The public sector needs to be organised far smarter
Even though the public sector has done a lot of work to streamline their organisations, there is still work to do. The development of public organisations is moving rapidly from traditional case processing to digital and automated workflows.
Public organisations often do not allocate the right resources for digitisation projects. Today, it is common for employees to work in limited units with specific operational goals focused on handling cases, reporting to their own line manager. This means the organisations are geared to deliver ‘upwards’ and to serve the political system they are a part of.
One solution is to create an organisation made up of overlapping circles rather than tiered boxes, making it possible to move continuously as the projects develop. The employees are no longer associated with one office under the leadership of one manager but are a part of a big team of resources moving to the tasks where they are needed.
Management is still there. However, it has a far greater cross-cutting management assignment and an even more important role in finding the right employees, even though there will be no physical contact between employee and manager on a daily basis.
If you want to run a project using Agile or Scrum, it will not help to maintain traditional decision-making processes. Instead, management must take responsibility for people across sectors and focus on creating success opportunities for the projects.
If each manager prioritises how employees are allocated, like today, we risk projects advancing without taking into account the development of other projects and organisations.
By working across public organisations, good experiences and valuable knowledge from one project are conveyed to other projects. Public organisations that exchange knowledge and experience will avoid spending time and resources on solving the same tasks in several places.
The model needs the courage to change. Moving from departments owning employees to using people as a versatile resource that handles a professional task in any organisation will be a major shift. At the same time, changing the perception of leadership to be based around projects rather than people will create cultural challenges. Therefore, when recruiting new professionals, you need to look at the organisation's professional skills collectively. Only then will we have a public sector that controls all projects.
Read the full article in Børsen.
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