Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Preamble
The effectiveness and efficiency of local governments directly depend on the factual content and
organization of their activities. Any serious attempt to improve operation of the local administration
in CEE and CIS and enhance their capacity in dealing with local issues faces the need to have a
clear description of what is taking place at the outset of the project.
As our experience says - most of the things that look normal and obvious to officials are in fact
very questionable. The actual scope of activities never fully complies with the existing legislative
regulations and with demands of life. Local governments, while complaining about the budget
deficiency, do many things that they formally should not do, and fail to do some things that are
really obligatory for them.
Organizational structures and corresponding patterns of organizational behavior are often inherited
from the previous regimes or transitional times of total disorder and accidental organizational
decisions. One could see unreasonable layers of hierarchy and even less reasonable partition of
integral activities into separated functions.
Many organizational procedures were designed to please supervising institutions, bosses or
officers themselves - not the clients. These procedures are far from being effective and
transparent. They provide unlimited possibilities for waste resources, and often provoke corruption.
Measures that are established to keep public informed and involved are often insufficient or even
substituted with the opposite ones – to ensure that public would not know how certain decisions
are made. Personnel management is often based on executing orders and maintaining obedience
to chiefs, rather than on any objective criteria of success in performing corresponding tasks.
Both external (national, federal etc.) legislative framework and internal regulations are often very
tangled, unclear, and provide no guidelines to asses the performance of the personnel and find out
where the poor results are caused by the lack of motivation and skills, and where they are just
consequences of the deficient organizational order.
Thus, considerably serious and costly projects of organizational capacity building in local
governments should be necessarily based on a more or less complete assessment of the current
state of things. By analogy with international practice of the assessment of management system
according to a certain set of rules that comes from the best practices (e.g. ISO 9001), such an
assessment may also be called a "management audit".
Local governments, which are committed to make investments in improvement of their functioning,
demand for such an audit. It may also be initiated by the Councils who want to know if the
executive branch is well organized and performs its functions well.
In other cases, the executives, who plan organizational changes, want to have a complete and
clear picture of the actual state of things, their roots and grounds. What is necessary and what is
voluntary, what is regular and what is accidental? What is considerable for changes and what is a
“mile stone”? Where and when do most of the pitfalls occur? Is there any room for improvement of
effectiveness and efficiency? Answers for these and many similar questions are far beyond the
obvious, and they are extremely important.
Organizational assessment may be useful at any time, but after the elections, when new leaders
come to power and intend to utilize the advantage of having considerably ‘free hands’ for changing
some or many organizational decisions, such an audit is usually most welcomed.
All these things look obvious, and one could only be surprised, how little is done in developing of
management audit tools in respect to local governments in CEE and CIS. These methodological
recommendations are aimed if not to fill the gap, then to start doing it.
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