Previous Manager’s Choice dilemmas

”Don’t even try that.” Once again, someone is telling you what you can — or, more pointedly, can’t — do. Once again, it is Gord Tommon, your procurement chief, who is telling you how you can’t go about contracting for a new computer system.

As director of West Dakota’s Division of Motor Vehicles, you have long been the target of public abuse. (So were your predecessor and your predecessor’s predecessors.) Every morning, it seems, Vera Wilton, the acerbic host of “Joy Ride,” Zenith City’s popular commuter radio program, reveals another embarrassing incident at one of the division’s offices. And if it is a slow news day, the Zenith City Tribune can always send a reporter to interview a few irate citizens who have been waiting in line (they claim) for hours. For journalistic hyperbole, you can’t beat a quote from someone who is making a third trip to Motor Vehicles to register a car. And, in the monthly summary of the governor’s mail, your division usually tops all other state agencies with the most complaints.

Certainly, much of the criticism has been warranted. The lines at the division’s urban offices have always been long — too long. And no one ever confused the quality of your division’s customer service with that of Neiman Marcus. By the time citizens get to the counter, they are furious, and so they take out their frustrations on the clerks. These clerks, having already spent hours being harassed by angry citizens, hardly respond pleasantly.

To deal with these obvious problems, you’ve taken a number of actions. You’ve renovated the offices to make them more inviting (or, at least, less like the landlord was paying West Dakota to use the place). You’ve redesigned the forms that you send to citizens. They now make it clear exactly what a driver needs to bring to renew a license or to register that pre-owned pickup purchased from a neighbor. If someone owes parking fines, which would prevent the computer from renewing his or her license, the form makes this very clear.

Naturally, you’ve trained your front-line personnel in customer-service skills and put your front-line supervisors through a special course to help them defuse volatile situations. Indeed, you’ve attempted to infuse a customer-service ethic throughout the division.

Still, better offices, better forms and better customer service will never solve your division’s problems. These steps were important and necessary. They have bought you some time. The complaints that the governor receives have declined slightly. These quick, first steps have demonstrated action, begun to change the division’s operations and thinking, and provided the breathing room necessary to develop the big changes.

And the biggest change is a new computer system for the division. When the DMV’s statewide network is functioning, front-line workers can get at the records they need to create and renew drivers’ licenses and vehicle registrations. And the information is accurate. But access is slow. And the system crashes too frequently. So the lines just grow — and grow. Without a new computer network, you will never be able to shorten the lines.

Moreover, you need this new system quickly. Unfortunately, West Dakota’s procurement process is not designed for speed. If you take the traditional approach, you will first have to go through the procurement process to contract with a firm to design the new system. Then, you will have to go through the process again to contract with a second firm to build it. By the time the new computer is up and running, the impact of your initial efforts will have completely dissipated.

Consequently, you want to take the “design-build” approach. You remember hearing about this concept at some conference: Rather than go through the procurement process twice, you only do it once. Rather than deal with two different firms (or two different joint ventures), you work with only one team that both designs and builds the system.

When you suggested this strategy, Tommon, your procurement chief, freaked out: “If the same firm both designs and builds this system, or any system, it has an obvious conflict.” But when you asked your legal counsel to track down the exact language — either in the statutes or the regs — that prevented your division from employing the design-build strategy, she couldn’t find any.

Still Tommon insists it is against both procurement regulations and procurement law. More than once he has told you: “We don’t do things that way in West Dakota.”

Then, to win support, Tommon brought the issue to the attention of Connell McGaret, the state’s chief procurement officer, who has called you with some pointed advice. “Don’t use the stupidity of a law as an excuse to route around it,” McGaret warned you on the phone. “Smart people get stupid laws changed.”

For Bob Behn's approach to this month's public management dilemma — or to post your own ideas — click here.