Advanced bureaucracy 101 - restructures, reviews, re-organisation

When in government, there is likely to come a time when you have honed your bureaucratic skills to such a point that you have achieved promotion to a reasonably senior level in your department. It is at this point that you will be in a position to implement advanced procrastination methods.

Now that you are in charge of large numbers of people, you will find yourself responsible for human resource issues, business planning, staff accommodation, and many more important administrative matters. All of these areas significantly broaden your influence and increase your ability to cause obstruction to progress.

The Operational Review

Whenever a branch, or even department, appears to be on the verge of achieving decision-making status, be this because an overzealous manager believes this is the purpose of the branch, or that procrastination options have been exhausted, the correct step is to order a review of the branch in question to investigate whether it is delivering the appropriate level of service.

This review will take up considerable time and distract the senior branch officers by requiring them to sit down and write tedious explanations and justifications of their activities.

An external consultant is often brought in to carry out the review. This consultant is unlikely to have any knowledge of the actual activities of the branch or the areas within which staff work, causing a great deal of time to be expended with repetitive explanations.

Their lack of knowledge is likely to lead to an extended review period and a good chance that their conclusions and recommendations will be totally inappropriate.

A bonus associated with the review process, and the lengthy period of time that it takes, is that staff within the branch are distracted and find concentrating on their work difficult because of the all the uncertainty that a review brings.

Added to this, rumours and stories are bound to start circulating about the likely outcomes of the review (often based on other rumours), which will further reduce productivity and stall decision-making processes.

A review is a grand opportunity to defer all decision-making until the outcome is known. As every department is reviewed on a semi-regular basis, it is almost guaranteed that one in every three years will be taken up with such a review and its consequences.

The Restructure

Once a review has been completed, one of the usual recommendations is that a restructure of the branch or department is required to accommodate the suggested changes.

This restructure will need to be carefully considered, as there will be robust debate about where different responsibilities should reside. The review will suggest one thing, while the staff actually involved with the relevant areas will, in all probability, have a different perspective based on practical and sensible considerations. These poor souls would be the ruin of the public service if they were allowed to get their way.

The possibility of a restructure will cause as much angst as the review process. Section Managers will all be jostling to ensure that they don’t lose staff members (whoever manages the most people wins!) or worse still, lose responsibilities.

Junior staff members will worry about who they will be working for and what they will be doing.

The ultimate aim of the restructure is to reposition people into areas that they know little about, to ensure that they broaden their knowledge. Of course this also means that much time is needed familiarise themselves with the new area and overcome the uncertainty that results from knowing they need to make decisions on things that they know nothing about. Decision-making is thus slowed down considerably.

Office Re-organisation

Following the review and restructure, there will be a need to re-organise the office layout and dynamics. This will further disrupt the branch and cause arguments about who sits next to who and who gets the window seats, and so on. This can go on for years, and be the cause of long-held grudges.

New Procedures

A restructure often means that new administrative procedures need to be developed. This has the potential to cause confusion and delays to process-based operations. A good administrative process will involve as many steps as possible and have timelines that are not achievable.

This presents yet another opportunity to employ a consultant to review and/or redesign the process. This will take a very long time and be the cause of many arguments between the consultant and the people who will need to make the process work. As with many consultancies, it has the potential to spawn a number of further consultant contracts, ensuring that someone, somewhere, gets to spend their budget by the end of the financial year.

Business Planning

Of course, once all the reviews and restructures have taken place, they need to be incorporated into the next year’s Business Plan.

This is a golden opportunity for the senior bureaucrat to delay decision-making, cause untold stress to their employees, as well as cause havoc among stakeholders who have just got their head around the previous direction of the department or branch.

Changing the requirements of the business plan from one year to the next will not only be fun, but you can then sit back and watch the chaos unfold. Changing the format, the headings, the length of justifications required, and the time frames in which the planning must be completed, can foster such indecision and distraction from the core business of the organisation, that months can be spent unproductively arguing over the new format and whether it provides a good basis from which to work.

Stakeholders will have gnawed most of their fingernails away, waiting for confirmation that projects will continue or that support will still be given, by the time their project or funding application is approved.

Where a Board is involved in the business planning, this adds an extra layer of complexity to the process and has the potential to delay the process to such an extent that the business plan may not be approved until six months into the year for which it has been written!