Here you will find knowledge, information and tools to meet the needs of urban leaders seeking to make major changes in a single service or sector of their city. You may be considering such a course of action for a variety of reasons.

Here are some typical situations.

• You have made a promise to improve a specific service or sector during an election campaign, e.g., to provide better urban transport, to reform the collection of municipal taxes, or to install a new water treatment system.
  
  
• A major failure or breakdown has occurred in some service or system used by the public every day, e.g., in garbage collection, water supply, or sewage collection.
  
  
• There has been a loss of confidence in a department or organization of the municipal government arising from corruption among senior officials.
  
  
• A major change has been imposed on your city from above, such as the transfer of specific additional powers and responsibilities by central government.

Some examples of major steps to improve services in a single sector include:

• Starting to charge users money for a service that has always been "free" in the past, though it actually cost your city money to provide.
  
  
• Replacing a long-time management group of a specific program or service with a new team with a mandate to "shake it up".
  
  
• Turning a given service or program over the the private sector to operate, or conversely, taking back public ownership or control of a key service or sector that has not been doing well as a private operation.
  
  
• Fundamentally changing the technology, financing and management structure used to provide a given service, such as by getting rid of central collection of garbage in favour of community waste management systems.

You will not find on the Internet a single convenient guide to organizing and carrying out reforms in specific services or systems, although there is a lot of related information available. We have created a short guide for you here. It takes the form of a slide presentation which you can flesh out and freely adapt to your own needs and situation. One possible use of this presentation would be at the first meeting of a new department head and his/her advisors on a day following his/her appointment.

The structure of this presentation was originally developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University for planning organizational change projects.

You can find it at: http://www.sei.cmu.edu/ideal/ideal.present/tsld001.htm. The actual contents have been extensively adapted here.

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