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Excerpts from ... Safety in Numbers Government has always been well known for measuring action, but not what was accomplished through that action. For example, the volunteer fire company to which I belong dutifully and proudly reports the number of calls it responds to each year, typically around 100 or so. Now, this sounds impressive for a bunch of guys who don’t get paid and who are extremely busy in their other lives. Kicking off the bedsheets at 4 o’clock on a 10-below-zero morning to respond to an emergency call represents real commitment to the cause. 
What we don’t report in any detail, though, is what the calls were all about or what was accomplished by responding. To do that would be to reveal the fact that more than half our runs are what we lovingly refer to as “[insert barnyard epithet for bovine byproduct here] calls” — contractors who’ve kicked off home fire alarms, faulty carbon monoxide detectors, fender benders, backed-up furnaces, phone lines down, and the occasional but regular school kid wondering what happens if he actually pulls the little red handle. (We do have a performance-based motto in our fire company, though: “We haven’t lost a foundation yet.”) But we’re hardly alone in our confusion (dissembling?) over what represents results. I once was asked by a medium-sized city in the nation’s heartland to come out and do an introduction to performance measurement for all the city’s department directors. Most department directors came solo, but one arrived with a “team.” It was the personnel department, which clearly understood the concept of safety in numbers (of people, that is). As part of the session, I gave everyone five minutes to do an off-the-top-of-their-heads mission statement (if it takes longer, it’s either your first day on the job or you’re one confused soul). Herewith the proud declaration of an assistant director of the city’s personnel department when asked what the department’s mission was: “We do job classifications!” (At this point, a kind of collective groan went up from the other department heads in the room. In talking to a few of them after the session, I learned that the groan was because that really was what the city’s personnel department regarded as its mission.) When I gently suggested to the personnel people that perhaps their mission was to help attract and retain the best and brightest employees for their fair city, I got glassy-eyed stares. Meanwhile, a buddy of mine who was hired by a large city to begin laying the groundwork for an ambitious and full-blown performance measurement effort was a bit discouraged at the prospects for the city’s child welfare agency when the director declared proudly that simply getting through a two-hour meeting on the topic of performance measurement represented a major accomplishment for program managers. Oy. But it’s a chronic condition that cuts across every policy, program, or internal administrative task, whether it’s personnel, child welfare, corrections, transportation, firefighting, contracting, planning, or economic development, and it’s easy to understand why. First, it’s just easier to measure action than it is results. Second — and related to that — government has direct control over what sort of activities it decides to pursue and so isn’t so squeamish about reporting that. But, more to the point, measuring results might reveal some unpleasant truths about your performance that you’d rather remain shrouded in mystery. Performance Measurement at War Let’s take a moment and consider the hardest job being done by any government in the United States as this is written. If progress on that can be measured, then surely little things like social services, economic development, internal personnel practices, or even government’s impact on general public health can be measured. I’d argue that the hardest job that the United States has taken on today is turning Iraq from a dictatorship into a democracy. It’s not one that I’d shoulder. It’s one that I’d recommend others shoulder. But here we are. And the U.S. Department of Defense at the behest of Congress (Section 9010, Public Law 109-289) is trying to set out clear markers related to progress while we are. The most recent of these reports, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” offers a host of interesting metrics by which to judge progress in Iraq, ranging from war and insurgency casualties, to crime rates, to inflation rates, to rates of oil production, and even assessments of where Iraq is by way of adopting certain key policies. In other words, if you think you’ve got an impossible-to-measure mess in your state or city or agency, think again. Best-Guess Budgeting As an alderman in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s, Joseph Curtatone was perpetually frustrated by the budgets his board was supposed to be helping shape and approve. “Budget time really used to get me,” says Curtatone. “It was a straight line-item budget. There might be a small paragraph for each department briefly describing what they do, but there was nothing that told you how much we spent on what — no inputs, outputs, or outcomes.” It was classic best-guess budgeting, characterized by one imperative above all, says Curtatone. “If you’re the DPW director and you come in and have $15,000 left in your account, then that’s how much we cut your budget by for next year,” says Curtatone. “And so the message to all our departments was ‘spend down your budget.’ ” Anyone who has witnessed public sector budgeting close up is familiar with the imperative. If you wander into a state or local government office and notice a pile of yet-to-be-unboxed computers collecting dust, you can make a pretty good guess at the late-in-the-fiscal-year frenzy that went into purchasing them. But the budgeting business was just one of the major points of the alderman’s frustration. Curtatone was also amazed at how the city went about managing money in general. “Here we were, a multimillion-dollar operation with absolutely no real-time information on even the most basic services. We weren’t measuring anything. How many potholes were we filling? How were we filling them? Which departments are racking up overtime and how much?” |
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