Three Speeds of Administrative Modernisation

Anyone who plans administrative modernisation at a single pace will run into trouble at the first sign of resistance.

Many modernisation projects in the public sector carry a quiet wish: to tackle everything at once. New structures, new processes, a new mindset, ideally within a year. Practice tells a different story. Quick wins, structural change and cultural change move on different timelines. Ignoring these differences overburdens the organisation and, in the end, costs exactly the acceptance that lasting change depends on.

Operational speed: quick wins as an early proof point

Quick wins operate at the operational level. A shortened approval process, a digitised form, a team responsibility reassigned more sensibly. Measures like these can be implemented within a few weeks and deliver visible results quickly. That is exactly their value for the course of the project: they show everyone involved that change actually achieves something, before the larger, slower undertakings become visible at all.

The mistake many modernisation projects make is confusing quick wins with genuine structural reform. Optimising a single process does not yet change an organisation. It builds trust, trust that is needed for the harder phase that follows. Precisely because quick wins work so fast, they tempt some project leads to pace the entire undertaking the same way. That does not work for structural or cultural questions, because these have different preconditions.

Structural change: the middle tempo

At the structural level, the work concerns organisational and process structures, responsibilities, interfaces and resource allocation. Changes here need considerably more time than operational adjustments, because they require coordination across several areas and often formal decisions. A realistic time frame runs from several months to a year, depending on the size of the administration and the complexity of the tasks involved.

What matters is building structural change on a robust analysis. An organisation that systematically records existing structures, potential and available resources before reassigning responsibilities avoids having to correct course later. I describe this analytical rigour in my book Verwaltungsmodernisierung mit Methode as one of several interconnected levels of analysis meant to create clarity before any structural decision is made. Only once it is clear what exists and what resources are available can a new structure be designed to hold up in day-to-day work, rather than needing adjustment again shortly after.

Cultural change: the longest stretch

The strategic level, where attitudes, leadership understanding and collaborative culture shift, takes the most time. Here, the measure is not weeks or months but years. Culture does not change by decree. It changes through repeated experience: through senior managers who model new behaviour, through processes that are genuinely lived differently, through successes that consolidate over time.

Squeezing cultural change into the same project plan as a quick win produces frustration. Staff experience an announcement that is not honoured in daily practice, because cultural patterns simply change more slowly than forms or responsibilities. Senior managers who show patience here and send small, repeated signals achieve more in the end than those who rely on a single grand announcement.

Thinking the three speeds together

Successful modernisation projects treat operational, structural and cultural change as three parallel processes running at different tempos. Quick wins build early trust and capacity to act. Structural reforms build on a sound analysis and change how the administration actually works. Cultural change ultimately ensures that new structures are carried forward for the long term.

For senior managers this means a clear communication task: explain early to everyone involved what change to expect and when. A quick win in the first week, a structural adjustment after half a year, a noticeably changed collaborative culture only after two or three years, that is a realistic timeline staff can follow. Building in this expectation management from the start avoids the most common reason modernisation projects fail: disappointment that some things change faster and others slower than originally hoped. In the end, patience at the cultural level pays off just as much as speed at the operational level. Both together, correctly paced, carry administrative modernisation well beyond its first few months.