Refocus organisation

Refocus an organisation to improve its effectiveness

Intent

Establishes a shared understanding of why an organisation exists, assesses its current effectiveness and identifies the changes that should be made to become more effective.

Business context

It’s easy for an organisation to keep doing the same things this year as they did last year and the year before. It worked then, so why shouldn’t it work now? But is the need the same now as it used to be? What outcomes is the organisation now creating and what value are these to government? What functions are being undertaken and how do these contribute to the outcomes?

Benefits of using this practice

This practice can be used to enable:

• the people responsible for steering an organisation to restate its mission and make the changes needed to improve its effectiveness and reset its direction; and
• teams to establish a strong sense of ownership of an organisation’s direction and empower them to work innovatively to that direction. (“When we’re clear about where we are going we can work from imagination rather than habit” Tony Richardson).

General approach

There are four steps involved in this exercise and these are depicted below. An organisation does not need to complete every step to obtain value but may elect to do just the first, or steps 1–3. As each step builds on the previous one, they must be done sequentially. How far an organisation goes depends on what it is seeking to achieve.



As with all discussion of the IMS, the most important outcome is that the key people have come together, shared their thinking and agreed to the ‘investment story’. At the end of the discussion they are all ‘on the same page’.

1. Organisational expectation
2. Current effectiveness
3. Potential changes
4. Intended changes

The physical output of these discussions is a document titled ‘Organisation effectiveness’.