It's an established fact that our public sector employees are equally comparable to private sector in terms of their qualification and skills.
They have the same desire for work and also the same drive for accomplishment. The most challenging thing observed is the culture of our public sector organisations.
The origin of this culture in Pakistan can be traced far back in history, especially the Mughal period in the 15th centuries, but the broad foundation of the structure of the civil service in Pakistan was laid after the advent of the British in India and the establishment of East India Company.
Many of the observations made by foreign experts (after independence: as of 1953 report by Professor Rowland Egger of USA and in 1955 by Bernard Gladieux) regarding new civil service still appear correct.
Our public workforce is deteriorating day by day. This is asking for real implementation of quality management principles. These principles may be taught in three or four hours, but the actual application would take time.
At present, this paradigm shift (ISO 9000) can be a gigantic organisational change. But it can be managed effectively if leaders of the change take into account their concerned organisation's prevailing "culture".
Any change (and its attached benefits) will take longer to realise than one expects. Typically, it may take as long as two or three years to have QMS working at its peak and after this period we will have a public sector in place that should be considered ideal.
QUALITY IN DISTRICT GOVERNMENTS: This proposed system (QMS) is a set of concepts, tools and applications which have been successfully implemented in our manufacturing industry.
The system is now witnessing true implementation in the public sector (especially in local government) in many of the Asian countries with the following objectives: better service for citizens, more transparent management of the city, lower service costs through more efficient operations, more robust information management system, change mindsets in preparation for merger with other local governments, introduce external audits to enable a system that ensures fairness and continual improvement, and an invigorated organisation.
QMS is being used as a tool to promote reforms and review new plans, advance beyond a mode of operation based on experience and rule of thumb, define existing ambiguous work procedures more clearly, shift emphasis from planning to deliverables, use ISO 9000 to review the way the city is managed and make it more citizen-focused, establish the efficiency-first principle to achieve objectives.
Most of our newly-structured district governments have failed to address basic civic amenities. This model can be of great value for these local governments.
In Pakistan only health and education sector are witnessing experimentation with the new system. We think that all key public service managers should at least need to know the basics of quality management system, its possibilities and limitations (if any) for our unique public sector, and particularly the types of applications which could work for their organisations.
ASPECTS ASKING FOR CHANGE: The first issue we can face is: What aspect of our organisations are we trying to change? The first step in addressing this question is to identify the potential arenas of organisational change. These are External (comprises the organisation's environment), Macro-Internal (organisational behaviour), Micro-Internal (organisational behaviour that takes place within individual organisational units as standard operating procedures are developed, implemented and analysed).
We have identified the following four major pillars of quality management system that pertain to our public sector environment.
1. INNOVATION: Innovation in public sector is development of new policy designs and new standard operating procedures by public organisations to address changing public policy problems. It is very interesting to note here that from the last 57 years, we are heavily engaged in both the design and the management of policies and programmes without any gains.
The failure of various organisational reforms efforts is a result of attempts to quickly and uniformly apply an organisational reform methodology throughout an organisation, rather than seeing these methods as instruments of incremental organisational reform, senior management and their high-priced consultants see these ideas as all encompassing organisational ideologies. They are over-sold and misapplied and often fail for those reasons.
Successful innovation is often incremental and small-scale because the factors conditioning the success of innovative practices vary according to the organisation's internal capacity, external environment and goals or mission. Each organisation is different and faces varied situations at particular points in time. The techniques required to promote organisational innovation, must therefore be specifically determined as per situation.
2. BENCHMARKING: This carries finding, adapting and implementing best practices. This can be expanded both towards public and private sectors, but most important one is using researched analysis to improve services, operations and cost position.
THE IMPROVEMENT AGENDA UNDER THIS HEADING INCLUDE:
1. identify areas that are ripe for productivity/immediate gains, operation where visible problems have already been hinted at (citizen complaints).
2. Identifying, vital quality, cost and efficiency measures for those functions;
3. Conduct an expert opinion survey and literature review to find the best in class organisation for each measure;
4. Measure the best in class performance in the key areas identified;
5. Compare your organisation's performance against the best in class and quantify the gap;
6. Specify actions to close the performance gap to best in class and, if possible, the steps necessary to "leap-frog" the current industry leader; and, lastly implement those actions and monitor performance.
3. PRIVATIZATION: Utilizing private or non-governmental organisations in the implementation of public policy, often replacing direct government provision of particular programmes or services. This takes four different forms.
The first is contracting out functions that government agencies used to implement with their own staff. Management control is still retained by government, and the option of ending a contract and resuming direct government control is retained.
The second form of privatisation involves turning over a government-run enterprise such as PTCL to the private sector, by selling government assets and monopolies to private firms.
The third form of privatisation is a public-private partnership, where government and the private sector work jointly, with clearly defined roles, on a public purpose.
The fourth form of privatisation is public policy designed to encourage private behaviour.
4. TEAM MANAGEMENT: Team management can be a 'stand alone' innovation technique that can help facilitate co-operation and co-ordination among organisational members, cope with downsizing and/or help flatten the organisational hierarchy.
Our public organisations are increasingly populated by highly educated, highly skilled knowledge workers who are capable and more interested in working together to achieve shared objectives than being told what to do, but the need here is to organise their abilities through a system.
An effective team management structure is rather meaningless without a clear mission and organisational consensus around key objectives.
And, similar to TQM, team management can "bounce against" fundamental systems that do not work.
In such circumstances, to achieve sustainable improvement, a team management innovation must be combined with either reengineering or some form of privatisation.
RECOMMENDATIONS: After a thorough study of local government system and QMS implementation in the developed Asian nations following qualitative and psychological conclusions have been identified: the QMS sets the stage for changing employees' attitudes, it provides tools to help the staff change their approach to work, work procedures have become clearer and more specific, services provided to citizens on a face-to-face basis have improved, the staff are no longer inhibited from trying newer and better ways, they now have a system in place to address problems, they have formed the habit of considering " the need" and "the priority".