Award winning programs - interviews with the winners.

Editor's Note: In an effort to provide more articles of a practical nature to our readers, Public Personnel Management recently interviewed the recipients of the 1992 IPMA Agency Awards for Excellence. Their complete answers to our questions regarding the programs and projects that earned them

recognition from the Association will be carried in the next few issues of the journal. In this issue, we highlight the responses of the human resources program of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, recipient of the Agency Award for Excellence, medium agency. Our interview was conducted with Barbara Sundquist and the members of the staff of the Office of Human Resources.

1) Please describe the Human Resource Planning Board and explain how it is transforming your HR department from a reactive to a proactive department.

The Human Resource Planning Board (HRPB) is the strategic human resource planning body at Mn/DOT responsible for identifying, prioritizing, and strategically planning for emerging human resource issues, trends, and opportunities which will impact the agency. The focus of the HRPB is on longer term, strategic, human resource planning rather than on tactical or operational human resource planning.

The HRPB is composed of managers from each division within the agency and supported by a working team of human resource professionals from within the Office of Human Resources.

The HRPB:

Identifies external and internal trends that may have human resource consequences in Mn/DOT.

* Solicits issues and opportunities from internal management.

* Screens and prioritizes issues, trends, and opportunities.

* Assigns responsibility to develop strategies/solutions/alternatives that satisfy or address the issues.

* Evaluates and selects from strategies/solutions/alternatives and recommends action to Deputy Commissioner's staff.

* Implements, markets, and provides sustained support for selected strategies/solutions.

* Revisits and modifies strategies and solutions as needed.

I consider our major accomplishment to be obtaining the involvement of management in addressing human resource issues on a long-term strategic basis. It is much more effective for managers to identify and address these issues than human resource staff. In the latter case, human resource staff have to sell the ideas and our ideas are many times looked upon as suspect, since we are staff, not line managers. With the HRPB we have a partnership with managers as human resource staff are directly involved along with the managers. This will prevent the "dumping" of ideas on the human resource office without any input from us. It also will give managers a better understanding of the many varied human resource issues and the difficulty in solving some of the

resultant problems.

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, says something about being truly proactive as being able to see how you contribute to your own problems. The HRPB has established a process for looking ahead and addressing long term human resource issues and problems before they are staring us in the face. Some of the issues are addressing what the department will become in twenty years. Will we continue to build roads or will we be much more multimodel? As a result how many engineers will we need? With the many changes in technology, engineering degrees as well as other degrees will rapidly become obsolete. How are we going to keep our employees trained?

Much of the Board's work to date has been defining internal processes and marketing the HRPB concept to the various functional groups within the agency who will be responsible for identifying and recommending issues to be addressed. The HRPB is in its infancy stage, but I am certain that this approach is our best chance to provide the agency with an effective way to adapt to changing organizational priorities and human resource issues.

2) Since 1990, decentralization has been a top priority for your department.

a) Please explain the impact of decentralization: what are the advantages?

The decentralization of authority and responsibility focused on the delegation of classification, examining and certification functions to offices and districts and one elimination of unnecessary review of various personnel transactions. Most delegation became possible when the Office of Human Resources (OHR) requested and received greater delegation of authority from the Department of Employee Relations in the staffing area. In addition to improve service to management, the advantages of decentralization within this system include:

* Turn around time on personnel actions reduced by eliminating unnecessary levels review.

* The level of satisfaction of managers, personnel officers and personnel support staff improved.

* Planning of personnel actions better controlled and related to the needs of individual offices.

* Better buy in on personnel decisions by operating managers.

* The skills and abilities of staff utilized more effectively.

The disadvantages are:

* Personnel files are no longer kept in the Human Resources Office. A special effort is required to make certain that consistent procedures are followed in filing, retention and the release of information. (On the other hand, better information is available to managers in the offices and districts who are closer to the decision process.)

* We no longer have centralized information on examinations e.g. Highway Maintenance Worker. Have to contact all the districts to put together a centralized report.

* On occasion errors occur or solutions are developed which are a little too creative, but there have been few problems and I would expect even fewer problems in the future as operating unit staff gain skill in the use of the system.

* Effort is required of the OHR staff to continually evaluate their role in providing consultative support to ensure that the locations continue to function with the planned level of autonomy. It is all too easy to make the decision rather than guide the decision process.

b) Have you noticed anything that you would do differently in the way decentralization was implemented or in the scope?

Let me say first of all, that the Mn/DOT approach has been participative and eclectic. The various offices have not been required to accept decentralized authority and uniformity has not been required. Some locations have pursued delegation more aggressively than others. Decentralization may actually be a misnomer. The idea is to strategically allocate authority and responsibility to facilitate planning to meet local needs and to improve the responsiveness of the system. Key ingredients are participation in the planning process, effective training, good communication and flexibility. Delegation can be modified or ended when having a particular authority and responsibility no longer meets the needs of an office. In my view the approach helps to minimize errors and problems.

If we were to begin again, however, we would devote more time to communicating with managers about our plans. We had some minor problems when some top managers concluded Human Resources Office staff should have been reassigned to the various offices to manage the increased workload. When we clarified that the additional delegation was possible only because the Human Resources Office had assumed greater authority from the central personnel agency, Department of Employee Relations, and had increased its workload to make decentralization possible, this issue was laid to rest. It would have been easier to address this issue in the beginning.

c) How has employee perception of the Office of Human Resources (OHR) been affected by decentralizing duties?

This is a very difficult question to answer because decentralization is just one of many changes that have occurred in Mn/DOT in the past three years. Staff members from the OHR and I have traveled throughout the state and talked with a great number of employees individually and with groups, I would like to believe that employees have a higher level of satisfaction because they can get answers to their questions and resolutions to their problems more quickly. Hopefully, the "blackbox" view of the Human Resources decision process has been dispelled to some degree.

3) How would you define Total Quality Management at Mn/DOT?

When Mn/DOT's Quality Management Improvement Steering Committee was established in response to the 1989 Strategic Plan, one of its first goals was to explore the theories of various quality gurus and select one to guide our effort. Without prejudice to the wisdom and insight of the other quality leaders, W. Edwards Deming's integration of humane management principles with disciplined statistical analysis appealed strongly to our organization. His definition of quality is the simple and unassailable: "quality is defined by the customer".

We have never tried to improve on that definition, but we have expanded on it in order to stimulate discussion and ensure understanding of Deming's 14 Points. Mn/DOT advocates these fundamental precepts of quality;

* Positive view of human nature

everyone is a willing worker who deserves to take pride in his or her work

* Focusing on the process, not people

employees work in the system and managers work on the system

* Participative Management

everyone is part of the same team and makes an essential contribution

* Empowering People

the people closest to the work know the work best

* Data-based decision making

management by fact, not "gut feeling" or untested assumptions |guesswork~

4) Please elaborate on your Quality improvement program and any related quality incentives.

Mn/DOT's focus on customer permeates the organization, such that quality, management has in fact become the way we do business. For example, the customers of the right of way acquisitions processes are people from whom land is being acquired, who may even have to leave their homes; they are not likely to be fans of Mn/DOT. Nevertheless, our departmentwide Right of Way team conducted a survey of these potential critics to learn how they could more sensitively and efficiently carry out their work. The response rate was high and the feedback was most constructive.

All Mn/DOT efforts are grounded on these principles of teamwork and willingness to solicit input from internal and external customers. A team of four people designated to develop a soils information system ended up pulling in members from offices and districts around the state, as well as reaching out to the University and private contractors, in order to ensure a universally satisfactory coding system.

The Division of Research and Strategic Planning has carried customer focus to a even higher level. Regional dialogues have been held around the state in order to seek input from the public. Business and community representatives were asked to lay out the needs and expectations around which Mn/DOT will plot its future course. This commitment to customer and to quality management is heartily endorsed by our Commissioner James N. Denn.