Performance measurement viewed as key to management success

By its very name and nature, the idea of measuring public-sector performance doesn't fire most people's imaginations. Government has had a hard time embracing it, too. Starting in the mid-1960s, various presidential edicts tried to get a handle on federal government performance by trying to measure it. They laid down complicated formulas centered on programs, planning, and budgeting; zero-based systems; and the like. No doubt these excited the financial managers and budgeteers of the time. None made much of an impression on the government's work force as a whole or on its executive ranks. Mostly, these systems just melted down.

In the early 1990s came the first statutory attempts at performance measurement-to some degree with the Chief Financial Officers Act, more extensively with the Government Performance and Results Act. The Results Act, in particular, doesn't merely tell agencies what to do-to plan strategically, set goals, devise measures, and report performance annually-it compels them by force of law. It poses these requirements only in broad outline in a few pages, leaving agencies to fill in the blanks with their own structures, formats, and procedures. And there have been some successes.

"One of the reasons Congress was impressed with our plan was that we put forth a measure that didn't just say we'll work harder at something," says one federal executive. "We will be measured and held accountable for those results. That means everybody really has to sign on to pieces of it."

Still, the executive branch's response so far to the Results Act's requirements gets mixed reviews. The federal executive branch remains huge, its moving parts numerous and tangled, its tasks many, and its time for any one of them in short supply. It's hard to abandon old habits-to switch the focus from process to results. Even the Congress, which created the act, has divided views. Performance and reform enthusiasts on the Hill propelled the act into being, but what it is producing so far has gotten a chillier reception among other legislators, especially appropriators. And inevitably, in various quarters of government at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, lurks concern about the possible use of performance information as a weapon, not a tool. Finally, as suggested by Donald F. Kettl, who directs the LaFollette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, performance first needs to be understood for what it really is. It's usually presented in terms of measurement, he says, when it's really about communication.

The ultimate problem doesn't lie in designing ways to measure performance or proving that they work. It lies in getting people, whether in the executive branch or the Congress, to value the information generated by measurement-and to use it constructively as a fundamental element in managing and governing.

"If you were a CEO or a senior executive in any important private business, you would be using performance numbers to manage your organization on a day-in, day-out basis," says one federal official. "Probably anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of your time would be involved looking at numbers, often on a daily basis."

That's because good-repeat, good-performance measures are management's signals of the results it expects and a highly useful way to drive performance. But in government, most presidential appointees are only marginally involved in managing to such numbers.

"The culture of the senior political levels in the executive branch is total obsession with Congress, the legislative stuff," says one senior manager. "But it's not by any means the whole job. Even getting good laws passed is only the first step towards improving the lives of the folks we are serving. And that involves things happening inside your organization. In government agencies, if they're really doing performance management, senior executives are looking at those numbers, asking for direct reports about what's going on. This is not a staff exercise. It is an executive exercise. The challenge is to move from those little documents, those annual performance plans, to making it part of managing your organization."

Out of all this, we can distill a couple of simple truths for senior appointees. First, no government organization should lack some sort of system that will show how well or badly it is doing what it is funded to do. Second, no political manager in such an organization should ignore the information that system produces. To do so is to invite trouble, perhaps major trouble, that-count on it-will jump up and bite hard where it hurts.