Search our website:

Customer Focus

Euro-Med Workshop on Administrative Simplification Strategies: Better Public Services to Support More Competitive Enterprises

Brussels, 30 November – 1 December 2011

The Workshop was organised by SIGMA and the EU Commission to support Euro-Med Countries to learn about practical tools to improve the customer focus in the public sector and to raise the quality of public services. The two-day event brought together more than 30 senior policy advisors and public managers dealing with administrative simplification, as well as representatives of business and employer associations, social partners and civil society organisations in the Euro-Med countries. Elke Loeffler, CEO of Governance International was commissioned to design the programme and to facilitate the event. As the photos show, the participants very much enjoyed the interactive sessions focussing on issues such as performance measurement, service charters, the Common Assessment Framework and ISO 9001. The result was a general agreement between participants that much could be done by the public sector to make it easier for enterprises to set up, comply with the law and pay the proper level of taxes.

Click here to read a report on the learning points of the workshop.

Click here to read a version of the report in French.

 

In-house seminar on citizen panels

6 January 2011, Besançon

Besançon (117,000 inhabitants) is the capital of the Departement of Doubs in the East of France. It has the distinction of being the first city in France to set up a Citizen’s Panel. Since its launch in 2009, two citizen satisfaction surveys have been conducted, covering 13 service areas. In early 2011, the manager of the panel, Serge GUILLEMIN, invited Governance International to help the council learn from international best practice in citizen surveys. This one-day workshop drew on experiences with citizen panels from the UK and Germany and demonstrated to the Deputy Mayor and senior managers a range of innovative approaches on how to nudge citizens towards working with the council on those services about which panel members were most interested.

For further information on the Besançon citizen panels, please contact our French Associate, Marcel Guenoun, at marcel.guenoun@govint.org.

Joint two-day workshop on Citizen Centered Public Services

The German Institute of Urban Affairs (DIFU) and Governance International, Berlin, 11-12 May 2009


This objective of this joint event with the DIFU – the ‘training agency’ of the German Local Government Association - was to showcase recent trends in customer service and personalisation of services and to enable senior public officials to transfer the good practice cases back to their own agency. Innovative cases included:

  • the introduction of service charters for immigrants in the City of Solingen,
  • active complaints management in Arnsberg council,
  • the peer-approach to improve the welfare and safety of disadvantaged children in the City of Augsburg.

The key lessons of the workshop were published by the public management journal Innovative Verwaltung (the German equivalent to LGC).

To view the article in German please click here.

Copyright © Governance International ®, 2010 -2024. All rights reserved
privacy statement | legal disclaimer | contact us