PGDip Public Management – (Grad.Dip.)

Contents

You will study four core courses.

• Public Policy & Management: Perspectives & Issues

We live in an era of frequent and sometimes radical change in what governments do and how they are organised to do it. Sometimes the changes are generated within countries as responses to social, political and economic developments and sometimes they originate outside the country. The purpose of this course is to provide an analytical framework for understanding public policy and management in a variety of historical and comparative contexts. It will give you the means to make your own judgements about appropriate ways to make public policy and organise and deliver public services.

• Human Resources Management & Development

This course is concerned with the management of people in public organisations. The staff of an organisation are its principal resource, and therefore good practice in the management and development of human resources makes an important contribution to the effectiveness of the organisation. There are many different approaches and managers need to understand which approach is likely to work best in specific circumstances. While covering all the main aspects of HRM this course is designed to enable you to evaluate and choose between approaches.

• Management Information & Information Systems

The introduction of new information systems, including computerised information systems, is essential in improving the performance of public sector organisations (PSOs). Yet, too often, the potential of information systems is never realised, and PSOs are littered with failed computerised information systems. These failures create a massive waste of public finance and of public servants' time and effort. They also reduce the quality of service provided by the public sector; in extreme cases threatening even the livelihoods and lives of those who depend on public services.

• Managing Organisational Change

The public sector is going through substantial change. We first saw a desire to scale down the scale and scope of the public sector, with an emphasis on privatisation and "downsizing". While these processes continue around the world, more recently we also see a desire to improve the capabilities of the public sector, often described in terms of capacity building, or institutional or sectoral development. This in turn leads to significant changes to, and within, individual public sector organisations. New organisational forms have emerged. For example, public sector service organisations are no longer conceived of solely as large scale, rule bound bureaucracies. Although there are still plenty of these, alongside them we find smaller, decentralised organisations, sometimes with a short lifespan, sometimes shifted to the private sector, or at least allegedly more "market oriented".