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Delivery

What the UK can learn from Maryland and elsewhere.

Look at any list of Democrat presidential contenders for 2016 and you’re likely to find Maryland’s Governor, Martin O’Malley. And if he does decide to run he’ll certainly point to his track record of delivery in office – helped by combining a delivery unit with data science and transparency. O'Malley is one of a number of case studies that feature in our new report, International Delivery.

At a breakfast roundtable at the Institute for Government last Thursday, O’Malley himself credited an institutional innovation from the UK – the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) – with helping him maintain a “relentless” focus on achieving his strategic goals in office. His Governor’s Delivery Unit, created in 2008, closely mirrors the original PMDU model established under Tony Blair’s premiership back in 2001:
  • The Governor’s 16 strategic goals –from education attainment to job recovery – are tracked by the Delivery Unit, whose staff analyse a constant stream of data gathered from departments
  • Any delivery problems detected are then investigated by the Unit
  • The Governor receives regular progress reports
  • The Delivery Unit organises bi-weekly “stocktake” meetings between the Governor and departmental executives. Here, executives are held to account and solutions to delivery problems are brainstormed.
But Maryland isn’t the only jurisdiction to import the PMDU model. In fact, as we show in our International Delivery report out today, the spread of delivery units is a truly global trend (covering 15 jurisdictions across North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia). The PMDU has now been replaced by the Cabinet Office’s Implementation Unit, but the latter still bears “more than a passing resemblance” to its predecessor. The UK can learn a great deal from how others have imported and adapted the delivery unit model. There’s a wealth of collective experience to be tapped. The Maryland example Maryland could offer a blueprint for where the Implementation Unit goes next, updating the delivery unit model for the era of open, data-driven government. The Governor’s Delivery Unit maintains an online performance dashboard that shows the progress being made on the Governor’s strategic priorities. Citizens can see in almost real time whether the government is “on track”, “progressing”, making “insufficient progress”, or “lagging” behind proposed timelines. Departmental performance data is also posted online, as are summaries of the stocktake meetings along with visual aids used in them. For Governor O’Malley, this approach is about leveraging available technology and meeting the expectations of the “show me” generation who increasingly expect timely and accurate evidence of progress. Of course, not every goal moves in the right direction. But this open approach gives greater “credibility to the things that do.” Compare this to the UK. Despite the government’s championing of a broad transparency agenda, the UK’s Implementation Unit – just like the PMDU before it – remains concerned with internal transparency and accountability. The Unit’s analysis is never made public. The work of the Major Projects Authority (MPA) is the closest the UK comes to Maryland’s approach to external transparency on delivery. The MPA publishes delivery confidence ratings for the government’s highest-risk projects, using quarterly performance data gathered from departments. But this is a far cry from allowing citizens to follow progress in real time. Rankings cannot be made public for 6 months. As one participant at our roundtable noted, this mandated delay makes it all too easy for departments simply to dismiss poor ratings as being out of date. And lessons from elsewhere... Nor is greater external transparency the only area where the UK could learn from how others have adapted the delivery unit model. International Delivery highlights a number of other innovations:
  • Undertaking front-end scrutiny: The UK’s Implementation Unit, like most delivery units around the world, tends only to scrutinise initiatives once they’ve gained political approval. The problem here is that poor policy design offers a poisoned chalice to those tasked with implementation. For this very reason, Australia’s delivery unit (the Cabinet Implementation Unit) now devotes the majority of its time to scrutinising the feasibility of departmental policy proposals before they become agreed policy.
  • Building distributed capability: It’s too easy for delivery units to focus their efforts on challenging departmental performance. As centres of expertise in delivery they also need to help build capacity. Australia’s Cabinet Implementation Unit, for instance, offers training in implementation planning to policy professionals across the Australian Public Service.
  • Innovation labs: Most delivery units develop action plans to resolve implementation problems in partnership with departments and heads of government. But this approach is not always enough to solve particularly complex implementation challenges. Units in Malaysia and Tanzania have enjoyed success in using pop-up “delivery labs.” These 6-to-8-week labs bring together a more diverse range of stakeholders (from inside and outside of government) to develop an action plan.

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