5 May 2014

Are we over-managed in Barnet?

Mr Mustard can't find the tweet now but @publicnaylor (Chris Naylor, the Chief Operating Officer) brought to his attention by re-tweeting, something about local government management and Mr Mustard tweeted back about the excessive number of levels of management. At this point the Guardian invited him to submit his view but he didn't have time as his world had gone mad following the Broadcast of Parking Mad. The final episode will be out on Thursday at 9pm on BBC1.

Unless he was dreaming (and they have been problematic recently, his new motorbike's brakes failed at 100mph approaching a T junction in France and a lady taxi driver in England took him down some country lanes that were even more pot-holed than the typical Barnet road and then she nudged a cyclist off his bike and when she got out to pick him up Mr Mustard saw her knickers were on the dashboard along with other clothes and yet she was fully clothed?)  he tweeted @publicnaylor that he could do with the latest organogram but it didn't arrive. Mr Mustard then went onto the council website and found that, for a change, it was up to date. Here is the latest staff organisational chart - Mr Mustard expected 2 or 3 pages but boy was he in for a shock.

That rather brought Mr Mustard to a halt. Instead of a 2 or 3 page chart he found himself looking at 134 pages of corporate structure. They say that less is more but in Barnet Council management, more is more. The size of this management tree, actually more of a small forest, is ridiculous. There will be managers in this chart who don't come out of meetings from one month to the next and who add nothing to the borough apart from overhead.

We are over-managed beyond belief, we are providing a whole field of troughs for snouts to dip into. Don't talk to Mr Mustard about miserable miserly mean £45,000 cuts to Mapledown School and expect him to believe that every single person in the above structure chart is necessary and that none of them are overpaid. Someone with some management and organisational skills needs to take an axe to the chart and get chopping, hard and fast. Don't think for one moment that the above represent all of the management either as the Parking Manager and the Parking Process Manager are not listed and their equivalents in every other department (the people who actually do all of the work and get their hands dirty) are not listed.

Feel free to tweet this blog to the heavens.

Yours frugally (unlike the council who are spending our money like drunken sailors)

Mr Mustard

1 comment:

  1. Actually the chart is only 14 pages! Simply staggering! For some reason there is still an old chart on our office wall. Tells you everything you need to know, and they had even bothered to put names in the boxes. The whole chart fitted on ONE PAGE!

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