The senior management of the CTCC have announced that the time wasting menace known as Activity Analysis & Monitoring is to be withdrawn following the Governments purge on bureaucracy. The decision is part of the aim to reduce needless paperwork and allow officers to spent more time on the streets, in the public eye.
The analysis into the dreaded monitoring scheme where officers were ordered to supply statistical information for the benefit of management and government statisticians. The figures appear to show that officers were spending too much of their time completing paperwork.
This has been celebrated as a bureaucratic reduction. Not in the fact that it was a time wasting fiasco but that it is a positive effort to reduce paperwork. I’m sure that the figures covering form filling were far higher than was thought.
This was introduced as an attempt to monitor what was being done by frontline officers, to further waste their valuable time by adding to their already considerable admin burden and supply the information for the benefit of those who will sit on their arses analysing this ‘valuable data’. It was another indication of the measuring and convenient management preferences that seem to be in vogue.
Activity based costing………………….good riddance.
My cynical side tells me that there will be something else that will replace this under the cloak of efficiency/reform/monitoring simply because the Government and their civil servants, along with the top Police seat polishers will, be after something else to submit in its place to try to show how well they are doing. My guesses are that this will by way of a new and radical computerised data input system, which will cost a fortune and be the new way forward. We may even try to market this to various of our family organisations to try to cover some of the costs. The multi-coloured chart or graph displays look impressive to those who understand business plans, budgets and the ‘bigger picture’ but have long since removed themselves from the basics of ground level Policing. It will give them something to talk about over coffee and will keep the ever inventive and resourceful safe in their jobs off the streets and cemented at the cutting edge hidden under the umbrella of management and leadership accountability.
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