What are your current priority projects?
So the main project I'm working on is a very, very big project called Australian Public Service Reform. So I'm the deputy for public sector reform at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and last year in the October budget and around the same time Minister Gallagher delivered what I think is going to become a really landmark speech outlining the government's very large APS reform agenda.
And so there are four priorities that the minister outlined in the government's agenda. The first one is making sure that the public service has integrity in everything that we do. The second one, I think, particularly relevant to the topic of the conversations here at the conference today are around putting people in business at the centre of service design and delivery. The third one is about the Australian Public Service being a model employer, and the fourth priority is about capability and uplifting the capability of the Australian Public Service.
So we have not just one project but at the moment we've got 31 initiatives that have been announced across that whole reform agenda across those four different pillars of the agenda with 11 different agencies running them. So we're a very small team in (the Department of) Prime Minister and Cabinet working to support and enable all these other departments to do great things that that align with the outcomes and principles of public sector reform.
How are you leveraging tools and strategies to accomplish your goals?
That's a really interesting question. We've got such a large reform agenda with so many moving parts across an organisation in the Australian Public Service that is 170,000 people strong with multiple different organisational units – different departments, different agencies within that.
One of the things that we're doing is, we're looking really strongly at this principle around evolved accountability. We know that a small team in (the Department of) Prime Minister and Cabinet can't affect cultural and mindset change across an organisation as large and complicated as the Australian Public Service, so we're really saying our job is to make sure that people at every level of the public service have an opportunity to get involved in public service reform, actually understand “What does that, how does that relate to my context in terms of what I do in my job in my agency?”, and that's all over the country and at all different levels across the service in many, many different roles: from being a park ranger to being a customer service support officer in a Services Australia office in Liverpool, to writing, helping government with their cabinet submissions for the budget.
So really diverse, and we're really looking at devolved accountability where all of those agencies who are delivering APS Reform outcomes and initiatives are actually accountable; we have a shared mission, we know what we're trying to achieve, but we give people the freedom to achieve that the way that works best for them. So that's one of our strategies.
The other one is around capability and it's really putting capability at the heart of everything we do in public sector reform and thinking about, in addition to our capability initiatives that we're delivering for government, if there's a choice of: you can deliver something with a capability uplift or without a capability uplift, we say do it with the capability uplift as part of it because we think that shifting capability and giving people the opportunities to lift their capability will actually then start shifting culture and mindset which helps us continually improve and achieve the reform outcomes that where we've been given the opportunity to work on.
What are your looking to achieve? How will this enhance experiences for employees and citizens alike?
As I talked about before, there's four pillars of the public service reform agenda. I think they're really important ones; going to your question, how do we:
- put people in business at the centre of service design and delivery
- make the Australian Public Service a model employer
- look at flexible work practices
- supporting specialist skills within the service
- attract and retain specialist skills
- make ourselves as a public service really reflect the communities that we serve when we're working for government and the Australian people
- make sure that we have a real diversity of people that we're attracting into the public service and that we're retaining all of those skill sets
- attract people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds
- attract people from First Nations backgrounds
- make sure we've got gender balance and diversity in the different work areas for the different things that we do?
So we're doing a whole lot of thinking about those things, and also when it comes to putting people in business at the centre, we're really thinking about, how do we lift capability to make sure that public servants are really capable and really informed so they can engage very deeply and genuinely with the people and the businesses and communities that we serve?
Why is collaboration in government so crucial?
So as I was saying, we're a very large organisation in the Australian Public Service, 170,000-odd people and multiple different agencies. If you take just one example, if you think about myGov as a digital service delivery platform, that's servicing millions of Australians every day [who] are relying on myGov to access a whole range of different government services, whether it's in health services digitally, whether it's veterans accessing veterans services, whether it's customers of Services Australia for social support or other types of benefits that are available to all Australians – all of those different member services are kind of joined up and linked in to one platform in the form of Services Australia and millions and millions of people use it.
The thing with myGov as a platform is, while there are a whole lot of different departments that are using that platform to support their service delivery for their ministers in a Westminster system of government, at the back end it's got to be joined up because people don't divide themselves into this portfolio subject area or this portfolio subject area. People are people, communities are communities, so really, it's how do we do that work at the back end so that when people do enter a digital service delivery platform like myGov, they're actually feeling like they're being treated as a whole person and that we've worked it out between all of the different departments – Department of Health, Services Australia, Department of Veterans Affairs, and so on – we've worked it out in the back end so that that collaboration ensures that people are getting a really similar service when they use Australian government services.
What have you enjoyed most about Innovate Australia?
I think it goes a little bit to your last question, what we've just been talking about, but I've just been on a panel with Amanda Cattermole who's from the Digital Health Agency and she made an excellent point: we actually have to think differently about how we do government and in government agencies to put people at the centre and at the heart of what we do – we've actually got to put it at the centre of everything we think about, put it at the centre of our design, also put it right on the table in our governance structures or when we're thinking about how we set ourselves up, how we design ourselves, how we think about delivery reporting outcomes, so I really love that idea of that – of really hard wiring people right at the centre of what we do and I think there are some very practical things that agencies like hers are doing right now to think differently and shift our mindset in the way that we think about government service delivery.