CategoryBureaucrat

I’m no stranger to Machinery of Government changes. Trust me: when you’ve been in the public sector long enough, you get used to them.  But the recent MoG changes have been something else.  I’m a manager in a line agency that designs strategies and services for vulnerable people across the state. But this latest MoG seems to have gutted strategic and decision-making functions from our agency. While there have been all sorts of changes, the biggest one from my perspective is the creation of a new central agency that is empowered to dictate strategy to my agency.   Now I, and many others in the...

Last year I started a new job as a junior executive in a big government department. Within the year, I was already facing tough decisions about cutting costs. As the last in a long line of managers juggling budget cuts, my options to save money without cutting services were already exhausted. It had always struck me as unfair that some staff get benefits, like extra pay or holidays, that aren’t available to other people who are doing the same job under a different classification. Now, for the first time, I realised how many of them there were, and how much it costs! Some of these arrangements...

I have a crazy idea: what if every adult could be issued with their own taser that can be fired only once a week, and legally use it on someone who needs to be shocked into reality?  Don’t tase me, bro. Just hear me out first.  We’ve all come across people in public being unduly irate and borderline abusive to other members of the public for the mildest of reasons, or for no good reason at all. How much more civil do you think these people would be if they could have an impromptu date with tens of thousands of volts of electricity any time they inflict on some innocent bystander their...

As an experienced management consultant, I’ve helped plenty of people in the public sector to implement programs and projects when they’ve needed our help. Recent machinery of government structural changes have meant I’ve had to give a different type of help, one that doesn’t seem to be quite as valuable as what I signed on to do.  I’m about to wrap up a piece of work where I’ve been helping managers improve their program management processes and capabilities, which has included working closely with interagency stakeholders. The main client is an executive for whom I’ve successfully completed...

Consultation events can be tricky to organise and manage when you’re in an agency like mine, which consults on some tough and sensitive topics. Even the preparation can be hard.   I’ve been preparing for a workshop with an important group of stakeholders that feels slightly disenfranchised by the process so far. Improving the lives of the people represented by these stakeholders is a priority for my agency.  Because of that, my agency recognises this event is a rare chance to do really good fieldwork and get intel so we can create good policies – policies that will actually mean positive...

I’m with a company that occasionally requires me to work from the offices of various governmentagencies, contract-by-contract. This means I’m frequently subjected to approval processes togain temporary access to government buildings and various other amenities. It’s surprisingly common to find layers of different processes to gain access to resources thatseem like they could benefit from being combined. Building access does not incorporate, forexample, having a login to the computer system, which may also be separate from access to thephone system. The degree of difficulty to access different...

Working in the public sector for long enough, you get to know its strengths and weaknesses. Onearea where it can be weak: messy service systems. This weakness can be made even worse bythe way organisations attempt to help the public, which just makes the system even messier.People who need services struggle to find their way around the system to get exactly what theyneed. There are so many unconnected parts to the system that it’s not surprising that they havethis struggle, and this includes the organisation where I work, which provides public healthservices and support to those in need. To...