PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 9, 111-114 (1989)

Professional Developments

This section exists to promote an exchange of ideas and expertise between readers. Summary statements of developments in the fields of management, research and training are intended to provide the opportunity for interested readers to follow up by writing to the contact person for fuller information. Please send your news to Richard Batley, Assistant Editor (Professional Developments).

This issue includes two examples of the use of exercises in management training, one in the field of health and the other in local government. Both use exercises as a means of developing trainees’ capacity to develop appropriate management approaches and solutions.

EXERCISES FOR HEALTH MANAGEMENT AND PLANNING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Exercises, including simulations, are increasingly recognized as a useful method of learning in management and planning. As a development of its own experience in creating and using such exercises, the Nuffield Institute for Health Services Studies at the University of Leeds has commenced publication of an ongoing series containing several of the principal exercises incorporated into its health manage- ment and planning courses. Exercises published for developing countries so far refer to the areas of resource allocation and budgeting, organizational structuring, the management of human resources, manpower planning and cost effectiveness and analysis.

In addition to their role as a means of motivating students and of understanding the details of techniques (such as economic appraisal), the exercises lead to discussion of a number of interesting features in management and planning in developing countries. Firstly, we might refer to the issue of universality versus contingency in management theory. Is there a set of universal principles and techniques that may be applied in blue-print fashion to any organization, irrespective of time, geography or socio-economic setting? Conversely, are approaches to management and planning contingent upon policy content, environment and socio-historical setting? The exercises, set within a particular context, generate discussion of the degree to which solutions are circumstance- specific. They also allow for discussions of the determining variables of management and planning. For example, the adoption of comprehensive Primary Health Care (PHC) as accepted by international agencies such as WHO and many national governments in the third world has led to the key question: what type of management and planning forms are most appropriate to PHC and how such forms must be adapted to particular environments. Although we might optimistically prescribe intersectoral coordination, decentralization and community participation, nevertheless management innovation and creativity is required in order to make those concepts relevant to both policy and environment. Just as early management theorists developed management prescriptions appropriate to large scale private enterprises at the beginning of this century, so too do contemporary managers have to create appropriate management and planning for social development programmes

0271-2075/88/010111-04$05.00 0 1989 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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in developing countries. Involvement in exercises allows participants to work in hypothetical environments and understand the limitations of simply transferring management practices from one realm of experience to another. At the same time they are presented with the challenge of actually creating management and planning forms appropriate to hypothetical situations.

A second issue refers to the degree to which concepts are incorporated into management and planning practices. Referring once again to community participa- tion, one is often struck by the tendency of many planning documents to isolate community participation in a separate institutional approach with its own budget and organizational structure, identifiable inputs and quantifiable outputs. The resultant problem is that participation is treated as something separate from the actual management and planning process rather than being incorporated within it. The same may be suggested of management coordination, the recommendation for which is more often than not the creation of a new bureaucratic body to coordinate. In both these cases, the incorporation of participation and coordination into actual management and planning practices had been merely superficial and symbolic. A key role of exercises is to make participants critically experience the superficiality of many reforms and strive for greater depth and incorporation of, for example, intersectoral coordination, decentralization and participation into management and planning practices.

The use of exercises can bring a number of advantages to management and planning teaching. Experience over the past ten years of incorporating exercises into course-work in the Nuffield Institute and elsewhere has indicated their particular importance in bringing to light the two points mentioned above. Conscious of the need to share this experience, current exercises are being published in a Health Management and Planning Exercise Series. To facilitate understanding for users, a full explanation is provided of how to run each exercise including exercise objectives, location, equipment requirements, and exercise material, timing, briefing and bibliography. The exercises are divided into stages with full explanations.

Contact point: CHARLES COLLINS, ANDREW GREEN,

Nuffield Institute for Health Services Studies, University of Leeds,

71-5 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9PL

TRAINING FOR A NEW LOCAL AUTHORITY

In-country training provides valuable opportunities for using a ‘capacity-building approach’ to training, as opposed to the more conventional ‘packaged training’ (Honadle and Hannah, 1982). Even so, in-country training still generally involves

Professional Developments 113

individual officers from a number of different organizations or local authorities, and is thus conducted with a degree of abstraction from the immediate realities faced by the officers concerned.

The recent establishment of a Municipal Council for Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, provided the staff of the Development Administration Group, University of Birmingham, with a valuable opportunity to prepare a training programme which was tightly focused on the immediate problems facing the officers of that newly formed authority. This programme was based on a careful analysis of the tasks expected of the officers of that authority and of their perceived training needs.

The main element of the training programme was a four-day residential workshop, held outside Maseru, involving about 25 middle-level and senior officers of the Maseru Municipal Council (MMC). This was followed by four subsidiary workshops on particular aspects, for the key staff involved: Human Resources Management, Municipal Finance, Urban Development Management, and Intro- ducing Councillors to the MMC Administration. In each of these, a wide variety of teaching methods was used, but with a particular emphasis on practical exercises.

The centre-piece of the main workshop was a budgeting exercise, which required the officers, working in Departmental Groups and then as a Management Team, to prepare a draft budget for the following financial year. This draft was then presented to a simulated Council meeting, in which some of the officers took the part of Councillors. The exercise revealed much about the problems of budgeting and corporate management, and proved to be a valuable learning experience, not least in terms of the sort of issues which could be expected to be raised by elected councillors. Through this and other exercises and discussions, a clear sense emerged of the group acting as the Management Team of the authority-despite the fact that this was the first occasion on which the whole group had ever worked together.

The subsidiary workshops also involved exercises based on the practical problems facing the authority and its staff, for example: the problem of inappropriate civil service attitudes among staff; the poor performance of local tax collection; the inheritance of some very inefficiently-run urban services; a poor public image (due to circumstances largely not of MMC’s own making); and the task of implementing a major upgrading project in one of the peri-urban areas. In relation to the last item, the Urban Development workshop started with participants undertaking a household survey in the area concerned, to acquaint themselves with the problems of that area as perceived by the residents.

The aim of the programme was, thus, not to provide ‘training’ in an abstract sense, but to enable staff to confront and start dealing with some of the practical issues facing the authority. The exercises also introduced staff to new methods of working which arise from the town administration becoming accountable for the first time to a representative local assembly. In this context, a public speaking exercise identified some of the difficulties involved in providing support and advice to elected councillors.

The results of the evaluation exercise on the training programme indicated a very high degree of satisfaction, with 83 per cent of respondents indicating that they now felt more positive towards the new local authority. But it also indicated large areas

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of training need which could not be tackled by such a short programme; much of this will have to be met through in-service training by the resident advisers to MMC over the next few years.

Contact point: NICK DEVAS MALCOLM WALLIS

JIM AMOS Development Administration Group,

School of Public Policy University of Birmingham,

Birmingham B15 2TT

REFERENCE

Honadle, G.H. and Hannah, J.P. (1982). ‘Management Performance for Rural Develop- ment: Packaged Training or Capacity Building’, Public Administration and Development, 2, 295-307.