Quality in public service and private enterprise

In last week's post, I talked about some of the topics that come up when you start to evaluate the performance of government institutions through the lens of Quality. And in fact the International Organization for Standardization has issued a guidance standard—ISO 18091—to support the application of ISO 9001 in a government context. But when you try to apply Quality principles to governments, you find right away that there are important differences between public and private organizations. Here are a few that I can see; please feel free to add more in the Comments.

Shortly after I started this post, in a fortuitous synchronicity, the Excellence Connection channel posted a discussion on YouTube, in which Tracey Polowich of Organizational Excellence Specialists interviews Dan Batista of the Institute for Citizen Centred Service (ICCS) on the subject of customer-orientation in public service. I use some elements of that discussion in what follows.

What's different about the public-sector environment?

Several things. For example, ....   

Financial constraints are different

There's a stereotype in some corners of the private sector that governments operate without any financial constraints at all, because a government can always raise taxes or else print more money. Of course this can't be true in any literal sense: raising taxes isn't as easy as it sounds, and creating fiat money out of thin air can have bad long-term consequences. Still, nobody worries that the government might actually go broke and have to shut its doors. (By the same token, if the lines are too long when you go to get your driver's license, you can't just take your business to a competitor instead.) 

On the other side of the ledger, projects can't be justified by Return-On-Investment, because government activity is not profit-generating. If you fill the potholes on Main Street and replace some of those stop signs with traffic lights you'll make traffic safer and residents happier, but it won't bring you any increased revenues. The absence of a quantitative ROI does not, however, mean you shouldn't fix the potholes or install the traffic lights! Batista makes the point in his interview that the relevant consequences of good or bad service are (respectively) enhancement or erosion of the overall public trust in government, rather than a bottom-line quantifiable in dollars.

Customers can want different things

In last week's post we talked about how hard it can be to identify who the real customers are for a governmental organization. But identifying them is only the first problem. Next comes getting them to agree on what they want from you.  

If you work for a private business that makes widgets, you know what your customers want: good quality widgets for the price, delivered on time, that don't break often, and that are backed up by prompt service when they do. In some government agencies, the demands are almost as tangible: your constituents want to see potholes filled, they want to know their tap water is drinkable, and they want their kids to learn how to read and write. 

But issues of policy can rapidly become controversial, partly (at a regional or national level) because different localities have different needs. A policy that benefits Ontario might not be good for Alberta; a policy that's popular in Los Angeles or San Francisco might be rejected in Iowa or Arkansas. There is a defined process for deciding among these different needs—namely the political process—but sometimes that process leaves the losing constituency unsatisfied and unreconciled. This is a problem that Quality expertise by itself cannot fix. As I argued in the first weeks of this blog, Quality means getting what you want; so if you can't come to an agreement on what you want, Quality methods will struggle to find a foothold.

There are limits to what you can change

Back at the widget factory, let's say that the preventive maintenance procedure is failing, and the equipment is falling apart. You pull an 8D team together, analyze it in detail, and find the gap that's causing the problem; then you rewrite and republish the procedure, and the problem is solved. Done and dusted. Sure, the details might be complex; but conceptually the hard part is the root-cause analysis: after that, fixing the problem is more or less straightforward.

But if you find a flaw in the operating procedures of a public agency, it might turn out that the procedure was defined that way by legislation, and that it's not so easy to change. Or the situation might be more extreme than that. As an American, I regularly have to explain to colleagues from other countries the process by which we elect our Presidents. Usually they tell me that it sounds complicated; and they ask why in all these years no-one has ever thought to simplify it? The answer is that people have suggested simplifications from time to time; but the method is written into Article 2 of the Constitution, and it can be very difficult to change the Constitution. This is another instance of the situation above, where the Quality process runs smack dab into the political process. When that happens, it is safest to assume that the political process wins.

So what's the same about the public-sector environment?

At an operational level, all the basic principles of Quality management apply equally well to the public and private sectors. In his interview, Batista points out that in order to achieve operational excellence, public organizations require:

• Commitment by senior leadership to working in a citizen-centric way.
• A clear and compelling vision of excellent service, understood by everyone in the organization.
• Employee empowerment, so the people on the front lines can make decisions on the spot (within the boundaries of legislation) to solve the problems of their clients who need help.
• Regular training and attention to supplies, so that the employees of each agency have the physical and procedural tools to do their jobs.
• Regular attention to the Voice of the Customer, collecting feedback from constituents through as many channels as possible in order to facilitate, finally, ...
• Continuous improvement, every day. 

Does this list look familiar? It should. And the upshot is that even though many of the boundary conditions around the QMS—in essence, the Context of the Organization—are very different in public organizations compared to private ones, the day-to-day work of Quality is broadly the same.