Effective Performance Measures to Evaluate Programs and Management in the Public Sector
The pursuit of high accomplishment in the public sector is not new. For many years, administrators, politicians, and general citizenry have been concerned about productivity, efficiency, and government organizations' economies. The attempts to weigh outputs of different public agencies and to assess their outcomes or impacts have long been objectives for different reformers and policymakers looking for improvements in government performances.
Early advocates such as Woodrow Wilson maintained that the object of public administration included first discovering what the government can correctly and effectively do (Guo 2019). Secondly, how it can do those things efficiently and with the least possible cost either of money or energy. Wilson supposed that the science of administration should exist to straighten out the trails of government, and make it's business efficient, build up its body and crown its responsibilities. Because today governments serve several public sectors, their functions are more complex and this is why Wilson advocated for the importance of great effective measures in running a public administration.
In the last fifty years, the impetus to weigh has taken an extra urgency as trust in the government has reduced, the stress on managerialism has intensified, the function of different government intervention measures has been re-evaluated and budget pressures skyrocketing. Evaluation and performance measurement is now crucial as essential plans for change, whose fundamental components incorporate high flexibility in conducting administrative activities (Cepiku 2017). Privatization, decentralization, devolution, and more focus on convenience, demand, loosening traditional accountability forms, and reconsidering what government should provide indirectly and directly.
Therefore, performance evaluation and measurement of various public sector undertakings is a critical initiative to streamline government, increase effectiveness and productivity, acquire greater efficiency, enhance accountability and transparency, and regains public trust in different institutions owned by the government. In the public sector, there are established success measures that may focus on decrease or increase profitability, rate of production, and the quality of individual goals and rate at which they are accomplished (Kim, 2016). Most importantly, results are evaluated; based on the baseline calculated by the manager and the benchmark, people may justify their satisfaction with performance attained or not.
Dwight Waldo connected public administration to the ideas of the past and posed a challenge to the field to contemplate other methods of investigation as dependable principles for decision making. He maintained that public administration and scientific management were correlated features of one occurrence; a certainty in positivism as the suitable science to lead human activities. Waldo’s views were that public management resting mainly on positivism shows the preeminence of administrators and a managed policy (Meier 2015). He maintained that the essential responsibilities of pursuing coherence, competence, and economy are administrative and rely on scientific policies. Herbert Simon on the other hand maintains that decisions should account for norms and principles, connect means to ends, ascertain reasonable options and systematize processes where systems improve transparency and assessment.
These views have an impact on the public administration today in that, most of the United States cities leverage the performance monitoring systems monitoring approaches, while most federal government agencies use the information to facilitate decision-making. Several other nations use robust management improvement systems with a stress on result evaluation being incorporated. In Spain, program management and budget employ strategic planning to match goals with outcomes and outputs (Cepiku, 2017). These approaches focus on modernizing the government. Therefore, this implies that there exists no single method of conducting evaluation and selecting performance measures. Thus, a combination of different standards has proved the most effective way of capturing the program’s or agency’s effectiveness.
Waldo is known as a deviating criticizer of the dichotomy between politics and administration. He conceptualized politics and administration intently as deciding and executing. Waldo’s idea of politics management could be known better as a connection that includes features of separation and mixture rather than a dichotomy (Guo 2019). Waldo states that the relationship between political science and public administration had been opposed. Later on, as political science went through its behaviorist revolution, public administration opened up to humanistic and non-positivists approaches.
All these approaches assume the greater salience as a governance concept that has replaced more traditional views about how the public sector operates. The most critical aspects of governance are the concept of cooperation and partnership among non-profit, private, and public sectors (Kim, 2016). This way, the government cannot be the dominant or sole provider of most public services. Its function is rather one of the lenders, purchasers, contractors, regulators, or funder for others' services. The traditional approach to evaluating management policies has always focused on inputs and activities. However, it is possible to incur considerable program costs in inputs and management resources and fail to produce quality outcomes. Evaluating such a program based on the cost of inputs and the extent of managerial activity would rate it as high performing, albeit having a poor result. Since these programs' principal aims are to deliver services to the public, the logical measure of performance would be to quantify and rate the program output. For example, rating criteria could be based on school enrollment, tons of farm produce harvested, or revenue collected. Any other operational performance measure, to be reliable, must be, in effect, an attribute of the program output. Such are but are not restricted to, waiting before service delivery or program completion. Another effective performance measure is to evaluate the cost per quantifiable unit of output, where the lower the cost, the higher the performance rating.
References
Cepiku, D. (2017). Performance management in public administrations. Handbook of Global Public Policy and Administration.
Guo, S. (2019). Political-Administrative Dichotomy: Its Sources, Logic and Debates. Open Journal of
Social Sciences, 7(03), 356.
Kim, J. (2016). Impact of performance appraisal justice on the effectiveness of pay-for-performance systems after civil service reform. Public Personnel Management, 45(2), 148-170.
Meier, K. J. (2015). Proverbs and the evolution of public administration. Public Administration
Review, 75(1), 15-24.
