Policy Mapping

37 Part of the early work completed on the shared workspace concept for Statistics New Zealand, included mapping the policy development process. The map was predicated on an assumption that the production of Cabinet papers, and the Cabinet decision-making process, is the core of government policy development activity. Thus, the depiction of the policy development process starts with the assignment of a policy advisor and jumps directly into the drafting of the first Cabinet paper.

38 This approach misses the iterative processes that constitute policy development in the Public Service and captures only the production processes associated with one of the key outputs. The project team sees the shared workspace concept as being only in part about the production of policy products. It also encapsulates the use of technology for:

• sharing information and ideas;

• formulating concepts and frameworks that can usefully be applied to the analysis of policy issues;

• utilising research and evaluations as input to analysis; and

• carrying out a range of relevant analyses to shape and formulate specific policies (e.g. social impact/economic/cost-benefit/gender etc.)

Quality of policy advice project

39 The SSC published work on Improving the quality of policy advice in the Public Service adopts a more high level approach to policy mapping. The model used identifies the interdependencies and relationships between several inputs to the policy development process.

40 This model is useful in that it identifies some of the key processes that need to be considered. It is limited, however, in that it does not map out the way these processes are used in the development of policy; how they are affected by multiparty contributions; or how the nature of inter-agency collaboration changes the dynamic interaction between separate processes.

41 To analyse how a policy development shared workspace might work most effectively a more accurate picture of the iterative process of policy development, and how this operates in a collaborative environment, needs to be reached. Clear workflow mapping is required. This is one of the key outcomes sought in the second phase of this project, in discussion with Public sector policy managers.

42 The project team sees policy development and project management as processes with distinct workflow patterns, which can be inter-related, but are not dependent on each other. Project management processes can be used in both operational and applied situations that do not involve policy development (e.g. building a house; reorganising a department). Equally, policy development can be done on issues that are not large enough to require project management, i.e. single-stream issues relevant to only a limited number of stakeholders (e.g. fees and charges regime for titles and survey searches).

43 The mapping of policy management processes is less complicated than that of policy development. The Department of Statistics provided the project team with project management templates available for managing and tracking project activities. These are attached (Attachment 2) and provide a useful starting point for looking at project management workflow in the next phase of this project.