Be proactive and get on the front foot by prompting a service review of your department.

That’s the advice from Brian Milne, Director of Xyst Australia and Project Director for the international benchmarking programme Yardstick.

Milne and fellow Xyst Director Jayson Kelly will be hitting the road in June to deliver face-to-face workshops, based on the newly released Practice Note 10.4. Parks Management: Service Delivery.

Service reviews are often prompted by decisions to investigate outsourcing, when there is a perceived issue or for political reasons.

“They seems to get overlooked a lot; unless there’s a real problem or some other external driver, people just keep doing what they’ve always done. You make a few incremental changes, you tweak things, but you never say ‘hey let’s look at our business, let’s look at how we’re doing things’,” Milne says.

“You should be approaching service reviews the same as other strategy documents or asset management plans, reviewing how you actually run your business.

 “We recommend being proactive rather than having it done to you, where you risk losing control and doing it in a threatening environment. 

“Service reviews can be seen as being threatening as they’re all about change, but it’s not necessarily the case if you use a team approach and involve all of the staff. You can get on the front foot and do it as a positive management task.

Every five years is a realistic timeframe for service reviews, Milne says.

“You should look at what your various options are; things are changing and technology is changing,” he says.

“A lot of the ways of operating are very traditional and have just evolved over time – we haven’t stopped and stepped back and asked if we could we do things better or differently.”

They can reveal a lot about an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses.

“I always like the managers to hear what the staff are actually doing, compared to what the managers think they’re doing – it’s a great process to communicate and get everyone on the same page, you get outcomes around an awareness across the organisation and between management and staff about the actions they can do better and get everyone working in the same way,” Milne says.

And, service reviews are an opportunity for staff to have their say.

“It’s providing the opportunity for everyone to say their say in a structured way about how things are working and not working,” Milne says.

“Otherwise you don’t really get that opportunity. Staff can moan about things not working, but this actually gives them a real opportunity to talk about it in an open way.” 

The IPWEA Parks Management: Service Delivery workshops are running in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth throughout June. Visit the event page for more information and to register.

The workshops will cover: 

• Service delivery planning
• Service reviews
• Service delivery specifications
• Quality management
• Contract management
• Maintenance planning and scheduling
• Financial requirements for operations and maintenance
• Documenting the above information in the lifecycle management section of the asset management plan