When the history of the Commission for Social Care Inspection's short existence comes to be written, The Permanent Revolution may prove an apt title.
The organisation has been in constant flux since its creation in 2004 and will continue to be in such a state until its demise, in 2009 at the latest.
However, as Community Care reports this week, this has come at a cost: the 2007 staff survey shows inspectors and other employees are ravaged by change fatigue.
Two-thirds felt CSCI did not value its staff, a similar figure felt change was not well managed, while over half felt employees were not consulted about change.
There are strong messages for the commission in this about genuinely involving staff and their trade union representatives in changes to the organisation, which it claims to be taking on board.
However, it also calls into question the sheer volume of change CSCI has had to undergo since 2004.
To recap:
In March 2005, less than a year after its creation, the government announced its demise: in April this year, its children's function transferred to Ofsted, while its adult role will merge with the Healthcare Commission in 2008-9.
At the same time, it has transformed its inspection methodology from undertaking regular sight visits for all adult providers to risk-based inspection, where frequency depends on the perceived level of risk to service users.
Next year, it is also introducing quality ratings for providers, while it will also have to take account of changes to performance assessment of councils, due to be introduced from next year.
Coupled with all of this are year-on-year budget and staff cuts.
Some of this change is necessary. Risk-based inspection, giving poor providers more attention, makes sense, so long as CSCI can gather and act on intelligence effectively (though trade unions at the commission have questioned whether this is the case).
However, the volume of transformation has been excessive and the effect on staff unsurprising. CSCI should have been given a degree of organisational stability to implement changes to the way services were inspected and regulated.
In this lies a lesson for the future, not just about how change is managed, but about how much change any public body should have to endure, which government would be wise to heed.