G.F. 323
0003230
J
CONFIDENTIAL #B
機密
Colonial Secretariat
Lower Albert Road,
Hong Kong.
13th March, 1973.
Dear Head of Department,
I expect that by now all of you will have studied or at least read the McKinsey Report and will wish to know more about how the management exercise generally is progressing, so I will attempt in this letter to give you a brief account of the state of play.
First of all, a word or two about the Report itself; only 200 copies were printed and distribution has had to be limited to those officers who are actually involved in the test areas and officers in all departments down to Assistant Director level, though there are some exceptions to this. May I ask you to let other officers below this level at professional, administrative and senior executive level in your department read the Report.
Before proceeding to tell you about implementation in the various chapters of the Report, I ought to say by way of introduction that the Consultants, consisting of Messrs. Roger Holland, Martin Beresford and Mark Weedon, took up their assignment last June and plan (after a 3-month extension) to complete their task at the end of June this year. From time to time Dr. Copisarow, who is
a director of McKinsey, flies in on short visits to check on their progress. The fees of the Consultants are not light (even if, at $2.5 million for one year, they represent only .0005% of Government's total estimated expenditure for 1973/74) and it is very unlikely that it will be possible to extend their services after June.
As you know, Chapter 1 deals with proposals for strengthening the existing machinery of Government. These proposals cover four types of activity, and sample exercises are being carried out in the Secretariat and in some departments, namely, the standardisation of submissions, the clarification of the rôles of departments and branches, delegation, and control of paperwork. Of these, the two most important are the first and the third.
Although the standardisation of submissions for equipment and staff has only been tried out in a limited number of test areas with departments there is already no doubt that it has achieved results; to give you one example, the Police had been trying for about a year to get personal radios for beat constables. Their submission had taken a substantial time to go through Defence and Finance Branches, but because of not unreasonable doubts
/and the level
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機密
CONFIDENTIAL