end, that is all any of us have.)
• Knowing what questions to ask of all involved that will liberate new ways of doing business. Just asking, for example, the simple question “is there anyone who provides this service far better than us?” can prompt a radical shift in existing methods. (When the first budget airline realised they could cut costs dramatically by keeping their aeroplanes in the air more and on the ground less, they searched for who was doing this extremely well. They learnt a huge amount from a Formula One team who showed them how do a pit stop in 9 seconds.)
• Having the skills (and being able to share these) to redesign a service so that fewer resources are spent on ‘fire-fighting’ and more priority is given to prevention and systemic fixes that can head off the expensive mistakes.

 

Sometimes dramatic improvements are staring us in the face and when we finally see them we wonder how we could not have seen them before. One council I was working with had experienced something like this when they looked at how they repaired street lights. The original method involved taking a call from a member of the public that a street light was not working. An engineer was dispatched (at dusk?) to check that indeed the light was not working. If (as was invariably the case) it was not, a second engineer was then sent out to fix it. All this took a while and involved two journeys. They then changed their assumption from ‘we cannot believe the public’ to ‘we can believe the public’. As a consequence only one engineer is now despatched to fix a street light that has been reported as faulty. 

This leads me on to declaring what I think is the most important attribute of this more progressive middle management leadership:

 

• Having the capability to learn from the past (and possibly even chuckle about it) but not be attached to tradition. True, this is very hard to do in any organisation that is wracked with fear, blame and a belief that changing old ways necessarily involves a loss of face. But I believe (I have to believe) this is still possible, even in such organisations. Certainly if not now, then when? If this is not a time to let go of old & inefficient practises, when will it be?

 

If you are a politician or senior manager reading this, my challenge to you is what can you do to allow, enable and support your middle managers to act in these ways? 

Putting the politics aside about whether now is the right time to be implementing extensive and deep reductions in public expenditure (I leave that to the politicians and economists to debate), it is always the right time for any manager to be putting in place radical improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. As Machiavelli said “a common failing of mankind [is] never to anticipate a storm when the sea is calm. A wise prince … must never take things easy in times of peace”.

Now that the storm has arrived, many people I fear are rushing to construct the world of public services as one large spreadsheet with lots of compartmentalised budget cells to slice and dice. I hope that the progressive middle managers will have the courage to practice leadership that calmly but dynamically acts in the interests of all of our futures.

But it won’t be easy!

Original blog post

Creative thinking about income generation

One of the more popular posts on my small creative ideas blog is about income generation - people often stumble across from a google search, it seems. (The original post is here: http://smallcreativeideas.blogspot.com/2009/04/thinking-about-income-generation.html if you want to go there)

Meanwhile - it seemed to me - given these austere times that people might have interest in reading this post here too:

_____

Below is a list of 'resource types' that all voluntary and public services have in some way. I have used the whimsical (and probably not very ethical) example of what a local church might do to generate income - to illustrate these resource types. I hasten to add that I am not advocating any of these methods at all! (One of the first rules of income generation is that whatever you do - has to accord with your ethical principles and legal parameters.)  

• Staff - Knowledge & Creativity (Vicar offers counselling to local businesses)
• Staff - Staff time (Choir Sings for Local Radio to create Christmas jingles)
• Staff - As potential customers  (Send a list of parishioners to religious publisher)
• Staff - Non work expertise (Church Warden's model making expertise to sell to local firm of architects)
• Information - Patterns of performance & results.(Send popular hymns chosen for services to music publishers)
• Information - About individual clients / users etc. (Send names of babies Christened to the local branch of Mothercare)
• Physical Assets - Buildings (Use the Church steeple for a mobile phone mast)
• Physical Assets - General Equipment (Loan church hall chairs to local hotel for big events)
• Physical Assets - Specialist Equipment (Charge for access to register of births and deaths to people researching family trees)
• Stakeholders - As potential customers (Church Commissioners to offer ethical financial advice)
• Stakeholders - As potential sponsors or supporters (Local Firms advertising in church newsletter)
• Stakeholders - As potential partners (advertise local education evening adult ed classes)
• Profile - ‘Brand’ reputation (Give stamp of approval to a pine furniture manufacturer)
• Profile - Access to media and public (Charge for inserts in the newsletter such as pizza delivery businesses)
• Systems and services - Software (Sell petty cash system to local shops)
• Systems and services - Expertise in how things are done (Sell skills at organising large events (the fete) to local businesses wanting celebrations)
• Systems and services - ‘Piggy backing’ existing services (Arrange to tie up marriage services with local dressmaker)
• Waste  ...is someone else’s supply...? (Church space on weekdays use for a Local nursery) 

Further information (although some of this may be out of date now): 

• http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4130667 (Guidance on income generation for theNHS)
• http://police.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/finance-and-business-planning/income_generation.pdf(Guidance for the police)
• http://www.derby.ac.uk/bdu/consultancy-income-generation-intellectual-property (Example guidance for higher education)
• http://www.renaissanceeastmidlands.org.uk/our_work/sustainability/income_1.html (Example for themuseums and galleries)
• http://www.dea.org.uk/sub-562910 (a source of guidance for the voluntary sector)
• http://www.shropshirefire.gov.uk/webimages/managing-the-service/cfa/strategyresources-meetings-data/pdf-125-2007-01-25-10%20-%20Income%20and%20Charging%20Consultation%20by%20the%20DCLG.pdf (example from the fire & rescue service)
• http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/localgovernment/generalpower2 (Guidance for local government)

___________

Overall, I do think that all public and third sector organisations ought to have a coherent and active income generation strategy at all times - but especially now. I used to run workshops on this subject when I was at OPM - would anyone be interested in my putting on another one? (Please drop me a line or say here, if you would like this. Thanks.)

Pro Bono Group established on Linked In

Together with a colleague (Marion Cole), we have established a group for experienced public sector consultants (including researchers, advisers, coaches, facilitators etc.) who wish to offer some pro bono help to public and third sector organisations during these austere times. 

The purpose of the group is exchange ideas, enquiries, opportunities and mutual support. 

The group is co-facilitated by myself & Marion Cole and is centred around Milton Keynes / Buckinghamshire. People from surrounding counties are most welcome. Indeed some have joined from further afield. 

The group has gained 35 members in less than a month.

Here is a link to the group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=3542050&trk=anet_ug_grppro (but you will need to be a member of linked in - which is free)

I am posting details here for two reasons:

1) to see if any consultants / researchers etc would like to join: you are most welcome

2) to see if anyone would like some pro bono support: My plan is to write to people in the public services in MK / Bucks / Beds / Northants / Oxon / Berks at some point soon (although I don't have a ready made mailing list...) - but in the mean time - I thought I would get the offer 'out there' for people to respond as they wish. If you are a potential client - please feel free to join the group - and post your request as a discussion thread. Or if you wish - browse the list of members and approach people directly. (There is a great deal of talent already in the 30 members signed up)

Ten ways to keep the peace

Major restructuring of the police appears inevitable and is creating a plenty of debate in political and media circles. Consultant Jon Harvey weighs in with his own points of order. There are many ways to respond to the looming 25% to 40% cuts in resources that are coming to a police station near you....

For the full article go to: http://www.guardianpublic.co.uk/police-cutbacks-comment-harvey

Ten ways to keep the peace

Major restructuring of the police appears inevitable and is creating a plenty of debate in political and media circles. Consultant Jon Harvey weighs in with his own points of order. There are many ways to respond to the looming 25% to 40% cuts in resources that are coming to a police station near you....

For the full article go to: http://www.guardianpublic.co.uk/police-cutbacks-comment-harvey