Instructions for new brooms

With our new ministers elected and settling in, I wonder how long it will take them to work out the realities of power.
 
You have an annual budget which you must defend with your life and spend to its limit.
 
Minimise cost cuts and don’t give the impression that you can actually run your department on less money. You will not get it back again and you will be expected to do more with even less next year and by the way, your department will hate you.
 
You have political and public accountability but little real power over your department. It is part of a self administered civil service which will see the back of you long before they draw their pensions. They will be temporally interested in your goals but only in as far as it suits their own long term aims. Do anything to upset these aims and they will hate you.
 
Do not try or even merely put forward any really radical solutions. 

Your job is to defend your department and keep things running the way they always have done. It might be efficient and cost effective to merge sections or even whole departments but that is not what the game is about. Every department desperately needs its own 
Human Resources staff and obviously must look after its own buildings and projects. It must not use professionals from other departments or share departmental secrets with them. That way lies integration and what would you do without a department to head?
 
If all of this sounds like a popular UK political sit-com then you may not be far wrong. The most successful sit-coms are based on reality and even though it was made decades ago, things change slowly here.
 
If you had to build a system from scratch for governing this Island would you end up with our current system?
 
I doubt it.
 
We desperately need a new solution but as the old chap on the sea wall said when giving directions to Town, “Ah but you can’t get there from ‘ere. You’ll have to go somewhere else first”.