Role of Senior Management
As already noted, a critical success factor for the whole IPOD process is ensuring and sustaining top-level management commitment to the process. This cannot be emphasized enough. Some practical guidance about involving or engaging top-level management is set out below.
As a key part of the process of undertaking the IP office diagnostic, it is suggested that meetings with the senior managers of the IP office should be scheduled at the beginning of the process and at the end of the research and consultation phases. Other meetings during the research and consultation phase may be useful but the two meetings discussed below are the most important and they are essential for the success of the IPOD Project.
In the first meeting, the nature of the IPOD process needs to be carefully outlined. It is important that senior management are fully briefed on the methodology and how the IPOD team are planning to proceed with their research and consultations. The team should specifically raise the question of the resources available to the IP office to contribute to the process and, more importantly, to the implementation of recommendations. The discussion needs, in part, to focus on the size of the IP office. Smaller IP offices, for example, have more restricted opportunities to follow through with management improvements if significant aspects of management services is provided by the larger ministry of which the IP office is only a small department. Improvements to the efficiency and effectiveness of IP rights processing is also impacted by the scale of the operations of the IP office. Nonetheless, the IPOD process should aim to identify practical opportunities to make improvements to both the management and operations of the IP office consistent with the resources available to the office. The commitment of senior management to the whole IPOD process should also be confirmed at this meeting.
The issue of confidentiality for participants in the IPOD process also needs to be discussed with senior management. Agreement needs to be reached with senior management that all discussions with managers and staff, as well as with external stakeholders, should be confidential to ensure that there is open sharing of information. And a decision should be made at this first meeting with senior managers on how and with whom the final report and recommendations will be shared. Again, to assure senior management that the gaps and weaknesses identified through the process are to remain essentially confidential between the IPOD team and the senior management group. The issue of how the findings are to be more generally shared also needs to be discussed. These are important ground rules to be established to maximise clarity and trust in the process.
Another important discussion with the senior management group at the beginning of the process is to establish if there are some improvement issues and priorities that they have already identified. These issues and priorities may have formed part of the background for establishing the process. While it should remain open for the process to identify other priority areas for improvement based on the diagnostic research and consultations, the initial view of senior managers of the priority areas for improvement is an important input to the framing of the research and consultations and for the final recommendations.
In the initial meeting with senior management, the opportunity should be taken to identify any strategic vision for the IP Office held by management or those to whom they are accountable. The strategic vision for the IP office may or may not be documented but it is essential that the IPOD Project fully understands the strategic directions held for the IP office. There is also an opportunity to discuss how senior management sees any limitations on potential improvements governed by the local (but wider) context. What restrictions are foreseen to make improvements because of government wide requirements or regulations? How does the senior management team view these constraints? These views may need to be challenged through the process and into the recommendations. As discussed in some of the Topics set out in Appendix 1 (especially those associated with financial and human resource management), exploring some of the ways other agencies in the government have dealt with these restraints may open up possibilities not otherwise seen by senior management at the beginning of the process.
After all the research and consultations, an initial attempt at putting it all together should be developed and presented for discussion to the senior management team. The presentation should indicate which areas should be improved and in what ways, what the priorities for improvement are that the IPOD process has identified, and how the improvements should be managed going forward.
This discussion should focus on presenting the data and information collected through the IPOD process that supports the proposed recommendations, identifying the reasoning behind the priorities suggested in the recommendations, and examining any restraints that have been identified to address the priorities and any suggestions to overcome the restraints.