The Centre for Effective Services
How long does it take to make cross-government collaboration work?
The slightly surprising answer from this Irish case study is 15 days – or more precisely, 15 days of work, as the elapsed time was rather greater. But even with that qualification, this is pretty impressive stuff. It is also interesting that most of the tools they used to make it work had been assembled in the UK civil service (specifically the Prime Minster’s Delivery Unit) some 15 years earlier – which suggests that this exercise had the potential to have been a wholly routine application of well-established methods. That was clearly not the case here – nor would it probably have been any more expected in a UK equivalent (where the PMDU is long gone).