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2. Clarify the roles of departments and branches.
Our experience in working with staff in the Secretariat and departments suggests that many of them are unclear about the scope and responsibilities of their own and others' jobs. As a result important tasks can be left undone; on other tasks staff overlap and duplicate each others' efforts, causing frustration and demoralis- ation.
We therefore recommend that the roles and responsibilities of branches and departments should be defined in terms of the end results required rather than purely in terms of broad areas of responsibility, as at present. The specific actions required can be completed fairly rapidly, but continuing long-term pressure from the top is required to ensure that staff observe the requirements.
3. Delegate authority even further. In theory the resolutions of Legislative Council and its committees require all decision-making powers to remain highly centralised. In practice, however, substantial decision- making powers are delegated. The papers forwarded to committees for approval give only an outline of the proposal and, by implication, say that the Secretariat have investigated the case and believe it to be justified. The committees probe and cross-question, but they rarely reject a proposal. Rather than actually take the decisions they maintain a valuable pressure on Secretariat staff to get the decisions right. Further, the Secretariat staff have large negative decision powers in that they decide which proposals are put forward for committee approval.
In practice, therefore, the person who issues the papers to the committee takes the decision. As volume increases this responsibility is delegated down the organisation.
Further such de facto delegation will be inevitable as the volume and scale of Government activity increases. We believe that rather than be overtaken by events, Government should anticipate this requirement now so that senior staff can be relieved of some of their administrative load and can give higher priority than at present to more critical tasks.
The degree of further delegation must be left to the judgement of senior staff because the present machinery does not provide a means of controlling overall end results without examining individual items.
To help these judgements, the decision levels of senior posts and committees should be analysed regularly and systematically. First trial attempts have revealed a lot of scope for delegation.
4. Control the progress of files. Many of the decisions taken by Government are extremely complex and require files of papers to be passed through large numbers of departments and branches. When top-level staff perceive a matter as urgent, the machinery of Government can respond with
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McKinsey & Company, Inc.
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