Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go: A Case Study (Part 15) - They Should Have Read My CV

The views in this post are my own, based on my lived experience and personal recollection. My ERA proceedings against the Department of Internal Affairs are ongoing. All supporting documents and evidence will be disclosed through that process.

Somewhere in the Department of Internal Affairs there is a job description document that describes my knowledge and skills more closely than the people who wrote it ever expected to find in a candidate. 

The job description for Manager Technical Operations. It is a good document. Whoever drafted it knew what they were asking for. Someone who knew ARIS down to its administration. Someone who understood the Common Process Model and the back-office machinery of government. Someone who had run business change at scale and lived to talk about it. And a skill very hard to recruit for. Strategic capability. The ability to think beyond the immediate and see what is coming.

I have read it many times since, and I keep arriving at the same question. Did the person who wrote this expect anyone to walk through the door and actually be it? Or was it written to sit there, precise and unmet, while the work carried on as it always had and the people already in the room remained the ones everyone deferred to?

Because here is what happened. I applied for two roles on this programme on the same day - Lead Process Analyst and Manager Technical Operations. They did not shortlist me for the Lead Process Analyst role. They interviewed me for the manager role instead. Richard Ashworth sat on the panel that chose me. They read twenty years of transformation work across three continents, matched the job requirements with my experience and skills, and asked me questions about scenarios the role could face. I came out as their preferred candidate through their recruitment process. The best match they could find for the role they had written. The offer came on a Friday in December, and I signed it before the day was out, because I believed them. I believed they wanted what they had written down.

In hindsight, I wonder if they believed it themselves. They wrote a description of someone remarkable, and then they were astonished when she turned out to be exactly that.

I did what I always do. I did my job to the best of my capability. From the first week in the workplace, I worked hard to understand the goal, the programme, the systems, and everything associated with back-office operations in New Zealand public services.

Surprisingly, I was warned about the ARIS system before I ever accessed it. Typically, people in a team are happy to share their knowledge so you can catch up to what has been done before you arrived. In DIA, however, the senior technical specialist held it the way some people hold a thing they are afraid to lose, as though it were sacred, as though he were the only one who could be trusted near it. A contractor from Azimuth told me, almost bragging, that it had taken him four months to understand the system and that my team could not possibly be ready inside six. I asked him why. He said because it was a very complicated system and it was not easy to understand. I said it is an IT system. It is a tool that helps us do certain things. I was confident it could be understood. 

I was not being glib. It is something that makes me wonder whether people equate complexity with a good system, or whether complexity is sometimes a way to show how important they are. I have spent more than twenty years being told that systems are complicated, and I have learned that complexity is almost always a decision somebody made, not the nature of the thing. It is not rocket science unless it is rocket science. Think of a house. A house has rooms, and the rooms connect. Change the plumbing in the kitchen and you affect the bathroom above it, because they share the same stack. That is not complexity. That is a connection, and any competent builder knows it is there before they pick up a tool. Nobody stands in a house and calls it impossible to understand because the bathroom sits above the kitchen. They simply check what is connected to what before they change anything.

When I looked into the system, I was proven right. It was not hard. It had been made to look hard. It is a process modelling system. It holds process models. The thing they were calling complexity was nothing more than layers. Processes connected to other processes. Steps shared across processes, so the same work is not built twice. That is not difficulty. That is how anything sensible is designed, to cut out repetition. I had seen it my whole career. When I was a programmer working on mainframes, single programs twenty or thirty thousand lines long, the first step before changing a single line was always impact analysis. What am I about to change, and what else does it touch? This was the same. Map what connects to what, and the so-called complexity becomes what it always was. Layers. Knowable ones.

What had been made hard was something else entirely. The collaboration function had been switched off, so the requirements coming out of agency workshops were being gathered by hand, typed into Word and Microsoft Forms, with one person sitting there transcribing what a properly configured system was built to do on its own. That was part of what we were paying contractors for.

So, I started asking the obvious questions. What does this system actually do? What are these models? How does the work really move through it?

The moment I began following those questions through the system, the picture became clear. This was ordinary operational knowledge. Models. Connections. Reuse. Governance. Workflow. The same logic every well-designed system depends on.

There was no secret. There was only work that had not been properly understood, structured, and turned into a usable method. Anyone with the right background who took the time to examine it would have seen what I saw. The process modellers in my team saw it as well.

Soon after I joined, the process modellers in my team came to me with clarifying questions. They were trying to understand the purpose of the programme and why we were doing what we were doing. They had been receiving contradictory information from different people in the team, and the pieces were not fitting together.

So, I took them to a whiteboard and drew what I understood. What the programme was for. How the Common Process Model, agency workshops, ARIS, back-office designs, suppliers, Marketplace, and implementation support were meant to connect. Where the gaps were. What risks we would have to manage if we were serious about making the model usable across government.

After that conversation, they told me it was the clearest explanation they had received of the programme. They said they had been given pieces before, from different people and in different settings, but no one had answered their questions in a way that brought the whole picture together. After that discussion, they understood how the parts connected.

The same response came from people outside my reporting line. People in other parts of DIA. People from other agencies. People who had no reason to please me and no reason to protect me.

I would explain what the programme could actually do. How it could reduce duplication for agencies. How it could give suppliers a clearer and more consistent design baseline. How it could save time for the workforce moving between agencies because the back-office processes would no longer be rebuilt in isolation every time. How it could help the agency running the programme by turning scattered work into reusable public-sector infrastructure. How, if done properly, it could become a win for agencies, suppliers, workers, and taxpayers.

That was the point at which the programme stopped sounding abstract to them. They could see how the pieces were meant to connect and why the work mattered.

Some said it to me directly. Many gave the same feedback to Andy James or Fraser Buchanan. They said DIA had finally found someone who understood the programme end to end and could translate that understanding into precise implementation.

I have not yet told you what it cost me to be good at this job, and I will not spend long on it here, because the earlier parts of this series already have.

The questions I asked were not welcome. The better I understood the programme, the more of a problem I became to the people who had been comfortable with the programme remaining unclear. What began as warnings to keep the senior specialist onside became something else. The institution turned every process it had against me rather than answer the things I had raised.

I was suspended. Then I was dismissed.

Those matters are now in the official record and before the Employment Relations Authority. For this article, I will leave them there.

What I want to talk about is what sat underneath the hurt, because the hurt was real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Being treated that way for doing exactly what you were hired to do, and doing it well, leaves a mark. But beneath that, growing the whole time, was something that had very little to do with me.

It was the programme.

I knew what it was supposed to deliver. I knew what it would take to deliver it. And I knew, from what I had seen and understood, that it was not going to get there. The problem was not that the work could not be done. The problem was that the programme was being held by people who, in my experience, did not have the capability, structure, or intent required to do it properly.

That is a strange and lonely thing to carry. To be pushed out of a room and still care, even on your way out, whether the work in that room gets done.

But I did care, and I will tell you why.

The thing being wasted was not only my skills. I am one person. I will be fine. The thing being wasted was the promise.

Three point nine billion dollars of savings, promised to the public, built on a method I had seen no evidence this team could deliver. That money was never theirs to lose. It belongs to the people who pay for all of it. The nurse. The teacher. The policeperson. The person waiting longer than they should for something basic from a government that keeps telling them there is no money.

That is whose money it is.

And from what I had seen, it was being put at risk by decisions that appeared to protect the people inside the system rather than the promise made to the public.

I have introduced myself the same way my whole career. I do this for the taxpayer.

Not as a slogan. As the actual reason.

People should not pay this much into a system and get so little coherence back. They should not have to deal with ten agencies, ten systems, and ten versions of the same form when the work could be built once and shared properly. I have always believed that. Believing it is part of what made me good at the job.

It is also what made it impossible to walk away quietly and tell myself it was no longer my concern.

Hence I wrote it down.

After they dismissed me, when I had every reason to close the laptop and never think about that programme again, I sat down and worked out how it should be done. Properly. From the beginning. The thing the programme was supposed to produce and never had. A method for getting to the savings, rather than the kind of activity that looks like progress and delivers nothing.

I did it because, from everything I had seen, I had no confidence that team would ever produce it. I believe there are other people in this country who know how to do this work and would do it gladly if they were given the chance. That knowledge exists in New Zealand. But the people holding this programme had shown me, over and over, that the capability, structure, and intent required to do this properly were missing. That is why I made the method public.

It is published now. It sits on Zenodo with a permanent identifier, a DOI, attached to my name. Anyone can find it. That was the point. I wrote it so that it exists in the world, outside that building. Beyond the reach of the same institutional habits through which the health check and the Deloitte report had already disappeared from view. Whichever agency in this country actually wants to save the public money it keeps promising to save can pick it up and read how the work is meant to be done.

This is why the framework matters to me. It was never about systems for their own sake, or models for their own sake. It was about the nurse who gets her time back. The person who deals with one government once instead of ten. That belief is part of what made me good at this work, and it is why being stopped from doing it hurt me the way it did.

They chose me for this. They looked at everyone and picked me.

And then they would not let me do the very thing they had chosen me for. I do not think I will ever fully make peace with that. Not because of what it did to me. Because of what it wasted.

But I need to say something about that framework, and it is the most important thing in this piece, so I will be direct.

A framework is a map. It is not the journey.

What I have published describes how this work should be done. It sets out the method, the sequence, the principles, and the conditions that have to exist for the savings to be real. It is the blueprint. But a blueprint is not a building, and anyone who has ever built anything knows the distance between the two.

The knowledge that turns that document into a delivered programme does not sit on the page. It sits in twenty years of doing this work across different countries, different systems, and different organisations, watching what fails and why. It is the judgement that tells you which corner can be cut and which one will collapse the wall. It is knowing, when an agency says its process is unique, whether that is true or whether it has simply never been shown the shared pattern underneath it.

None of that fits neatly into a document. It lives in the person doing the work. In the depth of experience, the pattern recognition, and the reason to care about getting it right.

Here is the hard truth for whoever picks this up.

The framework on its own will not save the money. Handed to a team without the capability to understand and execute it, it becomes one more artefact. Read. Filed. Quietly ignored. Or worse, half understood and half applied, which is how you spend millions getting something that looks like the answer and delivers none of it. That is the same waste in a new shape.

I know exactly how this goes, because I have already watched it happen with my own work. While I was on special paid leave, I wrote a strategy for this programme. A serious one. I did not have to. I claimed no ownership of it, because I was still employed by DIA at the time and anything I produced was theirs. I sent it to Richard Ashworth and told him he was welcome to use it however he saw fit. I did not need the credit. I needed the work to get done.

If they had taken that document and made it the strategy for the team, I would have been glad, whether my name was on it or not.

They did not use it.

Sometime later, I saw the strategy the programme produced instead, written by the director together with the team. In my opinion, it was a collection of buzzwords. They had a working strategy sitting in their inbox, handed to them for nothing, and they did not use it.

Every programme like this produces documents. That is normal. In technology, you document everything. Every project. Every task. Every decision that matters. There is nothing unusual in doing that.

What is different about mine is who I write them for.

I write for the person who does not understand IT. Over the years, I have learned to understand systems from the inside and from the point of view of the person who actually uses them. I have been a programmer. I have been a test manager, a quality and compliance officer, a team lead, and a business analyst. That last role taught me a great deal about looking at a system from the perspective of the person standing at the counter, filling in the form, waiting for the answer, or trying to get their work done.

When I write, I imagine I am explaining the system to my parents. That is the test of a good document for me. Could my parents read it and understand what the system is doing? Could anyone’s parents, people who simply did not grow up with this technology the way my generation did, understand what problem is being solved and why the solution makes sense?

If they can, I have written it well.

A document is only as good as the understanding behind it. Hand the right framework to the wrong team and you risk getting buzzwords, or another twenty months of activity with nothing useful to show for it.

Doing this properly needs the framework and it needs the experience to execute it. One without the other is more time, more effort, and more public money spent without the promised result.

When the team moved to the Public Service Commission, I let myself hope. I thought that here, at last, there might be someone who wanted the work done by the person hired to do it. When my advocate asked them to bring me back, they told us, in so many words, that it was not their problem to solve.

I am putting it to everyone else.

I have built the framework, and it is there for anyone to read and understand. It shows the method, the sequence, the principles, and the whole shape of the work. What it cannot do is replace the experience that turns a document into a delivered programme.

If there is a team, an agency, a consultancy, or a part of government that wants this done, I will help them do it. All of it. From where it stands now to where it was always meant to reach. I would like to do that with people who care about the public’s money the way I do.

The $3.9 billion is not the height of it. It is closer to the floor. A programme like this costs little to run once it stands, and it keeps returning value year after year, growing as it goes. I have a five-year view, a ten-year view, and a twenty-year view. Each one saves more than the last as the back office of government becomes what it was always meant to be. There are problems further down the line this work would quietly solve as it goes, more than I can fit into a single post. I am happy to talk those through with anyone serious about it.

I love this country. If I have the capability to help it and its people, I consider it my duty to so with my skills and experience.

If that is work you want done, and done properly, you can reach me through the contact form on this website or on LinkedIn.