BOOK REVIEW: Instruction to DeliverBy Michael Barber Methuen & Co. Ltd. £18.99 (€27). Michael Barber had the task of delivering public service reform for Tony Blair's government and this book describes the methods he used to introduce change, writes Niamh Brennan.

Sir Michael Barber's career began as a teacher, then as head of the education department of the British National Union of Teachers, followed by positions at Keele University and then at the University of London.

A Labour Party activist, he was elected to Hackney Council in 1986 and was an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate in the general election of 1987.

Hostile to "Old Labour", he was a supporter of New Labour's shifting of power from producers to consumers. Throughout, Barber writes about breaking the producer stranglehold, breaking producer monopolies, producer interests being put ahead of consumers and empowering consumers, and building services for customers.

After Labour's victory in May 1997, he was invited by David Blunkett, secretary for education, to head a standards and effectiveness unit in his department.

In this position, Barber established a target-driven approach, publishing league tables naming and shaming the worst schools in the country. He set an 80 per cent literacy target and established a numeracy taskforce. His methods proved effective in that big leaps in literacy and numeracy test results were achieved.

As a result of his success in education, Barber was invited to head a "delivery unit", to bring public service reform in Tony Blair's second term (2001-2005). This book details his experiences and the methods of "deliverology".

The mission of the unit was to deliver for Blair the internal performance management function of a large company. The methodology, which Barber calls "deliverology", is a performance management system for public service delivery. He acknowledges that his methods amounted to "blinding flashes of the obvious" which in well run businesses would be regarded as standard practice. "No business in its right mind would operate without a few targets or key priorities". The approach was target driven, focusing on core targets and a series of sub-targets.

Barber confesses his "love" of league tables. They make public evidence of performance and they narrow gaps between lowest-performing units and the average, and as such can be powerful drivers of equity. He also favours using league tables to supply a shock to the system and create a sense of urgency. A crisis, he observes, is "a terrible thing to waste!" A sense of drive, urgency, attention to detail, a can-do attitude and a refusal to take "no" for an answer pervades the book.

Notwithstanding his attention to detail, he also confesses to thriving on ambiguity: "The job of a manager is to manage uncertainty . . . You have to persuade people that ambiguity is normal. What holds us together is not structure, but mission." Barber has a strong sense of duty towards taxpayers, arguing that investing their hard-earned money must result in improved services.

He voices shock at the "immorality" of some public servants, citing the way in which A&E managers used patients waiting on trolleys as pawns in hospital politics.

On complacent attitudes to the number of deaths from MRSA, he says: "It was one of the examples I came across of passive (and, frankly, immoral) acceptance of the unacceptable. How many lives might have been saved if top officials had demanded this problem be tackled without waiting to be asked?"

He faced many problems in implementing deliverology in the public sector - a lack of urgency, a lack of capacity and defence of the status quo. The influence of lobby groups means civil servants see issues from a producer angle and tend to identify problems rather than opportunities.

However, there is another group of which he was even more critical (which struck a chord with me) "After working in universities, my first impressions of department officials were positive - unlike academics, when asked to do something, they generally did it."

Other problems he encountered in implementing deliverology were a tendency to "water down" and "fog up" targets, a willingness to retreat in response to lobby groups and bungled implementation. Barber has no time for managers who make excuses to deflect attention from inadequacies under their control, and he regrets how often he gave a manager the benefit of the doubt.

The book has some great Yes Minister-style insights. For example, Barber observes that department officials tend to create work for ministers "to keep them out of trouble" and that private offices fill ministerial diaries so that the diaries control them and prevent them focusing on key priorities.

On access to ministers, he reveals that Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister had her hair done once, sometimes twice, a day and as a result her hairdresser had more access than most members of her cabinet!

Barber emphasises the importance of communication - sharp, concise, clear messages, plain language and avoiding management jargon. He recognises the importance of managing the media well: "Spin really does matter. The danger comes when it is divorced from substance."

He is critical of civil servants who produced "thoughtful prose" and "essays decorated with the occasional number". "I was repeatedly struck by the inability of so many key officials to present anything in five minutes." He describes a very senior civil servant preparing for a presentation to the cabinet - "My usual approach is to wing it".

The delivery unit, as one might expect, had many critics. Public service leaders grumbled regularly in public. The media inevitably emphasised the negative. But Barber regrets there was not more acknowledgement of progress.

One reason he suggests was that the base performance was often so poor that, even after significant improvement, services were still unacceptably bad. However, he takes as a measure of success of the unit that other countries sought to copy his approach.

An attractive aspect of the book is that Barber includes quite a few self-critical comments - "a control freak's control freak", "a great war general sitting in his chateau counting targets as they go over the top and then counting them back". One presentation he made to a press conference "was comparable to a lecture from the speaking clock".

I have met a kindred spirit in Sir Michael Barber. I wholeheartedly agree with the great majority of views in this book. As a taxpayer, I hope that all public servants (I am one myself) not only read this book but adopt deliverology in their own units.

Prof Niamh Brennan is a chartered accountant and professor of management at University College Dublin. She is also a member of the board of the HSE.