Distinguishing the real from the surreal in management reform: Suggestions for beleaguered administrators in the government of Canada

Canadian Public Administration

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 453-476

  Clark, Ian D ^a   Swain, Harry ^b  

^a Ontario Council of University Libraries   (Canada)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33244471951     PISSN: 00084840     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-7121.2005.tb01198.x     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. We use the term management improvement interchangeably with the term management reform. The former somewhat more modest term has been common in Canada, and for a period in the 1970s the Treasury Board had a management improvement branch. The term public management reform is used in the international public administration literature to refer to significant changes in administrative practice since the 1960s and particularly since the 1980s.
2. See, for example, the introductory section of the Privy Council Office's Guidance for Deputy Ministers. The body of the text is a useful description of the constitutional and legislated responsibilities of the deputy minister but the introduction contains admonitions that even the saintly Thomas More would have trouble living up to: The Deputy Minister articulates a corporate vision for his or her department that is shared and lived throughout the organization.... The Deputy Minister engenders trust within the department and promotes an organizational environment focussed on achieving results. The Deputy Minister puts in place the essential conditions - internal coherence, corporate discipline and alignment to strategic outcomes - for effective strategic direction and the delivery of results in support of the government's agenda. As a matter of course, information on results should be gathered and used to make departmental decisions, and public reporting should be balanced, accurate, and easy to understand. The Deputy Minister assigns responsibilities and authorities for results consistent with resources and capabilities. In the management of public resources, the Deputy Minister ensures the departmental control regime is integrated and effective, and its underlying principles are clear to all staff... the Deputy Minister defines the corporate context and practices for managing organizational risk proactively. The Deputy Minister must ensure that continuous improvement is central to the delivery of services to Canadians and that, in the development of policies and programs, the views of Canadians are actively considered. (Privy Council Office web site [Ottawa: 2003], at http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?Page= Publications&Language=E&doc =gdm-gsm/gdm-gsm_doc_e.htm
3. In her comments on a draft of this paper, a highly respected (and recently retired) manager, wrote: "Our management team estimated at one point that we were spending more than 35% of our time coping with understanding and responding to frameworks and other change management initiatives. Adding to that the implementation of new rules and paper-work on 'accountability,' and we found we were spending less than 45% of our time on actually delivering the various programs for which we were responsible."
4. Until the recent shift of the management pendulum toward greatly increased control from the centre.
5. Frederick W. Taylor, Scientific Management (1911, reprinted 1964 by Harper & Row, New York) is the canonical reference, summarizing more than three decades of work in time and motion studies, standardization, and performance-based compensation.
6. Paul G. Thomas, "Performance Measurement, Reporting and Accountability," Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, Public Policy Paper 23 (Regina: University of Regina, February 2004), pp. 2, 11 and 12. These themes are further developed in a paper by Thomas prepared for future publication by the Conference Board in Canada entitled The Future of Performance Measurement and Performance Management in the Public Sector.
7. This list draws on Thomas, "Performance Measurement," pp. 46-7, and on Christopher Pollitt, Xavier Girre, Jeremy Lonsdale, Robert Mul, Hilkka Summa, and Mary Waerness, Performance or Compliance? Performance Audit and Public Management in Five Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1999).
8. See Canada, Auditor General, "A Model for Rating Departmental Performance Reports," chapter 6 of the April 2002 Report (Ottawa: Office of the Auditor General, Ottawa, 2002). Exhibit 6.1 in this report provides a good historical review of the disappointingly slow progress since 1981 along the path toward a performance management utopia.
9. The governance structures of the offices differ from country to country. In Canada's case, the public auditor is an "executive-appointed auditor to serve the legislature." See Sharon L. Sutherland, "The politics of audit: the federal Office of the Auditor General in comparative perspective," CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 29, no. 1 (Spring 1986), and Pollitt et al, Performance or Compliance?
10. Sutherland, "The politics of audit."
11. For a detailed description of the role of the accounting and consulting firms, see Denis Saint-Martin, Building the New Managerialist State: Consultants and the Politics of Public Sector Reform in Comparative Perspective (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), and the review of the book by Ian D. Clark in Isuma (Summer 2001), pp. 138-40.
12. See Graham T. Allison, "Public and Private Management: Are They Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Respects?" reprinted in Jay M. Shafritz and Albert C. Hyde, eds., Classics of Public Administration, 4th ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997), pp. 14-26.
13. Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat, Modern Comptrollership Initiative: A Progress Report on Government-wide Implementation (Ottawa: Treasury Board Secretariat, March 2003), p. 3.
14. Although it is too early to know how this initiative will play out, the model bears an eerie resemblance to the pre-Glassco system of a central comptroller general with agents in all departments who had the financial signing authority. This hyper-centralized system has for a half-century provided the rhetorical epitome of all that was un-modern about financial management in the Government of Canada.
15. This is the terminology used in the early 1990s when there was a Human Resources Development Branch in the Treasury Board Secretariat and a Human Resources Development Council of deputy ministers.
16. See Canada, President of the Treasury Board, Human Resources Management Framework, A Reference Tool for Managers (Ottawa: Treasury Board Secretariat, 2001),
17. and Canada, Interde-partmental Human Resources Planning Working Group, Human Resources Planning in the Public Service of Canada - Rebuilding Our Capacity, Final Report (Ottawa, Treasury Board Secretariat, 2004).
18. John W. Langford, "Acting on values: An ethical dead end for public servants," CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 47 no. 4 (Winter 2004), p. 429.
19. Peter Aucoin, "Restructuring Government for the Management and Delivery of Public Services," in Guy B. Peters and Donald J. Savoie, eds., Taking Stock: Assessing Public Sector Reforms (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 1998), p. 337.
20. Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 118.
21. Lindquist wrote: "several waves of reform have washed across countries during the last 150 years, whether they involved building, re-orienting, or rationalizing the public sector. With every incoming tide expectations were high (how else does one initiate reform?)"
22. See Evert Lindquist, "Review of Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis," in Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 3, no. 3 (November 2001), pp. 339-42.
23. Christopher Pollitt, The Essential Public Manager (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003), p. 152.
24. Henry Mintzberg, Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange World of Organizations (New York: The Free Press, 1989). Mintzberg's later look at how management work differs from the theory of strategic planning makes distinctions similar to ours: "planning on the left side, managing on the right."
25. See Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
26. Christopher Hood, The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 206.
27. Donald J. Savoie, Breaking the Bargain: Public Servants, Ministers and Parliament (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 279.
28. Canada, Treasury Board Secretariat, TBS Management Accountability Framework (Ottawa: Treasury Board Secretariat, 2004), Treasury Board Secretariat web site at http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/maf-crg/maf-crg_e.asp. The framework is an impressively concise compilation of the expectations of all the relevant central policies. However, the Utopian nature of the framework is evident from the opening paragraphs.
29. The human resources management framework was published as a "reference tool for managers" by the Treasury Board Secretariat in 2001. Responsibility for most of these policies was transferred in 2004 to the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada. Documents can be found on the agency's web site from its home page: http:// www.hrma-agrh.gc.ca/ index_e.asp.
30. These documents can all be found from the Modern Comptrollership section of the Treasury Board Secretariat web site: http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/cmo_mfc/ index_e.asp.
31. Evert Lindquist, "Business Planning Comes to Ottawa: Critical Issues and Future Directions," in Peter Aucoin and Donald Savoie, eds., Strategic Management in the Public Sector: Lessons from Program Review (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 1998), pp. 143-68.
32. The evolution of the Treasury Board Secretariat and the other central agencies is described in Evert Lindquist, Ian D. Clark, and James Mitchell, "Reshaping Ottawa's Centre of Government: Martin's Reforms in Historic Perspective," in G. Bruce Doern, ed., How Ottawa Spends 2004-2005: Mandate Change in the Paul Martin Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004), pp. 317-47.
33. Sharon L. Sutherland, "'Biggest Scandal in Canadian History': HRDC Audit Starts Probity War," Critical Perspectives in Accounting 14, nos. 1-2 (2003), pp. 187-224;
34. David A. Good, The Politics of Public Management: The HRDC Audit of Grants and Contributions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
35. When Prime Minister Turner followed Trudeau, he eliminated the ministries of state for economic and social development and dramatically reduced the size of cabinet. When Prime Minister Campbell followed Mulroney, she agreed to the most dramatic consolidation of departments in recent memory. The changes introduced by Prime Minister Martin, mostly before the June 2004 election, are detailed in Lindquist, Clark, and Mitchell, "Reshaping Ottawa."
36. Savoie, Breaking the Bargain, p. 234.
37. Hilkka Summa, "Definitions and Frameworks," in Pollitt et al, Performance or Compliance?, p. 16.
38. For entertaining, even alarming, descriptions of the public battles led by James Macdonell over the Auditor General's Act and by Ken Dye on the Petrofina case, see Sharon L. Sutherland, "On the Audit Trail of the Auditor General," CANADIAN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION 23 no. 4 (Winter 1980), pp. 616-44, and "The politics of audit."