Working to make government more effective

Comment

The challenges of departmental reform

What does it take for an organisation to become “better but smaller”?

What does it take for an organisation to become “better but smaller”? How can it keep delivering on its main priorities while simultaneously tightening its belt? Since the 2010 Spending Review, these questions have loomed large in the minds of leaders across Whitehall.

As our new report Transforming Whitehall One Year On: The challenges of departmental reform in Whitehall shows, there is no “one size fits all” route to answering them. Faced with finding savings of between 33% and 50% from their administration budgets, some departments have undertaken extensive restructuring, moved toward new operating models and investigated new ways of working, while others have simply downsized. With only two exceptions, Whitehall departments are now smaller than they were in 2010, but some are both smaller and operate very differently from the organisation that existed previously. For example, in response to the Lord Levene’s recommendations, the Ministry of Defence has implemented a new model of “delegated responsibility” which has substantially altered the way that the constituent parts of the organisation interact. The challenges of leading a private sector organisation through this sort of major change are well documented in management literature and business schools across the world continue to collect six figure fees for MBAs on the topic. But as we pointed out in our 2012 report, Transforming Whitehall Departments, when it comes to leading change, Whitehall is not like a business. There is a limit to how much the public sector can learn about organisational change from the private sector, not least because delivering public services and implementing policy is an inherently political process. With few textbooks to turn to, leaders across Whitehall may find the best education lies in sharing their experiences. Of course, no two departments have experienced change in exactly the same way – given the variation in the size of departments and the functions that they perform, this is unsurprising – but as our report shows, there are many areas where their experiences converge. Across Whitehall, leaders have had to reconcile their employees’ expectation that downsizing will mean prioritising and allocating work more efficiently (and indeed, scrapping some activities entirely) with the need to reassure ministers that the department can continue to successfully support their political priorities. There is wide variation in the extent to which leaders have managed to strike this balance. Leadership teams have also focused enormous amounts of attention on how to manage the consequences of staff redundancy processes and on keeping their day to day operations running under conditions of tremendous uncertainty and reduced morale. Following these exercises, some departments have found it particularly challenging to successfully engage their middle tier of management in the change process. This has deprived senior leaders of a crucial channel for communicating to staff about change and their vision for the future of their department. These are just some of the challenges that leaders have faced in the course of implementing major change in their department. Our report uses the nine features of leading and managing successful change that we identified in Transforming Whitehall Departments to highlight areas where departments have made progress in overcoming individual challenges and where they have faced common problems. As the threat of another long period of disruptive change becomes ever more real, departments across Whitehall now face the challenge of shock-proofing the progress that they have already made in these areas, while preparing for more to come.
Publisher
Institute for Government

Related content