The Civil Service will change our culture, structure and processes so that we become more agile, flexible and responsive.
Specific actions outlined under this thematic area include:
Strengthen professional expertise within corporate functions
We will:
- Create professional streams in key areas beginning with HR, ICT, and financial management.
- Formalise streams in other areas by building on existing models in legal, audit, statistics and economics (IGEES) in the same way.
- Establish Heads of Professions responsible for managing and developing each professional stream as a shared resource.
- Introduce clear career paths within each stream so that staff can advance across the Civil Service within areas of professional expertise.
Expand career and mobility opportunities for staff across geographic, organisational and sectoral boundaries
We will:
- Develop the Senior Public Service (SPS) model and expand the policy of managed mobility at the most senior levels to increase the number of career development moves and link this to talent management schemes.
- Advertise all mobility, secondment and transfer opportunities in the Civil Service on a single portal and implement practical arrangements that ensure that Departments can select the most appropriate person for the job drawing from the breadth of internal candidates.
- Speed up mobility by empowering managers to replace staff and by introducing a new policy that staff must be released within one month of selection for promotion or transfer.
- Adopt a policy of active mobility in all Departments and between Departments at all levels so that staff do not serve for excessive periods in the same role and are encouraged to apply for appropriate development opportunities.
- Extend mobility over time to provide additional development opportunities and enable greater mobility across the wider public service.
- Improve and expand schemes to facilitate exchanges and secondments between the Civil Service and other sectors of the Irish and international economy.
Re-design organisational and grade structures
We will:
- Create a more empowering organisational and grade structure and introduce more multi-disciplinary project working.
- Develop a new, common framework for describing traditional grades and titles to ensure that these accurately reflect the different jobs and roles that staff deliver.
Improve project management capacity
We will:
- Establish a Project Management Office in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to advise on and support the delivery of projects.
- Introduce a standardised project management approach based on the proven models currently in practice.
- Introduce project management training as part of induction and ongoing Continuous Professional Development.
Increase the authority, flexibility and accountability for managing staff resources by delegating more responsibility to Departments
We will:
- Set binding multi-annual pay allocations centrally, replacing the Employment Control Framework for Departments as the basis for resource management.
- Delegate the scope to determine staffing levels and grade mix to Heads of Departments on a phased basis with the exception of Top Level Appointments Committee (TLAC) posts.
- Strengthen workforce planning processes and requirements to ensure a medium-term strategic view of resource management underpins these changes.
- Initiate a consultation process with senior managers to identify further opportunities to increase local flexibility.
Expand the ICT capacity of Departments and increase efficiencies by creating common systems and infrastructure
We will publish and implement a new ICT Strategy for the civil and public services.
The strategy will:
- Establish common technology standards across all Departments to support closer integration and underpin reform.
- Establish common practices for governance, management and delivery of ICT services.
- Increase efficiencies by sharing common systems and infrastructure.
- Enable better online service delivery by making the top 20 public services (those with the highest number of transactions) digital, supported by new technology trends including mobile, cloud computing, and big data.
- Recognise data as a corporate asset and develop a common data model and coordinated data infrastructure, underpinned by legislation.
- Establish ICT as a professional stream to ensure skills and expertise are available to Departments.
