Putting a value on governance - The PGPA Review
Governance means many things to many people. Most of us can recognise when it goes bad or doesnt quite meet the 'sniff' test, but 'good' governance, the kind that lasts beyond immediate leaders and talented, hardworking and committed staff, is much harder to identify and foster.
In my 24 years as an APS employee, including three years managing Comcover (the general insurer of Commonwealth liability), my experience was that good governance was almost always tied to strong culture, requiring strong structural and behaviour parameters which were consistently and transparently applied.
The Commonwealth's Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (PGPA Act) has been an attempt to enshrine some basic principles of governance in the Australian Public Service. Recently, the PGPA Act has been the subject of a review by Elizabeth Alexander AM and David Thodey AO, and they have just published a Consultation draft (attached). Comments on the review can be provided by 22 June 2018.
The reviewers consulted widely and received many submissions. The review has made 46 recommendations touching on many areas of governance under the PGPA Act. While a deeper synopsis of the review will be the subject of a longer article, for now, a key area of interest for me is Recommendations 10-14, which deal with managing and engaging with risk and the Commonwealth's Risk Management Policy, a policy implemented by Comcover while I was there.
Their findings, which are not entirely revelatory, include that:
the Risk Management Policy has improved government risk management practices but the pace of reform is patchy across entities and too slow
more work is need to embed effective risk management into policy development and program management
officials at all levels need to be incentivised to better engage with risk
the APS overall remains too risk averse.
The reviewers focus on good governance as being the key to improve risk management and public service outcomes overall, in particular stating in the first sentence of their Executive Summary that:
Strong governance, performance and accountability practice drives enormous value for organisations (my emphasis).
And therein lies a key part of the problem - a critical part of actualising strong governance is convincing people that it DOES drive organisational value.
Value that you probably never will be able to cost, estimate or assess in a monetary way.
Value that actually costs time, effort and money to implement.
Value that is not actually valued by many people in organisations.
So the starting point for me is to convince staff that good governance MATTERS. That it is part of being a responsible, ethical, paid up member of a group of people responsible for the very significant expenditure of public money.
That it is not someone else's job...
That it is not something that gets in the way of their job.
That it IS their job.