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Unless you’re under 35 or over 65 you might not have noticed that there’s been an explosion in city living. London apartment developments have been popping up all over the capital fed by a growing need for neat single living units and a desire to be where the action is, and at the most within a night bus home.In the UK some 50% of new homes are apartments, a trend that’s found worldwide, and this has led to some unusual trends in garden design and gardening. In particular it has led to gardens on a tiny scale with a new trend in micro gardening including vertical green walls and grow your own. Community gardening in these new neighbourhoods is a big trend that we’re hearing about. But one trend that has gone under the radar is the rise of slick independent male apartment living – old style bachelor pads with a new twist. They want a garden to match their stylish new homes.The rise of these new bachelor pad gardens is led by a few different influences. First of all there is a new sophistication for staying home and if you are entertaining your date then what better than taking them out into your stylish outdoor space, sitting around a fireplace at night time whatever the season. Second climate change in city centres has led to more exotic gardening, if you have a warm micro climate in your London garden then you can grow exotic plants like luxurious tree ferns and sexy jungle plants like canna lilies.The other big influence is technology, serious boys toys for the garden. New LED lighting technology gives a great atmosphere year round and even when it snows what better view than a snow lit landscape. But of course night time garden lighting allows busy city boys to relax in the garden when they get home, have a beer from their slick stainless steel cooling drawer and chill out. Add in a great sound system linked into the internal computerised music feed and an outdoor TV and you’ve got an extension to your small apartment for year round entertainment.A challenge for every small city garden is seclusion, especially if you’re a bachelor entertaining his latest girl or boyfriend. It doesn’t have to be the usual timber fence and the contemporary horizontal trellis that has sprung up in suburban gardens isn’t enough when your home displays your tastes to people you want to impress.And plants are just as important to create that secluded atmosphere. In small gardens every plant counts and it’s important to choose wisely. For the gardener he might sacrifice seating space for planting but for many it’s about low maintenance garden design that means occasional gardening whilst enjoying great simple planting schemes with a peak of interest for the summertime. For the minimalist bachelor pad it might mean a single great Japanese Maple but the clear white branches of multi-stem birches and black bamboo are a popular choice. For the single male interested in emanating Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver there’s also an interest in planting more unusual exotic edibles like Szechuan pepper or Cocktail Kiwis that thrive in the warmth of the city.Whatever their taste for planting and gardening there seems to be a cool modern garden for every bachelor, whether it’s the city banker with his rooftop space for entertaining or the newly independent divorcee retiring into the city rather than out to the country and wanting a city garden to enjoy for gardening and relaxing in. So next time your London garden is looking a bit tired check out the garden of the single male living next door and get a few tips for a fab garden design.

Worldwide travel is a hoot. If you haven’t done it yet, you really should! Sure it can wind up costing tons of cash-but it really doesn’t have to! No way, travel on a budget is totally possible and in some ways much more rewarding. For one thing, you are not artificially separated from the locals by expensive hotels and restaurants. There are bunch of things one must do before jetting off and visiting a certified travel clinic for an immunization or two is a great idea depending on where you are going.Immunization is another word for vaccination and they are administered to combat and protect against any diseases that may be lingering in your country of destination. Diseases, you say? Yeah, but they’re nothing to worry about-even if according to the World Health Organization there are at least six thousand rare diseases and over twelve thousand other categoriesof disease across the globe. Sure the numbers seem dire, but that shouldn’t keep you from beginning to travel-one need only worry about contracting a microscopic percentage of existing diseases while traveling-and an immunization is available for each one.Of course, we are being a tad light-hearted, but the facts are the facts, the world is a dangerous place, there’s no way around this. Yet, even though one may need a little extra protection against disease via an immunization while traveling, this no excuse to sit home and never experience the world in a first-person manner. Once you begin to travel, chances are you will never stop. It can be like an addiction; an addiction to other cultures, wondrous sites, delicious food, and friendly foreigners. These things all coalesce to make world travel one of the highlights of any fulfilling lifetime.So where to go? Is there a place on earth that is more dangerous in terms of indigenous disease than any other? Well, yes, that continent is probably the continent of Africa. Once again, however, with the help of a certified travel doctor and his immunization skills, one can behold the splendor of wild elephants at a watering hole bathing themselves with their spraying trunks or even take up residence with a tribe such as the Masai, whose Kenyan culture is fascinating and whose welcoming attitude is famous worldwide.One of the most dangerous diseases-and one for which an immunization is surely needed-is yellow fever. Yellow fever is a potentially deadly disease still a threat in many areas of the world, not just Africa. A yellow fever immunization is recommended if one is planning to travel to Africa, Central and South America, and/or parts of Asia. It is spread through the bite of an infected mosquito, thus making it difficult to halt its devastating path.Other travel related diseases that have an immunization available are malaria, typhoid and Japanese encephalitis. The process of immunization is commonly administered by a single injection. A rabies immunization, however, is up to five shots (though this is the exception rather than the rule). Receiving a travel immunization is very safe and affordable, and significantly lowers the risk of catching any disease while abroad.

Background

Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.

Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.

The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.

The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.

Challenge

Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.

In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.

Developing a Best in Class Finance Function

Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.

1) Aligning to Force Strategy

As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.

Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.

The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.

Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.

2) Supporting Force Decisions

Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.

Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk

Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.

A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.

3) Value to the Force

The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:

Centralization

By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.

With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.

The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:

o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support

However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:

o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force

A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.

To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.

Process Efficiencies

Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.

Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.

Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.

Culture

Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.

A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.

Organizational Improvements

Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.

Technology Enabled Improvements

There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.

These include:

A) Scanning and workflow

Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.

B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool

Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:

o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.

o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.

The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.

C) Database solution

Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.

Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.

D) Customize reports

In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.

In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.

These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.

Conclusion

It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.

While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.