Capability Reviews: Progress and Next Steps - The Civil Service

• A new business planning framework and process, linked to strategic priorities;resource allocation clearly linked to priorities (FCO).Case study: Business planning in the FCO‘One of the most unpopular days of the year for any manager in the FCO is the daywhen instructions thud onto the desk (or fill up the available space in your in-box)asking for draft objectives for the coming year. Even worse when you have to draftobjectives for the next three years, and worse still when the system has changed –yet again! This was the scenario facing the Business Planning Team in the FCO onceour board made the decision to adopt business planning practices earlier this year.But why change to business planning at all? First, the objective-setting exercises wehad run for years in ever more complex ways weren’t delivering what we wanted.Second, the Capability Reviewers had told us clearly that our planning practicesweren’t up to scratch. So we had to do something.We had to devise a business planning model pretty much from scratch, test it, rollit out and get buy-in from across the disparate FCO network: from policy wonks inLondon, and from super-embassies such as Washington to the smallest posts onthe smallest islands. The business planning model we devised has an inbuilt tensionbetween resourcing our Departmental Strategic Objectives (which the CapabilityReviewers liked) and resourcing our large overseas network (which, at first, theydidn’t). We had to be sure that our plan was the most appropriate one for us. Wecompared business planning frameworks across Whitehall and in local government.We brought in consultants to give our model a health check. We set up aconsultative group and a project board to run our ideas by.In the FCO, we traditionally burnish a project until it is gleaming and new and thenlaunch it fully formed. Dints and scars quickly accumulate. We then tinker with it,during which time interest turns to the next big thing. This time, we decided to use2007/08 as a trial year to roll out an unpolished, rough-hewn framework across thewhole network, which meant that everyone was involved in trying to make it work.Then we had to sell it to staff. We needed to impress upon everyone that businessplanning required a culture change in how the FCO goes about its work. We tookadvantage of all the FCO’s internal communications systems to keep businessplanning to the fore in people’s minds: we established a web page on the FCO’sintranet; the Permanent Secretary, who is the driving force behind our businessplanning, regularly sent messages to staff; we drafted templates and guidance foreach stage of the process, etc.We’ve just completed our mid-year review, using the new framework. It has been asuccess (our newly arrived, externally appointed Director General Finance couldn’tbelieve the FCO had not done this before). It’s not been perfect, but we didn’t expectit to be. It’s less ‘process light’ than we wanted, but corrections resulting from ourcurrent ‘lessons learned’ exercise should deal with that; this year it’s been less‘benefit heavy’ than it needs to be – but again, as the process beds down, we areconfident it will deliver. It takes at least a couple of years to run a good businessplanning process. But it has shown that it should provide the return we need to bringtogether more effectively what we do and the resources we need to do it.46 COMMON CAPABILITY GAPS: PROGRESS AND NEXT STEPS