Strategic workforce planning is gradually becoming a key priority and core management practice for public sector employees in OECD countries. In times of limited resources, governments are required to demonstrate workforce planning capability to meet current and future challenges for service delivery and to produce efficiency gains. Since experience in workforce planning remains limited, a simple but pragmatic approach that takes into account the national context is recommended. To send consistent messages about financial and human capital resources required to achieve government's programmatic goals, workforce planning should be aligned with the budget process. Its success depends on the cooperation between the finance authority, the central Human Resource Management (HRM) body, and line managers in individual ministries and agencies. The implementation of workforce planning continues to present difficulties for practitioners. Therefore, management flexibility, incentives to engage managers, developing workforce planning capability, and revisions to the HRM process are critical to pave the way for a successful implementation. Monitoring and evaluating progress of the workforce plan and its contribution to the programmatic goals should be conducted systematically.This project was led by Oscar Huerta Melchor (OECD Secretariat). Initial research was conducted by Cornelia Lercher and Jacob Arturo Rivera Pérez (OECD Secretariat). Useful comments were provided by Robert Ball and Maya Beauvallet (OECD Secretariat). Janos Bertok and Edwin Lau successively oversaw the project.

The Chilean government is exploring several important areas of public sector reform. This article discusses performance budgeting (including spending reviews, efficiency reviews, and the Chilean performance management system), mediumterm budgeting (especially the use of forward estimates and fiscal rules), and flexibility and efficiency in budget execution. Chile's situation as of May 2012 was analysed in the light of OECD country best practices at the annual meeting of the OECD network on performance and results in November 2012, and the article makes several suggestions for reform.

Reforming the public sector is a complex matter. OECD member and non-member countries are facing increasing challenges to make change happen. Adopting innovative reforms to respond to social demands is no longer enough; governments need to accompany their reform proposals with a strategy to manage change. Managing change dictates, to a large extent, the success or failure of a reform initiative. This paper argues that reform and change are generally used as interchangeable concepts but that is not always appropriate as reforms do not always produce change and changes are not always the product of reform efforts. This study draws on the notion of receptivity to explain the practice of managing change in six OECD countries: Finland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. Over the last few years, these six OECD countries have adopted major reform initiatives to modernise the management of their public service to meet society's growing expectations in a context of limited financial resources and political pressure. Receptivity is an underdeveloped concept that intends to reveal the factors that contribute to organizations being either low-change, non-change contexts or high-change, receptive contexts. Managing change, it is argued, is an independent variable to explain change in government as it largely determines policy success. Four interconnected factors of analysis are used to explain managing change in government: ideological vision, leading change, institutional politics, and implementation capacity.The principal focus of change is the administrative culture as the traditional values, priorities, routines, and above all mindsets in public organisations are under pressure. The extent of change, however, remains unclear. This paper concludes that although the notion of receptivity provides an approach to analyse and explain change in government, it lacks explanatory power to determine whether change has actually happened. Furthermore, it states that OECD countries are underestimating the importance of managing change while designing and implementing policy reforms. This is because the instruments used to manage change are more a casuistic characteristic of policy formulation than a conscious strategy to deal with the effects produced by the implementation of a reform proposal. There was no evidence of a coherent strategy to manage change that accompanies the reform efforts.

No abstract

No abstract