AGA’s Fifth Annual Performance Management Conference kicked off in Seattle Thursday with a discussion about successful performance management efforts in the state of Washington, which has been recognized by Governing magazine as one of the best-managed states in the nation.
Robin Arnold-Williams, director of the state’s Executive
Policy Office, gave specific examples of how Gov. Christine Gregoire has pushed
performance measurement and management as a way to improve services,
dramatically in some cases, for Washington residents.
One graphic example was the improvement in services to at-risk children in Washington state. Arnold-Williams said Gregoire told her that the state in some cases took 10 days to respond to reports of abuse while pointing to a file that contained information on a child who died on the ninth day. “Talk about having an urgency for action,” Arnold-Williams said. With the conviction that the state had to improve its response rate, state officials set to work. The response goal was changed from 10 days to 24 hours in 2005. “We said to staff, this is a priority, and the staff said, ‘thank you.’ ”Arnold-Williams said.
While getting to the scene of reported abuse quickly was critically important, “you can’t just stop with measuring.” Maybe Child Protective Services personnel got there in time, but did they do the right things while there? The “ultimate outcome” was to prevent children from being victimized again, she said. Arnold-Williams showed a graph that illustrated the dramatic decline in the number of children who had been re-victimized in a six-month period after the first report of abuse.
“For me, this is closing the loop and connecting the dots all the way through,” she said. From there, the legislature and the governor supported an infusion of resources that paid for 400 more case workers, reducing case loads from roughly 24 clients to 15.
Arnold-Williams pointed out that success can be difficult to quantify. She pointed out that enrollment in Washington’s community college and technical institutions increased tremendously during the economic downturn, but how do you define success in worker retraining programs? Is it simply the number of enrollees in the program? Is it the number of certificates and degrees? If the program isn’t completed, is that a failure? What if a student left the program because he or she got a job? Was that a good use of state resources? These are the kinds of questions that should be asked to determine how to define success for various programs,
One clear success was in the Department of Licensing, where budget shortfalls forced the state to close 11 under-utilized offices. Despite the closures, the state was able to decrease wait times by 30 percent, from 34 minutes to 25 minutes, by increasing hours at some of the remaining offices, adding self-service kiosks and other measures.
Keeping the momentum of performance measurement during an economic downturn is a challenge, she said, but added, “We do need the courage to act with the path is not clear.”
The second keynote speaker, Shelley H. Metzenbaum, Ph.D.,
associate director of Performance and Personnel Management, U.S. Office of
Management and Budget, shared lessons of performance lessons from local, state
and federal governments.
The bottom line, she said, is performance management can work remarkably well. She emphasized the word ‘can,’ and added that it is one of the most powerful tools to drive dramatic performance in government while strengthening citizen involvement in the democratic process. The key, she said, is to make sure government performance is focused on outcomes, rather than measuring the outputs of government as a compliance exercise.
People in government need to discuss the stories the data reveals, or the cost of measuring performance can swamp the progress, she said.
Some key lessons she’s learned is that performance measurements must be used to be meaningful, the connection between outputs and outcomes should be clear, analysis should be ongoing, inquiries should be interactive and the measures should be as simple as possible. She suggested, for example, that governments think about “bad things you want to slow, and good things you want to grow.”
Crime rates can be driven down, smoking can be decreased, recycling rates can be increased and river cleanups can show measureable improvements using performance management techniques, she said. In two decades in the field, Mezenbaum said progress can feel slow at times, “but it’s a whole lot better than it used to be.” —By: Christina M. Camara
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