Managing strategic issues in the public service

Abstract Public sector reforms in recent years have forced managers to take stakeholder and customer interests into consideration when dealing with strategic issues. Given high levels of environmental turbulence, real time management is critical in dealing with issues when they emerge rather than at the annual planning review. Two normative frameworks are proposed which could guide public sector decision making on how various stakeholder and customer groups should be managed at a particular point in time, in terms of each strategic issue scheduled for priority processing. A research project was undertaken into how a major strategic issue was processed over time and was used as a basis to demonstrate how the frameworks could guide managers in developing the most effective contact strategies for specific stakeholder and customer groups at a particular point in time.