The above-stated headline screamed across Today front page showing that the government has finally recognized that a system based on purely on grades, scholars, meritocracy and talents alone may not work well in today's highly competitive world as posted by forumites in this feedback channel earlier.
However, the intention to recruit insurgents who can manage tasks with creativity and entrepreneurship and people-oriented or problem-solving approaches is really nothing new as a similar recruitment exercise was supposed to have taken place sometime ago to induce mid-career private sector employees to join the civil service to challenge past assumptions and practices.
In order that the civil service will be revolutionalized as suggested in this headline, it is critical to understand the psychological constraints affecting the civil service.
The first important constraint is the existence of tangible fears by civil servants should they try to solve on-the-spot problems based on their own creativity and entrepreneurship or out-of-the-box solutions, they may incur the displeasures of seniors.
There may be the fears too that in the event of any complaints about disparity of treatments due to such entrepreneurial management, civil servants concerned may be consequently taken to task by anti-corruption agency unsupported by their seniors.
To overcome such psychological barriers, the civil service must therefore unambiguously decentralize certain decision-making or operational work processes to empower and enable frontline departments or civil servants in exercise of a creative or problem-solving approach.
At least, the civil servants will be supported by the department or senior for exercise of creativity or entrepreneurship within certain established frameworks. Otherwise, there will be simply too many dangerous snares or booby traps inherently created by certain overwhelming past policies or directives from the seniors.
The rationale of adopting a decentralized empowering managing process as described below I hope will be published to help overcome such psychological problems:-
SHORTCOMINGS OF EXISTING MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
First, a quick overview of some secrets of success.
According to Mark Twain, ?The secret of getting ahead is to get started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex and overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.?
However, many people today still manage tasks from their minds or intuitions making decisions on hunches instead of result-oriented,or empowered accountable or transparent work processes.
There is still the constant harping on individual qualities like Leadership, talents, Positive Work Attitude, Foresight & Insight etc leading unwittingly to complexities, justifications, self-centeredness hampering doable and practical solutions.
On the other hand, it is already well proven that many tasks today are efficiently performed in the advent of computers and technologies in divided component processes self-regulated by internal quality-time-cost relationship as in on-line banking, e-trading, travel-ticketing, CAD-CAM designing, online transportation, logistics, stock-trading, accounting, telecommunications etc.
DOABLE WORK PROCESSES
Hence, there is no doubt that works can be planned in decentralized doable work processes to enable or empower civil servants to carry out their works professionally in steps such as: (1) Study of Ideas, (2) Enquiry, (3) Securing Contracts and (4) Contract Administration (Operations), to solve problems on the ground.
Operations can be developed like project management in doable core activities in ten departments, namely: 1.(General) 2.(Human Resource) 3.(Revenue) 4.(Accounts) 5.(Marketing) 6.(Services-all outsourced activities) 7.(Facility) 8.(Enforcement) 9. (Production) 10.(Compliance) with monitoring in one-page department reports supported by detailed quality-time-cost work forms.
Once such decentralized work processes are set, task performances can be easily assessed to provide data and information e.g. ?1?, ?2? or ?3? (or percentages) being ?non-attainment?, ?attainment? and ?excellent attainment? of internal task relationships with corrections made to variances of "1" in a two-way communication task-line.
SEQUENTIAL WORK FORMS
The decentralized work processes can be planned and performed in accountable and transparent manner with coordination and knowledge applications by all civil servants to avoid all the top-down conceptual or policy approaches.
Top or senior management should decentralize tasks in (1) administrative forms, - head office (2) department reports - operations (3) work forms - detailed works to attain problem-solving and result-oriented management excellence.
All civil servants should be able to practise their crafts and expertise in every field with openness, equity, accountability and transparency to produce results and good governance.
For general discussions of alternative views of governance by all forumites please.
