Honesty has broken out in most of the public sector about the need to cut public spending. The debate is moving on to a question of when and what to cut, rather than if.
For the last two years, senior civil servants have been trying to work out how to deliver more Ministerial commitments with less money (more for less). The obvious answer here is to increase productivity. And techniques such as lean, BPR , systems thinking have become widely popular from local councils to health trusts to most Departments of State.
Now Ministers have been instructed to think about what they can stop doing, or rather, which programmes are ‘lower priority’. The problem is no longer how do deliver more for less, but how to deliver less for less.
Different concepts come into play when the focus moves from increasing productivity to stopping low priority work and taking cost out of the system. To take cost out, managers will be thinking about more radical concepts such as de-layering, rapid outsourcing and straight up downsizing - though they are unlikely to use some of these terms. To select priorities (ie. to work out what to cut), concepts such as portfolio analysis offer a guide - and to get a tighter grip on spend from the bottom up, fine grained techniques such as zero-based budgeting make great sense.
As circumstances change, so to do the appropriate tools of management. Whether it’s an upturn or crisis, smart executive makes sure they are equipped with the knowledge they need to lead any type of change.
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