VESPRA: Three Questions Every Administrative Analysis Must Answer

Anyone who wants to change a public authority must first understand it. The VESPRA method turns this insight into a tool: structure, potential and resource as the three touchstones of every analysis.

Many modernisation efforts in public administration fail because of the order in which change is approached. Rebuilding processes first and only afterwards asking which structures lie behind them changes the surface and leaves the underlying causes untouched. This is where the VESPRA method starts. It requires structures to be examined before processes are optimised, and potential to be recognised before resources are deployed.

The pressure public authorities are currently under can now be measured with some precision. According to a McKinsey study from 2023, more than 1.5 million employees will leave the public service due to retirement by 2030, roughly a third of the approximately 5 million employees overall. At the same time, PwC Germany and Strategy& conclude in a 2024 analysis that the public sector will be short of at least one million skilled workers by 2030. Expectations of a modern administration are rising in parallel: a representative Bitkom survey from 2024 shows that 90 percent of citizens want their city or municipal administration to pursue digitalisation with greater determination. This expectation meets a reality in which, according to an Allensbach study conducted for the BDI in the same year, only two percent of the medium-sized businesses surveyed consider German public administration highly capable, while 62 percent rate it as barely or not very capable. A forsa survey conducted for the dbb in 2024 arrives at a similar finding: only 27 percent of respondents believe the state is capable of fulfilling its tasks.

These figures do not describe a lack of knowledge. They describe an administration caught between structural requirements from another era and the expectations of the present. This is exactly where the three dimensions of the VESPRA method come in: structure, potential and resource, considered in this order.

Structure: where responsibility actually lies

The first question is how an organisation is built and where responsibility actually runs, independent of the org chart. In many public authorities, formal responsibility diverges from lived practice. Decisions travel through informal channels, coordination loops grow longer because no one clearly holds final responsibility. This often shows up in matters that are formally assigned to one department but in practice have to be coordinated across several levels and areas of responsibility before a decision is reached. A structural analysis exposes such gaps before decisions are made about new processes or digitalisation projects. Building a new IT system on top of an unclear structure only reinforces the existing unclarity, because the digital version reproduces the real coordination paths one to one.

Potential: what already exists in the organisation

The second question concerns what already exists in a public authority but remains unused. Given a skills shortage that, according to the PwC analysis mentioned above, could affect one million posts by 2030, the ability to recognise and deploy existing knowledge and competencies carries more weight than any additional job advertisement. This applies equally to experienced staff nearing retirement and to younger employees whose abilities go unused in the current allocation of tasks. Precisely because around a third of today’s employees will leave due to retirement by 2030, the knowledge these staff can still pass on becomes one of the scarcest resources of all. A potential analysis makes visible which capacities an organisation already possesses before any discussion of building new resources. It asks about experience, informal knowledge and abilities that day-to-day work does not draw on.

Resource: what is actually needed

Only the third question concerns the actual deployment of resources: staff, budget, time, technology. If this question is asked first, resource deployment often follows what happens to be available or politically achievable. If it is asked last, the deployment can be precisely justified, backed by a clear picture of the structure and a realistic picture of the potential already available. A public authority that knows its structure and knows its potential can deploy resources where they actually make a difference, instead of spreading them across open issues that are really structural questions.

The order matters

Michael Ahr describes exactly this order, structure before potential before resource, in his book Verwaltungsmodernisierung mit Methode as the core of the VESPRA method. For senior managers in public administration, this means a shift in perspective: modernisation begins with the question of what the organisation actually is and actually can do. Given the figures on the skills shortage and the declining trust in the state’s capacity to act, this is a practical necessity rather than an academic exercise. Anyone who analyses structure, potential and resource in this order ends up making decisions that fit their own administration, rather than a concept developed elsewhere.

The three questions can be asked at any scale, from a single department to an entire authority. What matters is not the scope of the analysis but its order. Following it provides a robust foundation for every decision that follows the analysis.