Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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may be considered ‘as implementation plans, setting forth the major steps, accountabilities, deadlines, and resource requirements involved in achieving the target’ (Eadie, 1983, p. 448). Once strategic issues are identified, an action plan should be formulated to deal with them. In the above examples of strategic issues, a response to the first would be to offer more money or better conditions for the accountants to stay. If an organization feels its existence is threatened by forms of privatization, it would need to be pre-emptive, to make a case for its continuance, and as well to think of contingencies – other alternatives for the staff – if the worst happened. Eighthly, organizational vision, Bryson’s final point, is rather more vague than the mission, but is meant to provide a code, a vision, a shared view of those within the organization for the future. Bryson is not, however, really clear how this differs from the mission. One parallel may be the development in the United Kingdom where public, and formerly public, organizations publish ‘citizen’s charters’ to govern their relationship with clients. Presumably, part of the idea is to provide a shared vision to those inside the organization to govern their behaviour. In sum, strategic planning, as set out by Bryson, does offer much to the public sector. He argues that ‘at its best, strategic planning requires broad-scale information gathering, an exploration of alternatives, and an emphasis on the future implications of present decisions’. It can ‘facilitate communication and participation, accommodate divergent interests and values, and foster orderly decision making and successful implementation’ (Bryson, 1988, p. 5). It should be regarded as an adjunct to the political process, one with limits. These limits may be greater than in the private sector, a factor which changes the way plans are drawn up and what they contain, but does not diminish the value of the process. Strategic planning does have limitations in the public sector, in precisely the same way as it did in the private sector. Frequently the only product of the process in the early years of strategic planning in the public sector was to produce a formal document. This documentation was ‘all too often the main, if not the sole product’ (Eadie, 1989, p. 170). There may be paralysis by analysis, and so on. However, it is markedly better than planning by budget or simple forecasting. More recently, however, there have been moves towards strategic management, a more comprehensive approach again deriving from the private sector (see Elcock, 1996). Strategic management Strategic Management 141 As noted before, the next stage in the evolution of planning in the private sector is that of strategic management, argued to be a more realistic approach than strategic planning. The public sector, too, is moving towards strategic management as a result of similar limitations found with strategic planning.
142 Public Management and Administration Strategic management aims to integrate the planning function with the overall management task. Beyond this point, there are differing views as to exactly what is entailed in strategic management. As in the private sector, strategic planning involves analysing the environment for opportunities or threats, and formulating strategic plans to exploit those opportunities or cope with threats. In one view, strategic management includes these two aspects of strategic planning and extends strategy development to include strategy implementation and strategic control (Montanari, Daneke and Bracker, 1989, p. 305). McCaffery agrees, arguing that strategic management includes strategic planning, but it is ‘a more inclusive concept, emphasizing dynamic interaction with the environment and an incremental methodology that allows for scanning the environment to choose the target that will yield the most benefit for the effort expended’ (1989, p. 194). Bozeman and Straussman see four aspects to strategic management. They argue (1990, pp. 29–30): As we use the term, strategic management is guided by four principles: (1) concern with the long term, (2) integration of goals and objectives into a coherent hierarchy, (3) recognition that strategic management and planning are not self-implementing, and most important, (4) an external perspective emphasizing not adapting to the environment but anticipating and shaping of environmental change. Strategic public management adds an additional ingredient: strategic thinking must be cognisant of the exercise of political authority. The first two are essentially no different from strategic planning. However, the need for good implementation and the greater interaction with the environment are persistent themes in the transition to strategic management. Eadie argues strategic management includes: an action orientation; recognizes the importance of design; and recognizes the importance of the human factor. An action orientation is to make sure that any document has built-in processes of implementation, including detailed action plans, schedules, accountabilities and specified costs. Design involves ‘matching desired outcomes with the processes to achieve them’ so that ‘what an organization accomplishes through the strategic management process and how quickly these accomplishments are to be achieved are obviously tied to its capability, including human and financial resources’ (Eadie, 1989, p. 171). From these various perspectives, the changes from planning to management seem to be, first, greater care in developing the plan and what it represents and, secondly, greater attention to implementation. The strategic management plan Strategic management includes strategic planning and a plan is formulated in a similar way as before. What the plan means and its details do differ from
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Public Management and Administratio
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Also by Owen E. Hughes AUSTRALIAN P
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© Owen E. Hughes 1994, 1998, 2003
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Preface Over the past 20 years the
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viii Preface the Colorado link such
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3 Public Management Introduction Th
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11 Managing External Constituencies
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12 Public Management in Developing
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13 Accountability Introduction The
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14 Conclusion: A New Paradigm for P
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284 References Borins, Sandford (19
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286 References Glor, Eleanor D. (20
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288 References Jordan, Grant (1997)
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290 References Monroe, Kristen Renw
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292 References Putt, Allen C. and S
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294 References Wilson, Graham K. (1
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296 Index bureaucracy 1-5, 9, 15-43
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298 Index information and communica
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300 Index ‘one best way’ thinki
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302 Index Ritter, G. 85, 86 role of
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Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

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