Selected publications
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Building transformative capability through public service reforms
Published in the January 2021 edition of Administration (Journal of the Institute of Public Administration in Dublin).
In it I explore the importance of capability building to the success of public service reforms. It draws on the neglected literature on capability to explore how capability is a product (or not) of the interaction between the skills, experience and methods of an individual – and the culture, structures, processes of the organisation they work in.
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The analysis identifies four key features of the most successful capability building reforms in the UK and investigates how far they explain the early successes of key reforms in the Goal Programme of Public Service Reform in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
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The key features of successful reforms that have built sustainable capability are:
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An iterative and permissive approach to project identification and scoping
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Projects on high priority cross cutting outcomes that demand new ways of working
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Projects that are connected with conducive elements of the organisational and leadership context
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Projects that are designed to create or adapt ‘enabling routines’ which civil servants ‘learn by doing’
Such reforms have acted as capability factories. And as the early adopters of new routines rise through the organisation and take on new roles, they become advocates and teachers of the routines and practice they have acquired.
This is how organisations learn and build the capability they need to succeed.
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Civiil service reform in the real world
This report exposes the chemistry of successful civil service reform. We analyse four reforms seen as more or less successful in the past 25 years to understand what lay behind their success:
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Next Steps (1987-97)
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Bringing In and Bringing On Talent (1999-2002)
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Public Service Agreements and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (1998-2010)
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Capability Reviews (2005-12).
Each of these is internationally admired, often copied and adapted. Together with an additional review of a wider set of past and current reforms, we developed a framework for understanding civil service reform and identified the key factors that lift or drag down a reform at various stages of its life.
Evaluation of the Goal Programme for public service reform
The Goal programme involved seven government departments in Ireland and Northern Ireland delivering, and learning from, nine public service reform and innovation programmes in collaboration with CES, over the period 2016 - 2019. Between 2017 and 2019, an evaluation team from the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) carried out an evaluation of the programme.
This independent evaluation of the Goal programme provides a succinct analysis of the factors that can help or hinder reform and identifies seven lessons of interest to those engaged in future reform initiatives.
Improving government effectiveness across the world
One consistent area of demand for UK funding and expertise is for the support of public sector reform and improvement in the effectiveness of government. Yet there is general consensus in the development literature that, in terms of impact, efforts to improve the effectiveness of governments and to reform public services largely have a patchy record. And efforts to strengthen the centre of governments have the patchiest record of all.
This InsideOUT report explores how far and under what conditions more than 40 years of public sectors reforms in the UK can help other countries in their own efforts to improve policymaking.The authors used a stocktake of progress to explore the parallel lessons from their respective experience of reforms in the UK and overseas more systematically, drawing on a mix of their experiences, practitioner reflection, case studies drawn from the NSGI portfolio, research by the Institute for Government and lessons from research into aid interventions in developing countries (especially centre-of-government reforms) to provide a model approach as well as key questions and recommendations that should be applied throughout an engagement with a recipient government.
15 days: a case study
A practical guide to leading accelerated, high-impact collaboration in the Irish Civil Service.
Some of the toughest challenges facing governments seem intractable. The challenge of improving the mental well- being of young people is one such complex issue. The Irish Government picked this topic to be one of three high-profile pathfinder projects at the heart of its ambitious Civil Service Renewal Plan.
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A small team in the Department of Health was charged with finding new ways to work together on this issue. Convinced that there was a better model than establishing a two-year committee, they decided to use an accelerated, collaborative problem-solving model and a diverse team of frontline staff and policy-makers.
This report is the story of how the 12 pathfinder group members used their 15 days of working together to get to the heart of the problem. It shows how the group came up with a small number of actions that could have a disproportionately positive impact on the underlying problem, and it is the story of how they engaged key Secretaries General to act on their findings and recommendations.
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The report and supporting toolkit published on the Centre for Effective Services website provide a ‘how to’ case study and guide for senior officials in governments who are trying to work across boundaries to develop and implement policies on ‘wicked issues’.
Adapting the PMDU model
The PMDU model has been much copied and adapted internationally at all levels of government.
In 2013 Haringey Council in north London became the first local authority to create its own version of the PMDU model. This report aims to draw out the lessons in adapting this model for local government, based on an evaluation conducted in autumn 2014. It will have relevance for other local authorities in the UK and internationally, as well as those seeking to create a delivery unit at other levels of government. The report is designed to enable anyone interested in models of improvement to understand Haringey’s experience, as well as to provide guidance for those considering a similar innovation.
Reform case study: Public Service Agreements and the PMDU
The introduction of Public Service Agreements (PSAs) was unexpected and unplanned – proposed by the Chancellor’s special adviser just days before the 1998 spending review was announced. An initial set of 600 rapidly assembled PSAs matured and then burst into life when Tony Blair gave Michael Barber his ‘instruction to deliver’ in 2001. The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) became the most notable component of the reform and, together with the later evolution of the PSA regime, is now the UK Civil Service’s best-selling reform export – from Haringey to California, the White House, the World Bank and Malaysia.
Leading change in the Civil Service
This report is based on the Institute’s extensive research on leading major change in the Civil Service – both corporately across the Civil Service and within individual departments – over the last five years.
At a time of huge economic pressures and large cuts to public spending, the report looks at the lessons learned from leading the first round of change from 2010-2015.
The civil service responded well to that first challenge, but what further change is required? How can senior leaders successfully lead the service in a way that builds the capability it needs, whilst making significant further savings.
A force for change
The first research into wide scale intervention by the UK Government into failing social services departments and education departments.
The research covered all the interventions to answer the questions:
- Does intervention tackle failure?
- What causes service failure?
- How does intervention Work?
- How can interventions be improved?
- The future of Intervention.
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Performance breakthroughs
Managing performance is not rocket science. It is about practical ways of improving how you do things in your organisation. Its only purpose is to deliver better quality services to local people. It is about supporting your staff to make the difference that originally attracted them into the public sector. Managing performance involves much more than setting up a system. The mechanics – targets, indicators, and plans – are only a small part of the whole process, and they are easy to deal with in comparison with getting the right focus, leadership and culture in place.
To develop practical insights we worked with 12 organisations drawn from local government, the health service and the emergency services over a period of four months.
Reform case study: Capability Reviews
Capability Reviews were a direct consequence of the drive for delivery in Labour’s second term. They were conceived by Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, as the way to hold departmental leaders to account for improving their departments’ capability to deliver. The extensive process of engagement and operating model that underpinned the reform immediately gave it traction in Whitehall. The Capability Reviews were the first organisational capability assessment framework in the UK systematically to assess the organisational capabilities of individual departments and to publish results that could be compared across departments.
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The reviews came to be seen as robust primarily because they applied the model consistently across all departments and allowed for comparison between them.This focused the attention of permanent secretaries on the relative strengths and weaknesses within their departments, and injected a degree of competition, which acted as a constant pressure for improvement: ‘Without the scores, they wouldn’t have listened.’
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By the end of 2009, all major departments were re-reviewed and it was reported that 95% of areas that were assessed in the baseline reviews as needing urgent development had been addressed. In particular, progress was reported in terms of leadership, notably in the capability and effectiveness of top leadership teams, and in strategy, with departments improving the way they used evidence and analysis in policy making.
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The reviews directly led to the creation of the civil service staff engagement survey, which exposed key capability gaps without having to rely on a high-level external review.
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However, by 2010 the loss of key reform leaders and the failure to reinvent what was only ever designed as a time-limited intervention led to the eventual watering down of the reviews. All the most effective elements of the reform design were abandoned with the move to self-assessment and, later, departmental improvement planning.
Seeing is believing
The output of a team of 15 drawn from across the sector working at high speed to create a practical user focused method for best value inspection that looked at the service from 360 degrees, exposed the key improvement issues, and avoided the dead hand of traditional audit style approaches.
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It sets out the principles and values behind the new approach to inspection of local government. And how inspectors would carry out their work in order to to make their two
judgements:
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How good are the services that they have inspected? – rated from 3 stars (excellent) to 0 stars (poor); and
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Will they improve in the way that best value requires? – rated on a scale that runs from ‘yes’, to ‘probably’, to ‘unlikely’, to ‘no’.
The report explains how each of the inspectors 6 key lines of enquiry will be tested:
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Are the authority's aims clear and challenging?
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Does the service met those aims?
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How does its performance compare?
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Does their internal review process drive improvement?
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How good is the improvement plan?
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Will the authority deliver the improvements?
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Changing gear
This report commandeered what was envisaged as a commentary on the first year of inspection, and turned it into a case for change to the whole approach to local government inspection. The report - Changing gear- changed the course of local government inspection.
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The case for change was developed by carrying out research reviewing the impact of the new inspection regime.The report starts by drawing out the four success factors that underlay the performance of the best councils:
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Ownership of problems and willingness to changes.
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A sustained focus on what matters
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The capacity and systems to deliver performance and improvement.
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Integration of best value into day to day management.
It then makes the case for a new regime - which led directly to the creation of the highly effective Corporate Performance Assessment regime in the UK, which gave star ratings to each council. This new approach focused on challenging the capacity and effectiveness of the whole organisation - rather than inspecting its public toilets service
