Having spent some time recently getting more familiar with how the current set of water companies like to organise themselves, it continues to fascinate me how something so similar can often be so different.
One company will have a central team of improvement resources and another will have none. One will have a capital customer engagement team and another will not.
Most will have a developer services function but within that you will have 10 different set ups.
When you think about it, all water companies are trying to deliver the same service. Yes, there are some regional differences but on the whole there is a lot of reason to believe that more should be aligned than not.
So why then do we not leverage what one water company finds as the current best way to go about applying resources to a particular challenge, in other companies so we all get the benefit?
A number of thoughts spring to mind…
The main drivers?
Obviously, funding is the big one as you need a decent level of budget to do most things. But that aside there is more to this and there will be a number of factors that play into how we end up with differing structures. Here are my thoughts on the main ones from where I’m sitting (there will be more):
1. How leaders think – naturally not all leaders will think the same. Past experience, successes, learning and how the current state is interpreted will all play into how a leader will determine an answer to the best way to utilise resources. If someone thinks in a more ‘command and control’ way they may create a structure that ensures they have as much of the control within their direct line as possible so as not to rely on central teams.
2. What leaders aspire to – this may be controversial but in my experience its true. Sometimes, leaders will set about creating the conditions that push more favourably towards a personal goal (quite often a promotion), regardless of whether this is the best solution when looking at the bigger picture.
3. How leaders weigh up a challenge – Depending on the level of actual understanding vs perceived and also where someone sits on the realist to optimist scale can have quite a big impact on how they decide to utilise resources in meeting any given challenge.
4. Reactive nature – there are a lot of reactions to events in the water sector. Take the recent Thames news. I don’t know if something shifted quickly out of the back of that but I can imagine it did so that we can demonstrate we are doing something about it. This knee jerk can often make for bad decisions which actually take us further away from an optimum. Short term thinking.
5. AMP periods – this is an obvious one but has such a big say in how water companies structure. Because we’re having to align to the next period it drives leaders to think about what they need to do to reshape and if we find that we’ve now got new leaders because the last only stayed for one AMP then we’ve got new thinking, new ideas and so on. These periods have a lot to answer for in taking water company thinking back round the loop (we’ve had a go at this before years ago). Short term thinking again.
6. The big consultancies – if you’ve had the pleasure of working with the big ones you will know that a ‘diagnostic’ coming in at the top table will identify millions of savings opportunities which then require a large re-organisation of sorts. Once complete and 5 years later we go again and often we end up moving some things back to how they were before as we created different problems from our first efforts. Often short term thinking as driven towards business performance for shareholders sooner rather than later.
Is this true?
Difficult for me to say but it would make sense.
If one water company cracked the ideal way to go about running a reporting function that served internal needs and also faced off to the regulator why wouldn’t that be shared and leveraged by the others?
I see different challenges in each water company. One challenge in one seems to have a decent solution in another but not always shared. You only have to look at the make up of the roles that each water company has and unless you are a water or waste water technician of some sort (acting on the network) its not that straightforward to see your role in another company.
As a leader, how is your thinking around how you utilise your resources AND what can you learn from looking at how other water companies are utilising their resources around the same challenges?