PIF Follow Up review
It is important to understand the context within which the Performance Improvement Framework (PIF) is being delivered. There are two developments driving change across the public sector. The first one is that everywhere across the world people are under some fiscal constraint of one sort or another, some more severe than others. What that means is that there isn't a lot of money around to fund services, so people have to look really hard at how they get the best value from the dollar they've got. The second big development is that people's expectations, citizens' expectations, are rising. People want to interact with government in a different way. People's expectations of the sorts of services they can get from government are changing. It's partially a generational thing, there is a huge change coming in terms of the way individuals want to access services. But, more critically, people expect more from their tax dollar. These two things in particular are driving the need for the State Services to do things differently. The changes we made in the late 80s and early 90s were world leading. They had lots of strengths but they had lots of weaknesses. While PIF builds on the strengths of those early reforms the stated aspiration is to take New Zealand from having a good public service, which it has today, to a great public service in the future.
The New Zealand public service is already number one in the world for the absence of corruption. Senior leaders in the State Services want to lift performance in a number of other areas to make sure we have the best public service in the world. PIF is a key tool to enable public servants to do just that. At its heart a PIF is a review of agencies' fitness-for-purpose as they prepare for the challenges in the future. It looks at the current state of an agency, then how well placed the agency is to deal with the issues that confront it in the near future. It looks at the areas where the agency needs to do the most work to make them fit-for-the-future. And, because change does not happen overnight, the PIF is evolving to assist chief executives and Chairs beyond their first report. The PIF Follow Up review is a stock take of the progress the agency has made since its initial review. It is another example of the public service taking ownership of its own continuous improvement and using the PIF to do its job better. As with the first reports, these reports are published. That way the public can have confidence that the public sector is continuing to improve its performance year in and year out.
