Internal study calls for series of reforms

Date: 22/07/1999

By Rory Watson

THE European Commission should adopt a system of internal billing to make operational departments more aware of the costs when they ask for support from the legal, translation and other back-up services, according to a new internal report.

The recommendation is contained in a wide-ranging study, Designing Tomorrow's Commission which draws together the findings of an 18-month screening exercise dubbed 'Decode'.

The report reveals that more than 30,000 people, including outsiders on temporary contracts, now work full-time for the Commission in one capacity or another - almost double the usual estimates.

The exercise, which identified both good and bad practices in the Commission, was launched in October 1997 to help restructure the organisation to cope with its new responsibilities under the Amsterdam Treaty and prepare for EU enlargement.

It has since assumed even greater political importance following the highly critical report earlier this year by the committee of 'wise men' on the Commis-sion's management style.

"It is a kind of tool box of ideas, facts and figures and Romano Prodi has already used some of them when he announced his reorganisation of the Commission last week," said Graham Avery, the inspector-general whose department coordinated the mammoth task.

"This is not a response to the experts' report, but the Commission needs to have a more serious discussion on its priorities. We need a process of change, but this should be properly managed."

The 12 teams of senior officials involved in the exercise also stressed the need for departments to determine positive and negative priorities. "This may lead to the conclusion that some activities should be reduced, abandoned or organised differently," states the report. "In operational terms, there is a need for a more structured approach by the College, in collaboration with senior management, in order to enable its political guidelines to be translated into the work programmes of the departments."

Attention is also drawn to the need for far more rigorous performance management, with less emphasis on measuring how much work goes into a project and more on what it actually achieves.

One area clearly ripe for such scrutiny is project management, with an estimated 100,000 projects swallowing up 13% of the Commission's budget and more than 10% of its staff resources.