Public Service Operations Management

A research handbook

Zoe Radnor, Nicola Bateman, Ann Esain, Maneesh Kumar, Sharon Williams, David Upton, Zoe Radnor, Nicola Bateman, Ann Esain, Maneesh Kumar, Sharon Williams, David Upton, Zoe J. Radnor, Sharon J. Williams, David M. Upton, Zoe J. Radnor, Nicola Bateman, Ann Esain, Maneesh Kumar, Sharon J. Williams, David M. Upton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138813694
• eBook ISBN: 9781317602941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How do policy makers and managers square the circle of increasing demand and expectations for the delivery and quality of services against a backdrop of reduced public funding from government and philanthropists? Leaders, executives and managers are increasingly focusing on service operations improvement. In terms of research, public services are immature within the discipline of operations management, and existing knowledge is limited to government departments and large bureaucratic institutions.

Drawing on a range of theory and frameworks, this book develops the research agenda, and knowledge and understanding in public service operations management, addressing the most pressing dilemmas faced by leaders, executives and operations managers in the public services environment. It offers a new empirical analysis of the impact of contextual factors, including the migration of planning systems founded on MRP/ERP and the adoption of industrial based improvement practices such as TQM, lean thinking and Six Sigma.

This will be of interest to researchers, educators and advanced students in public management, service operations management, health service management and public policy studies.

1
Introduction

The role and substance of public service operations management

Zoe J. Radnor and Nicola Bateman

This introductory chapter establishes the need for a book on public service operations management and then through unpacking the structure and content of the book explore what is meant by public service operations management. To begin let us reflect briefly on some of the concepts as a baseline for the focus of the book.

This book focused on operations management and public service. A public service can be considered to be a service or set of services provided to citizens directly through a public sector body or through financing of provision by private sector, third sector or voluntary organisations. The public sector is the economic body in which many public service organisations reside. At the most simplistic level operations management (OM) is concerned with managing inputs of processes, people and resources through a transformation process model to provide the required output of goods and services (Slack et al., 2012). Service operations management is concerned with both the output or outcome of ‘the service’ in the sense of ‘customer service’ and also the service organisation itself – in the way it configures, manages and integrates its (hopefully value-adding) activities (Johnston and Clark, 2008). Operations tasks fall into three main areas; developing an operations strategy, improving the operation and, managing the day-to-day operations (Slack et al., 2012). Within service operations two main components are evident: the front office and back office (Johnston and Clark, 2008). The front office is the interface between the organisation and user, while the back office is the activities, tasks and processes being carried out remotely from the user (Johnston and Clark, 2001). All these elements; transformation process, tasks and components are shown to be pertinent in the chapters within this book and support the development of operations management within the public sector and public service organisations.

So, why the need for presenting a body of knowledge focused on public service operations management? We argue that general operations management concepts, tasks and components are relevant to this sector but also, that public sector organisations should recognise that they are a service organisation so should engage with service operations management theory and frameworks. Authors, including the leading editor of this book (Radnor et al., 2012), have noted that operations management methodologies are ‘context specific’ and this means that the discipline needs to adapt, rather than dismiss, the context (Radnor and Osborne, 2013). The chapters within this book aim to develop that adaption process through illustration and presentation of propositions culminating with a final chapter which gives some reflections on the implications and draws together future research agendas.

Operations management recognising public services

Periodically authors and editors of operations management journals state the need for more operations management research in not-for-profit and public sector organisations (Taylor and Taylor, 2009; Karwan and Markland, 2006; Verma et al., 2005). In 2014 the Office of National Statistics quoted that 5.7 million people in the UK worked in the public sector, which equates to 19.1 per cent of the workforce (Office for National Statistics, 2013). In the US and UK in 2005 the total outlay on public services as a percentage of national gross domestic product (GDP) was 35.9 per cent and 44.5 per cent respectively (Pettigrew, 2005) rising from 12.7 per cent and 24.0 per cent in 2001 (Karwan and Markland, 2006). In 2011 the Index of Economic Freedom reported that government spending as a percentage of national GDP was 38.9 per cent for the USA and 47.3 per cent for the UK (Miller et al., 2011: 331–2). During this same period (2005–11) both the UK and US, as well as other countries such as Greece and Portugal, have experienced financial crisis with debts in the billions and trillions leading to severe budget and spending cuts across the public sector. In the UK, the Operational Efficiency Report (HM Treasury, 2009) in April 2009 stipulated that potential savings of around £10 billion a year should be sought over three years across public services.

This growing pressure on public services across the western world has led to a focus on increased efficiency which, according to Berman (1998), traditionally receives less focus as an outcome measure than effectiveness and equity. However, although the focus on efficiency and productivity initially led many public organisations to consider information technology as a possible solution (Karwan and Markland, 2006) the pressure to reduce the cost base and reduction of budgets has meant many organisations have had to adopt private management concepts in order to improve their internal operations and processes. In particular, public services including health (Fillingham, 2008; Guthrie, 2006), central and federal government (Radnor and Bucci, 2007, 2010; Richard, 2008) and, local government (Seddon and Brand, 2008; Krings et al., 2006; Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2005) have responded by implementing business process improvement methodologies. Business process improvement methodologies (BPIMs) include lean thinking, Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Kaizen and total quality management, as well as blended approaches such as lean Six Sigma. In a recent literature review focusing on the use of business process improvement methodologies in the public sector 51 per cent of publications sourced focused on lean, 35 per cent of these were on health services (Radnor, 2010).

An analysis of the key operations management journals – International Journal of Operations and Production Management (IJOPM), Journal of Operations Management (JOM) and Production and Operations Management (POM) – from 1980 to 2014 shows how operations management thinking has evolved over the last thirty years and the role that public service operations has taken within this body of work. Of 3,607 papers published 114 were explicitly focused on the public sector with a further 140 as mixed public and private. The peak of publication for public sector (including mixed) was 2011, while during 1980–91 only a handful of papers were published and in some years none at all. In the past decade there has been consistent publication focusing on public service and mixed public and private; however, it may be that the 41 per cent of papers (1980–2014) where no sector is stated did have a public sector element that the authors chose not to explicitly state. The predominant types of papers published were surveys and case studies representing 30 per cent and 31 per cent of the 254 papers. Revealing that most research published is trying to establish the current state of public service OM. Whereas papers that set the agenda (i.e. positional and conceptual) only represent 1.2 per cent and 3.9 per cent of the public service OM papers. This may be a lack of research in this area, difficulty publishing this type of papers or, a reflection of the need for greater levels of field data and in-depth analysis to develop new concepts and theory in the area.

Of the 254 papers in public and mixed categorising by sector, healthcare was revealed as the biggest with 30 per cent of papers. The next largest single sector was education with 8 per cent, but papers that examined multiple sectors represented 24 per cent of the papers. In compiling this book the editors particularly sought to bring sectors other than healthcare to the fore and so we have drawn from a wider range of sectors than have been extensively documented in the past. These include:

• uniformed services (Ritchie and Walley, Chapter 7);
• fire services (Bateman, Maher and Randall, Chapter 8);
• police services (Barton and Matthews, (Chapter 15);
• ambulance services (Aitken, Esain and Williams, Chapter 21);
• social housing (Meehan, Drake, Vogel and Parkhouse, Chapter 9);
• local government (Ramesh and Sheikh, (Chapter 12);
• higher education (Adderley and Kirkbright, Chapter 10; Radnor and Osborne, Chapter 16); and
• third sector and voluntary organisations (Bamford, Moxham, Kauppi and Dehe, Chapter 2; Taylor and Taylor, Chapter 11; Moxham, Chapter 13).

The countries represented across the 254 papers in the journal analysis were dominated by the USA (37 per cent) and UK (17 per cent), China and India are surprisingly low, both with only 2 per cent of papers. Of the other BRICS countries only Brazil is represented with a single paper, Russia and South Africa are not specially mentioned at all. How public service is to be shaped for these large and growing countries has not been addressed in the literature.

Due to the GDP percentage spent on public services, the financial situation and, the response by public organisations in using operations management concepts and methodologies (particularly managing process improvement) there never has been a more important time for OM scholars to both research and publish on OM in the public sector. This has to go beyond merely reporting case study examples, giving survey results or focusing on healthcare and developed countries, but to use the opportunity to develop new OM thinking and theory which can be applied to public sector organisations and public services in general which we are defining as ‘public service operations management’. This new discipline needs to adapt the traditional frameworks and concepts, developed through manufacturing and private service organisations, and develop on new frontiers taking into account the digital and information age.

However, the challenge is not just how the OM discipline should adapt to the context/sector but also how the context/sector adapts to the discipline. As the next section will explore and argue, public sector organisations have struggled to recognise that they are a service based organisation but instead considered themselves in terms of policy and product orientation.

Public sector organisations recognising public service operations

It has been argued that the increasingly fragmented and inter-organisational context of public services delivery (Haveri, 2006) necessitates asking new questions about public services delivery. It is now no longer possible to continue with a focus solely either upon administrative processes or upon intra-organisational management – the central pre-occupations of public administration and (new) public management, respectively. Rather these foci must be integrated with a broader paradigm that emphasises both the governance of inter-organisational (and cross-sectorial) relationships and the efficacy of public service delivery systems rather than discrete public service organisations. This broader framework has subsequently been termed the New Public Governance (Osborne, 2010). This framework does not replace the previous foci of course, but rather embeds them in a new context, an argument similarly made by Thomas (2012).

A second argument that has been presented is that much contemporary public management theory has been derived conceptually from prior ‘generic’ management research conducted in the manufacturing rather than the services sector. This has generated a ‘fatal flaw’ (Osborne and Brown, 2011) in public management theory that has viewed public services as manufacturing rather than as service processes – and that are created by professional design and input and then delivered to the user even though the business of government is, by and large, not about delivering pre-manufactured products but to deliver services. Nor are most relationships between public service users and public service organisations characterised by a transactional or discrete nature, as they are for such products (McLaughlin et al., 2009). On the contrary, the majority of ‘public goods’ (whether provided by government, the nonprofit and third sector or the private sector) are in fact not ‘public products’ but rather ‘public services’ that are integrated into people’s lives. Social work, health care, education, economic and business support services, community development and regeneration, for example, are all services provided but service organisations rather than concrete products, in that they are intangible, process-driven and based upon a promise of what is to be delivered. Public services can of course include concrete elements (health care or communications technology, for example). But these are not ‘public goods’ in their own right – rather they are required to support and enable the delivery of intangible and process-driven public services.

We would suggest that the attitude of uncritically applying manufacturing ideas to public service is flawed although, many of the approaches and ways of thinking that helped evolve these original manufacturing ideas are useful. This approach of adapting operations management to the public service environment while learning from existing thinking is exemplified in a study of the UK’s Royal Air Force by Bateman et al. (2014), and further developed in Chapters 4, 5, 9, 16 and 22 of this volume. We argue that public services should recognise themselves as services, with the distinctive service operations management logic and managerial challenges that this implies, and hence reject the potential flaw contained within current, product-dominant public management theory.

This product-dominant flaw, we argue, has persisted despite the growth of a substantive body of services management and service operations management theory that challenges many of its fundamental tenets for the management of services (Johnston and Clark, 2008; G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the role and substance of public service operations management
• PART I Strategy and service design
• PART II Responsiveness and resourcing
• PART III Performance management and measurement
• PART IV Improvement
• PART V Supply chain management
• Index