Competency 5 of 8 - Barriers

“A digital era public service leader can identify the opportunities to improve government operations, service delivery or policy making, and can overcome structural and institutional obstacles to change."

Background to this competency

Learning how to develop and then implement innovative proposals for change is at the heart of much public service teaching.

Because there is a lot of university and non-university training already being delivered on policy development, negotiation, persuasion and coalition building this competency may seem duplicative. But there are specifically digital era considerations that mean that some of this teaching needs updating.

Some of the most central digital era government practices can create tensions with the standard operating procedures of pre-existing government functions. For example, most finance department's conceptions of good practice in project planning will be fundamentally different to most software teams.

In order for governments to meet the needs of their stakeholders, these tensions need to be resolved or overcome, helping all parts of the government infrastructure to pull together.

What this means in practice is that public servants need to be ready and prepared to handle the semi-predictable tensions that will likely develop between their teams and HR, finance and legal functions, and be inclusive and visionary enough to move everyone forward together.

Meaning of the competency

Public service leaders need to:

Be able to negotiate, persuade and build coalitions using skills developed outside of any digital era specific teaching.
Be able to predict and mitigate the most common conflicts between teams working to digital era project management techniques, and legal, HR and finance functions, before they occur.
Be able to engage leaders in HR, legal, finance and other functions in a conversation about how historic processes need to modernise to match modern service expectations and standards.

In practice we believe that most students going through MPA and MPP programmes will be exposed to numerous persuasion, negotiation and coalition building skills. The additions recommended by this competency can probably be taught through digital era case studies contained within those main classes. However MPP students are generally exposed to less implementation overall, and so the amount of additional learning required to adapt to this competency may be greater than for MPA students.

Why was this competency developed and agreed?

Our list of 8 Digital Era Competencies is designed to sit alongside current, existing competencies often taught in schools of public administration or public policy. All eight of our competencies therefore represent capabilities that are either not being taught to current and future public servants or that require some updating to succeed in the digital era.

Our community has seen considerable conflict between key government functions, and new digital era government functions. It is vitally important that public servants with digital era ambitions understand where tensions are likely to lie, and how those can be mitigated both in the short term (through negotiation) and in the long term (through skills and culture change).

Reading Suggestion

What we mean when we say "Show the Thing" - Giles Turnbull

Administrative burden: Policymaking by other means Herd, P., & Moynihan, D. P.

Bureaucratic Competence and Success in Dealing with Public Bureaucracies Gordon, L. K.

How to make friends and winfluence people - Alex Blandford