Performance Management

Two departments received special authorities this past year that are intended to improve their abilities to manage. It will be interesting to watch to see how they use these authorities. If these agencies can demonstrate success, then there’s a good chance that Congress might extend these authorities to other agencies.

“The key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control,” write Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in the January 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review. How? “. . . scrupulously avoid impeding progress.”

Amabile and Kramer surveyed more than 600 managers, and then asked hundreds of knowledge workers to keep daily diaries to find out what was the top motivator of performance.

(a continuation from the December 23, 2009 blog on “Managing Performance”)

(a continuation from the December 23, 2009 blog on “Managing Performance”)

(a continuation from the December 23, 2009 blog on “Managing Performance”)

(a continuation from the December 23, 2009 blog on “Managing Performance”)

Bouckaert and Halligan call their first idealized performance management model the “Performance Administration” approach.

This model is seen as modest, ad hoc and un-systematic. It is oftentimes designed for formal, hierarchical organizations and is seen as mechanistic or compliance-oriented in implementation. Nevertheless, it is the typical starting place for many organizations.

Remember the YouTube phenomena, “The Evolution of Dance?” I have been reading a book, “Managing Performance: International Comparisons” by two highly-regarded foreign academics – Geert Bouckaert (a Belgian) and John Halligan (an Australian). Their book could well have been named: “The Evolution of Performance!”

The federal government’s chief performance officer, Jeff Zients, declared at a recent Senate hearing: “The test of a performance management system is whether it is used.” He thought federal agencies were failing the test.

OMB released a report today, “Acquisition and Contracting Improvement Plans and Pilots: Saving Money and Improving Government,” which follows up on its July 2009 directive that agencies trim 7 percent – about $40 billion -- from their contracting budgets over the next two years by improving their buying processes.

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on the reporting of the outputs and outcomes of government programs. Yet there is limited information on what outputs and outcomes are actually reported on in practice.