#eavoices

How to make change happen in government

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Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s one-time policy adviser currently on mid-term sabbatical in California, has given Stanford students some frank insights into the workings of Government.

  • The Prime Minister sometimes opposes the measures his own ministers put forward. He often finds out about these policies from the radio or newspapers.
  • Only 30 per cent of what the government is doing is actually delivering what we are supposed to be doing.
  • It’s a brilliant system for paper-shuffling people to be in control.  The bureaucracy masters the politicians.

I just wanted to make a few comments about collective intelligence and the role of the policy adviser.

Some Prime Ministers and Presidents have had an extraordinary ability to get through large quantities of paperwork and master the critical points. Cameron has many strengths as a leader, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. As a consequence of this, he is effectively leaving journalists to perform a filtering function – thus he pays attention to an issue only when it is drawn to his attention by the media, and of course, this delayed attention may cause some irritation or embarrassment sometimes. Perhaps a more diligent policy adviser should have picked up some of these issues earlier?

In the system we may infer from Hilton’s description, journalists are not only performing a filtering function but also a sensemaking function. There is clearly a difference between the way a policy looks in some bundle of government papers and how it looks when it appears in the media. Again, we might have expected a diligent policy adviser to have anticipated how policies would appear to the public.

But it seems that the politicians and their advisers don’t control the volume of paperwork they are given to wade through. In his seminar, Hilton dramatically produced a pile of paper one foot high (representing four days committee output), prompting gasps from students. “The idea that a couple of political advisers read through all this and spot things that are bad, things that are contradictory, is just inconceivable”, pleads Hilton.

Of course it is, say members of the previous government including Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former political press secretary. Which is why the previous government had a greater number of political advisers, and a coordination process (known as the “grid”) allocating a manageable number of pages to each. McBride acknowledges that the grid sometimes resulted in leaks to journalists, and suggests that Hilton may have downgraded the grid in order to reduce these leaks, but argues that the grid was a key mechanism for effective government and that the problems Hilton complains about are an inevitable consequence of abandoning this mechanism.

It may also be a consequence of regarding the civil service as a malignant force, trying to pull the wool over the politicians’ eyes. (This was a great theme in the original “Yes Minister” series, but has turned into a tired joke in the 2013 series.) Edward Pearce stands up for the independence of the civil service, and complains that it is Hilton who is unrepresentative and unelected.

When Hilton talks about “delivering what we are supposed to be doing”, this presumably refers to some kind of top-down strategic plan, formulated before the election and presented in the manifesto. But this raises some important questions about the relationship between strategy and execution, and the possibility for strategies to emerge and evolve during execution.

Which in turn raises some questions about government as a learning system. Recent governments (including Blair’s New Labour) have had a focus on delivery, which emphasizes single-loop learning – getting better at achieving a fixed set of goals. However, this has to be balanced against double-loop learning – changing the goals to fit changing circumstances.

In an earlier analysis of New Labour and Delivery, two MORI analysts argued that delivery and achievement was at least partially subjective and rhetorical.

  • “Delivery” is not keeping your promises, it is convincing the public that you have kept your promises.
  • What matters is not what you promise, but what the public understands by those promises, and what expectations they arouse.

Hilton clearly agrees about the importance of external communication. He encourages his students to think about how policies can be “branded”, and suggests that policies often fail not because they weren’t very good policies in the first place but because they are poorly presented. That might be true, but it is also a common excuse: politicians genererally find it easier to admit to errors in presentation than to errors in policy.

Which part of this ecosytem has the longest memory?  Presumably the civil servants. And which part has the shortest memory? With some honourable exceptions, probably the media. According to one theory of change, when there are several subsystems operating on different timescales, it is the slowest system that controls the whole. And the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does.

Roger Mortimore and Mark Gill, New Labour and Delivery (IPSOS MORI May 2004)

PM’s aide exposes No 10’s lack of control (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013) (subscription)

John Harlow and Eric Kiefer, Shoes off, feet up, the dude lifts lid on No 10 (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013)

Patrick Hennessy, David Cameron finds out about policies from the newspapers, reveals Steve Hilton (The Telegraph 13 January 2013)

Damien McBride, Whither the Grid? (13 January 2013) Why did the Grid Wither? (14 January 2013)

Edward Pearce, The Unelected (LRB 25 January 2013)

James Tapsfield, Prime Minister often finds out about policies from the radio or newspapers, says former advisor Hilton (The Independent 13 January 2013)

Richard Veryard (ed), Fragile Strategy or Fragile Execution (Storify, December 2012)

Nicholas Watt, David Cameron’s ex-policy guru Steve Hilton criticised over policy remarks (Guardian, 13 January 2013)

updated 25 January 2013

Soft Skills, Leadership, and now Empathy

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A recent post by @mikejwalker on a new Soft Skills course by Architecting the Enterprise rightly points out the importance of soft skills for the EA discipline. I think this is a great addition to the profession and shows formal recognition of the importance of soft skills in the industry.
The EA positions I’ve seen in companies are generally at a 1st or 2nd line management grades. Corporations seem to recognize at some level the need for a “higher stature” for the EA professional. The leadership skills take more cultivation than just updating the HR records, however. It takes a skillful balance of things perhaps even learned outside the scope of the office such as running a youth organization or planning other non-profit events. Corporations are wise to invest in leadership training – often only slated for management – for EA professionals. 
The EA profession is both strategic and change-oriented impacting people far more than the bucket of bolts on your data center floor. Changing behaviors in humans is at the core of the discipline. 
The above was written last week. This week @nickmalik rightly opines on the importance of empathy EAs. I only scanned this article (which deserves a good read by the fire with my favorite scotch). He’s definitely onto something here…
Bottom line – soft skills are becoming increasingly important!!! So, fellow EA professional, what do you do to hone your soft skills? Who do you draw upon for leadership lessons?

Enterprise Architects Will Need To …

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Like last year, I focus my predictions on how current trends will impact Enterprise Architecture in 2013. I see three things coming: 1. Make sense of big data. Big data will continue to get a lot of press, and vendors will be keen to show off new tricks with data integration. The enterprise architecture teams need Read more

Enterprise Architects Will Need To …

by

Like last year, I focus my predictions on how current trends will impact Enterprise Architecture in 2013. I see three things coming: 1. Make sense of big data. Big data will continue to get a lot of press, and vendors will be keen to show off new tricks with data integration. The enterprise architecture teams need Read more

Quick Strategy Assessments and Scoping with Business Capability Wheels

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The Business Capability Alignment Wheel is a quick and effective means to scope and describe what is needed within an enterprise to achieve strategic direction. Once the strategic direction is articulated, and  the key  business results or success measures that contribute to achievement of the strategic direction are defined, you are ready to use the Strategic

The post Quick Strategy Assessments and Scoping with Business Capability Wheels appeared first on Louise A Harris on Enterprise Business Architecture.

Top Ten Global Proficiency Challenges Impeding Growth

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There are a few macro arguments for nurturing and mentoring global diversity skills at all levels of leadership and operations management in a corporation. Yet, it does not make immediate sense, lighting up an urgent need on the radar screen. … Continue reading →

DSM: A useful tool for process improvement efforts

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Design Structure Matrix, or DSM in short, is a tool I frequently see during my year here at MIT.  It is often mentioned in “System Thinking” talks, as well as talks on designing complex system.  While the DSM’s uses are many, my project team mates and I focused on process improvement and successfully used the DSM to help our sponsor company improve its processes.  Our sponsor company is a aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul business, and the process we focused on was the aircraft upgrading process, which spans from defining requirements for the upgrade, to drawing out the design, to implementation, to testing and finally to delivery.

How the DSM helped

1. Reduce long rework cycles – imagine the nightmare scenario where a project gets to almost completion, and then have to loopback to the beginning for reasons such as a major design error.  It is like the chutes and ladders game.  The DSM helps to reduce long reworks by reordering the tasks.  For example, in our project, initially there were four rework cycles that would set the project back by more than 20 tasks.  After the reordering, there were none.

2. Challenge the status quo task ordering, while respecting task dependencies – in the reordered task list for our project, we realized that a number of documentation tasks were pushed to the bottom of the list.  These tasks dealt with the development of internal test reports, flight manual and maintenance manual.

Initially, we thought that meant that the company should do those documentation tasks last.  However, on investigating further, we realized it was because no or very few other tasks depended on those tasks.  We thought about that further, and a revelation hit us: if no other tasks are waiting on those documents to be developed, does that mean that employees could develop those documents late and to the lowest quality but yet not affect the entire process in any way?  How can the company ensure the timeliness and quality of those documents?  Our sponsor validated that concern, and in the end, we recommended adding sign-offs of those documents to resolve this issue.

This is just one of the many examples.  The DSM challenged the status quo task ordering, in a way that respected the task dependencies, so the new ordering still made sense and provided ideas for how the current process might be done better.

3. Facilitate understanding of the current process
The DSM creation process required us to get our hands dirty into understanding the process.  We needed to think about what level of granularity we need to get down to, and what kinds of dependencies we should capture.  These activities helped us think more about the process, and thus added in our understanding.

In addition, the DSM also provided a visual map of the process.  At one glance, we could see which are the tasks that have many dependencies.

Additional Information about the DSM

For readers interested in finding out more about the DSM, I have included some basic information here.

DSM might seem rather technical and intimidating at first glance.  And that fear is well justified, as DSMs are matrices, a mathematical artifact that inspire fear into people’s heart by the mere mention of its name.  However, if you spend 10-15 understanding how it works, you will find DSM a useful tool to include in your toolbox for process improvement projects.

Creating the DSM

To use the DSM (for the purpose describe in the article), we have to provide three main pieces of information:
1. The list of tasks in the process.  For example, in the design phase, creating the high level design would be a possible task, and doing preliminary design review would be another possible task.
2. The dependencies between tasks.  This information will specify that for Task A to start, what tasks would need to be first completed.  For example, preliminary design review needs to be completed first before detailed design can commence.
3. Possible loopbacks.  This indicates scenarios where rework need to happen.  For example, after preliminary design review, the proposed design might be deem unsuitable and the project will need to go back to high level design.

These three pieces of information can be visualized in a graph like the following:

Here, the tasks are represented by the boxes, the task dependencies by the black arrows and the loopbacks by the red arrows.  This graph is not needed for DSM creation, but is included here to illustrate information needed to create a DSM.

With the required information, a DSM can easily be created.  Using the same example, the DSM will look like this:

The DSM contains the same information as provided by the graph, but putting it in a matrix allow us to apply some tools that will help in our process improvement task.  Then, to do the task re-ordering, you just need to use a tool to “partition” the matrix.  Tools, such as PSM 32 and a DSM Excel Macro, can be found DSMweb.org.

The partitioned DSM will have the new ordering, like the one described in this article.  Analysis and recommendations can then be made based on the partitioned DSM.

Further Readings

  • “Complex Concurrent Engineering and the DSM Method” by Yassine and Braha 
  • “The Model Based Method for Organizing Product Development” by Steven D. Eppinger, Daniel E. Whitney, Robert P. Smith and David E. Gebala. 
  • “Generalized Model of Design Iterations Using Signal Flow Graphs” by Steven D. Eppinger, Murphy V Nukala, and Daniel E. Whitney.

Credits

This work is not solely of my own.  A lot of credits to my team mates Haibo Wang, Davit Tadevosyan and Kai Siang Teo.