Mel from Yarra RAnges council, VIC, Australia

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Hi everyone,

My name is Mel, I work for Yarra Ranges Council near Melbourne, Australia. I am a Research & Business Analyst (Corporate Planning).
I attended a 2-day introductory PuMP workshop a year ago and my supervisor and I have been trying to roll out the methodology at Council.
So far implementation has been difficult, but we managed to get good buy-in across the organisation. Our main challenge is finding time to go through each step, and not lose momentum. Another issue is getting teams to use their KPI data (collect, monitor and report).
Ideally we would also like all KPI definitions, data and visualisations to be stored in a central system. We are currently experimenting with Interplan for KPI definition, storage, reporting and basic visualisations, and Tableau for more advanced data visualisations.
If anyone has some experience in rolling out PuMP in state or local government environment, I would be more than happy to get in touch to exchange tips and ideas!

Cheers,
Mel
m.ricou@yarraranges.vic.gov.au

Hi Mel,

I did the 2-day PuMP workshop with Stacey about 2 and a half years ago. I also happen to live in the Yarra Ranges Shire, and have worked in state-government organisations in the past.

I’m now working as a process improvement specialist and business analyst. Although I’m not directly involved in setting strategic or corporate KPIs anymore, my work does involve defining and monitoring operational and project evaluation metrics on a regular basis, so I’d be happy to get in touch and share ideas.

Not long I’d done the training with Stacey, I began a PuMP pilot to develop new KPIs in a state-government organisation. Like you, I felt there was good buy-in (superficially) with the key stakeholders, but when it came to the crunch, there was poor commitment to providing time for the PuMP pilot program and undue influence was exerted to short-circuit the proper process and sequence of stages. Alas, I changed roles after only getting to Step 3 (and I heard later that those involved resorted to ‘voting’ on measures that they brainstormed).

I’ve since concluded that the problems encountered were largely due to a lack of strategic thinking and lack of understanding of how poor the ‘traditional’ approaches (eg. brainstorming) are. Far too people were always in ‘fire-fighting’ mode, even those who should be thinking more strategically, and hence were impatient and wanting to cut corners and bring it to a conclusion much too quickly. Too many also believed they intuitively could come up with good measures, and there wasn’t enough appreciation or respect for the science and logic behind the PuMP process. I believe this is a challenging impediment for many types of strategic and process-based methodologies. Perhaps I needed to put more emphasis on the warm-up and Step 1 diagnostic, yet this is problematic if there is a lack of time commitment to start with. A solution may be to first focus on garnering the unequivocal support and advocacy of a highly-influential senior manager, to ensure that you are fully empowered to deliver the PuMP program with integrity and with the necessary resources.

Cheers,
Allan