Chief Executives may not have confronted the causes of failure of their environmental services directors
The Environmental Services ‘block’ consists of services dealing with the group of most demanding public interfacing and high volume services. It appears to be the most difficult one for Councils to manage. There is very little consensus on the best options to pursue. The principal challenges are determined by the nature of these services, as follows:
1. Environmental Services are more capital intensive than other Council services and where they are provided by in-house teams, they tend to be under capitalised owing to stringent control on capital investment and lack of funding in general caused by poor justification of the business case for managing these portfolio services.
2. Where the services are outsourced, contractors tend to negotiate high service charges in order to protect their margins. They also want contracts of increasing durations with more contingency clauses to protect their business against risks. Councils are known to fail to carry out basic 'input-output analysis - what is going into the service and what is coming out.
3. Many Councils do not prepare outline business cases (OBCs) to justify investment in the service capacity. The availability of public money is taken for granted. The cost of capital has never been understood by the level of management at which crucial decisions are made.
4. The services suffer from skill shortages on the one hand but are heads of services are also known to be protective of their traditional resourcing practices; non-specialists can also perform many technical jobs, they claim.
5. Outsourced contracts are increasingly performance based but Councils have not prioritised investment in information strategies (IS). Consequently the application of information technology can be flawed. The IT service may also be under-funded and in the end the best that managers can offer is a scatter-gun approach.
Options for Service Improvement
Environmental Services Directors can exercise several types of innovative management options for trying to improve performance. In practice councils prefer to appoint a pair of safe hands to run these multifunctional departments using traditional ‘linear functions’ where the service head is expected to bring in content based skills, with emphasis on delivery through traditional structures, with a resulting bias towards ‘more of the same’. This is generally based on an annual operating cycle with short or failing time frames for research and implementation. As far as performance improvement is concerned, this approach is unlikely to take services from ‘fair’ to ‘excellent’ rating unless radical changes are made, along with cohesive argument for investment to deal with chronic under-capacity.
Opportunities for service improvement are missed where councils fail to run these services as fully orchestrated and crosscutting service portfolios that are motivated by challenge, innovation, investment in processes, business continuity and performance management to meet both predetermined outputs and outcomes.
Councils have to respond to emerging opportunities but also need to develop deliberate strategies for change which result in improving capacity to deliver in the short term and greater capability to address growing demand for the future. These strategies are focused on a three-year Business Planning cycle.
Councils fail to combine optimal approaches to change management to suit the business needs of the services. This, where undertaken, should provide a bias towards crosscutting portfolio development wherever possible. It highlights the need for the design and delivery of leadership development to facilitate change management, consisting of challenging conventional wisdom and service delivery models through Best Value preparation and implementation but at the same time leading and preparing departments to develop strategies for change and to meet judgement criteria for improving services under CPA regimes. The most effective combination of strategy will follow when the current departmental managers’ ‘tacit’ knowledge is built into the strategy.
In most cases line managers know what is good for the service but they cannot relate to strategies and improvement planning scenarios when service directors and the chief executives starve them of oxygen of enterprise and innovation.
The Value of Portfolio Skills
Ideally, chief executives and environmental service directors should have a track record of achieving turnarounds and managing change through a number of change management roles covering large scale and dedicated programmes of management consisting of the mastery of process management skills in a high capital-intensive context. This is easier said than done.
Chief executives may have to take risks and recruit more entreprenurial executive directors. Better still, chief executives would do well to become 'change champions' and manage the process of change from their own offices.
