Bureaucracies have the power and the means to protect themselves from internal and external criticism by controlling the flow of information within the organization. The main means of control is through employee loyalty fueled by financial incentive. Before an individual can progress in the organization he must be promoted to the next higher level of management and the more employees a supervisor has working for him the higher his salary. The result, unnecessary levels of management are created to reward individual employees for loyalty.

As the organization gains strength it becomes less tolerant of employee complaints and nearly all communication is in the form of downward directives. Upward communication is generally interpreted as a disloyal complaint. Employees who are perceived as disloyal are not promoted. What you have here is the perfect environment for waste, fraud and abuse of public trust. Most of the waste is in the form of added layers of management. Through the power of employee loyalty management can get away with almost anything and many employees will know but say nothing openly.

The major problem in bringing change to a bureaucracy is that its management has been playing by their rules so long that they are reluctant to accept any change except cosmetic change and besides they have managed to avoid change in the past. First we must realize that no meaningful change will take place without the concurrence of top management. The easiest way to bring change and avoid stonewalling is to start right at the top of the organization since lower management has been well trained to take directives. This is a good time to start a retirement program and bring in your own management.

To bring about change we will take a bottom up approach. We shift our attention to breaking down Departments into identifiable Functions and measuring the work actually being done by each Function. Note that once you known how much time is spent doing meaningful work and who is doing the work all else is expendable fluff. Our goal is to eliminate as many levels of management as possible thus driving down the decision-making processes to the lowest level of effectiveness. Some decisions are clearly the responsibility of a certain level of management. This is the essence of the reform process.

We have our choice of two Work Measurement approaches using “Work Improvement Teams” and “Cost and Schedule”. The method of choice where the top management of the bureaucracy is in agreement is to begin by emphasizing the need for employee innovation through the implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM). An innovative Japanese management program which has been used in American industry since the early 1980’s.

The first steps are to obtain agreement with top management to provide training personnel who can be trained to fill the role of Facilitators for each of the Work Improvement Teams (WIT). Training of the Facilitators will include monitoring the organization of the WIT and training them in how to do detailed Process Flow Charts (PFC). Selected Budgeting personnel will also be required to attend the training sessions in how to do the PFCs. Budgeting personnel will be required to analyze the PFCs determining required man-hour and other associated costs such as mileage for each process of the Function.

After the WIT has been organized, elected its leader and meeting once a week monitored by a facilitator it will begin work on finding the best way to do their Function. The best way I have found to do this is in making a PFC of the processes of the Function. White butcher paper or brown wrapping paper is taped around the conference room walls. In order to maintain flexibility each process is written on 8 1/2x11 paper and taped to the wall allowing for changes to be easily made. I would make two PFCs the first one is of the existing PFC and the second right under it the new improved method PFC. When the PFCs are completed and other improvements are known the budget analyst will review the PFCs to determine cost savings from the method. To do this the budget analyst will determine all associated costs for each process and enter the results into a spreadsheet. The total expenditures for the Function becomes the Funding Formula for the Function. The budget for the function simply becomes the number of times that the Function is expected to be performed in the budgeted year. Staffing is done from the calculated man-hours. The reason this can be done is that you cannot staff with less than a full person.

Where there is a strong bureaucracy in place with a significant budget requiring processes to be scheduled the Cost and Schedule method should be used. First we break down the work being done into functions. Then we bring in time study analysts and time study all of the work associated with each function. After all of the functions have been time studied. The analyst studies the methods being used in doing the work revising and eliminating unnecessary work. The employees are then trained in doing the new method.

Bureaucracies are generally top heavy with management and it is necessary to restructure eliminating all redundant personnel. The analyst then installs a weekly productive reporting system for each function based on the standards developed from the time study of the function. The new management is then trained to manage using the productivity reporting tools. The whole organization becomes more focused on the work at hand rather than protecting its turf and its budget.