Reinvention to Reengineering: Driving Government Improvement

EXECUTIVE MEMO

Reinvention to Reengineering: Driving Government Improvement

eengineering, reinventing, privatization, quality management, self-managed teams-all have been tried by various federal agencies in recent years, with varying degrees of success. Now David K. Carr, Ian Littman and John K. Condon of the consulting firm Coopers and Lybrand set out to put these movements in perspective in a new book, Improvement Driven Government: Pubic Service for the 21st Century.

In the book, the authors argue that one size of quality-improvement effort does not fit all organizations. They explain how to assess, select, and implement the improvement tools that best fulfill the specific needs of a manager's department or agency.

Carr, Littman and Condon argue that creating "improvement-driven organizations" should be the motivation behind all public-sector management. They say an agency must go through three phases-leadership, process, and improvement-in order to create and instill the framework needed to become truly improvement-driven. They use examples from federal, state and local governments to illustrate the process and its results.

In this day and age, the authors argue, agencies are subject to the same market forces that affect private organizations. Unless they learn to meet the expectations of their customers, they will suffer the same fate as companies that fail to do so in the private sector-downsizing and restructuring at best, elimination at worst.

But committing to becoming an improvement-driven organization, Carr, Littman and Condon maintain, will lead to "continual improvement in mission performance, finances and operations" and build a government that has the confidence and support of the public.