Over the past few years, the new role of public administration is increasingly defined. At the organizational and managerial level, this change was manifested both in a change in work processes and in the definition of new competencies for management and public sector operators, who increasingly have to play an active and active role, transforming areas of activity towards innovation in everyday practice. It is from this point of view that the use of organizational and managerial recommendations finds its motivation.
What is consulting. This is a useful tool for the state manager, to whom he can offer new ways of directing his actions. In particular, consulting can be useful as support for public administration in organizational change processes, which include: consolidating the results achieved as a result of undertaken change processes in the logic of “continuous improvement” of the organization; streamlining processes and practices, in search of improved services provided to users and overall productivity; radical change, that is, the innovation of processes and practices, for example, in the face of a change in mission or significant changes in the context of actions.
In these areas, organizational and managerial consultations should not be construed solely as a specific technical contribution for professionals not represented in the administration. Rather, it is an operational tool for supporting change process management, useful for identifying innovative paths, for improving efficiency, and for supporting the formulation and achievement of strategic goals. The task of consulting is not to replace the client, introducing new elements into his environment, as if they were foreign bodies, but to act side by side with the client to help him determine, starting with the determination of needs, possible solutions , including through the inclusion in the public context of tools, methodologies, innovative knowledge.
Importance of consulting services. For example, a state manager may perceive the presence of critical problems in his organization or evaluate his work inadequately, but at the same time, he may not have a clear character and outlines of the problem that needs to be solved. In this case, the consultant can help him understand and limit critical problems, identify possible solutions for improvement, and support change management.
Thus, some inherent aspects of the relationship between the consultant and the client remain valid: – management is responsible for the change process and for checking the correspondence between the overall goals of the organization and the results expected from the intervention, constant attention to measuring value is generated by the intervention; – Consulting is responsible for satisfying customer requests, offering innovative ways and adequate management methods, as well as maintaining coherence between specific objectives of the intervention and gradually achieved results. Therefore, in this sense, consulting intervention is understood as the process by which new experience and methodologies are introduced into the public administration. Its actions should allow to improve work in relation to citizens and business and increase the general skills, culture and knowledge of organizations.
When the client has not yet started the change process, he can ask the consultant to help develop a common change program (in these cases we are talking about the master plan), which sets the time, responsibilities and resources and indicates the goals, actions that should be implemented at the stage implementation, and related working methods. Usually this type of assistance then generates a definition, within the general plan, of several projects that insist on specific areas of intervention and the implementation of which can be entrusted to other consulting companies or managed directly by the administration. The contribution of consultants at this stage is focused, in particular, on:
1. support in identifying the set of initiatives that need to be activated, their priorities and their communication;
2. determination of the budget of resources required for the program and individual initiatives or projects within the plan;
3. definition and implementation of actions to support program management, transition to individual projects (for example, coordination of actions between projects, internal transfer of a report on the status of the program, improvement of the logic of actions common to the program, etc.).