Open Forum Events – Managing Change Dec 2014

Thanks for coming to visit us at the Managing Change Conference on the 9th December at the Manchester Conference Centre. Some of the highlights of the day….

Professor Colin Talbot, Professor of Government, University of Manchester talked about ‘A New Vision for Public Services: Changes beyond 2015’ about how permanent austerity was here to stay and how public sector managers are having to rethink the way public services are provided and paid for.

Jackie Lynton, Head of Transformation NHS Horizons outlined how ‘Disruption – an agent of constructive change’ was a powerful way for a small change team to influence such a big organisation like the NHS.

Debbie Simpson, the Founder and acting CEO of ICiPS (Institute for Continuous Improvement in Public Services) discussed ‘Transforming the Public Sector: Lessons learnt from continuous improvement’ and highlighted how organisations should avoid prescriptive change methodologies and don’t do enough to set-up the infrastructure to embed change, don’t focus enough on the people side of change by empowering employees and are hampered by leadership that focuses on short terms quick wins and revolution rather than long term evolution through continuous improvement.

Some interesting case studies were presented covering the benefits of scrum, a ‘Getting organised for change’ template, how agile project management can help deliver change, how Hull City Council engaged front line employees to improve service delivery and quality processes using Lean Six Sigma,

Professor Zoe Radnor, Professor of Service Operations Management, Loughborough University was her usual energetic and amusing self, starting her session with the ‘bicycle book’ story and then postulating ‘Is Lean a failed theory for public services?’ Drawing on her recent research which argues that the implementation of lean to date has been defective focusing on the technical tools without a business logic to validate it. She argues that lean can only achieve its potential in public services when based within a public service dominant business logic. Without this lean is doomed to fail both as a theory and a set of practices.

Dr Claire Radley, Senior Advisor to the Chair of the College of Policing spoke about ‘Leading substantive change: Experiences in Policing’. Police forces are facing budget cuts on an unprecedented scale combined with changes in the level and complexity of demand that requires new ways of working. The prevailing culture is to focus on task and to do that quickly; whilst a strength in some operational situations– it can hinder transformational change. Flurries of activity can create an illusion of change which is nominal rather than substantive. Whilst organisations might claim to have transformed their services, they rarely achieve sustainable whole system transformation. At a time when forces are developing increasingly complex working arrangements, it is essential to pay attention to behaviours and relationships that will either help or hinder the success of these arrangements. In this session she considered an approach to identifying and working with behaviours and relationships, and described the experience of doing so from a practitioner perspective.

Dr Steve Reeve, Institute of Change Management, Brighton Business School presented ‘More and more local: A shift in the public service change agenda?’ about how public change management programmes may need radical overhaul, and their focus should be on recalibrating. The management of change must adapt to a new and different role – that of facilitator of effective decentralisation and localisation.

More detail and some of the presentations can be found here: http://www.openforumevents.co.uk/managing-change-programme/