Advanced bureaucracy 101 - restructures, reviews, re-organisation

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!