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Main introduction page THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Introduction: 50-State Average Grade: C+
With Hatry’s admonitions in mind, it’s good news that the states that have been leading the country in this discipline are among the quickest to report that it’s not a silver bullet. Utah, for example, has been in the MFR business for a long time. Listen to Lynne Ward, director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget: “We see it as just another tool to manage. It’s funny, because we get calls from other states...and they think we have all this information that’s put into a computer, and then the outcome is a budget or set policy. Our attitude is it’s just another way of getting information.”
This is not to say that managing for results has stalled. In fact, in a majority of states, efforts are moving forward to come up with better measures and to utilize them in the best way possible. Strategic planning, too, is an evolving form. Not only do more and more states have entity-wide plans — South Carolina and Illinois among the most recent entrants — but efforts in the agencies have been getting better as training efforts pay off and years of experience improve the process.
Just a couple of years ago, Alabama was the national poster child for pathetic MFR efforts. Some agencies that were required to fill out a performance-related form every quarter just kept copying the previous quarter’s form over and over again. That was a sure-fire way to guarantee that they wouldn’t show any improvement. But nobody seemed to notice.
Now, according to the state’s finance director, Henry C. Mabry III, “we are starting, and we’re trying to build a foundation to do it right. Our new process is not perfect. But we’re really trying to determine a ‘best practices’ way of implementing this process in each department.” Pilots are popping up in Alabama like flowers in the spring, and the state and its agencies are producing their first strategic plans.
In fact, among the 50 states, there’s no longer a single one that denies the utility of managing for results. There’s just a wide disparity of opinion about the best approaches to take. Georgia, for example, has decided to center its efforts almost exclusively on outcome measures — efforts to see the actual results of programs, rather than just the amount of work accomplished. When inputs and outcomes get mixed together, one state official says, “outcome measures fall by the wayside and are rarely developed or measured. By concentrating on the ‘bottom line’ effectiveness, we have thus far avoided this type of measurement overkill.”
With Georgia at one extreme, there are far more states that are concerned about the limitations of outcome measurement; they are concerned about holding single agencies accountable for broad ranges of result. After all, a measure such as “reducing crime” can just as easily be the province of the state’s schools as its prisons. So, they proudly point to so-called “families of measures.”
“A year or two ago, we were asking agencies if they had performance measures at all,” says Lou Kompare, executive director of the Center for Effective Government in Tennessee. “Now we’ve educated people to ask if they have a well-rounded family of measures including outcome measures and outputs in which they’re actually counting things. They’re understanding the value of the full array.”
Then there’s Pennsylvania. Although the Keystone State uses some outcome measures and accepts their utility, the basic emphasis here is on straightforward outputs. That’s in large part because, more than most other states, Pennsylvania’s executive branch really uses its measures to budget. “We can hold our managers more accountable on the outputs when we create their budget,” says one high-ranking official there. “If we hold them accountable for outcomes, they’ll spend all their time explaining why they didn’t get where they wanted to go.”
Not surprisingly, the more seriously performance measures are taken, the more contentious the process of developing them often becomes. One legislator may think the primary goal of the state prisons is to punish criminals severely. Another may believe it’s to rehabilitate. There’s no simple way to come up with a measure that both will buy in to.
Few states have worked more resolutely than Louisiana to get MFR efforts up to speed. Yet planning officer Carolyn Lane reports that, “just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the usefulness or meaningfulness of a performance indicator may vary from user to user.” Although this may be frustrating for some, the fact is that debates over measures can be one of the most valuable products of the MFR process. When state officials are forced to say what they really want a program to produce, the program benefits.
As states grapple with the question of what sorts of measures to use — and precisely what the measures will be — there are a number of other fronts in which progress is necessary. More states than ever before are now seeking to ensure that the measures they produce are accurate. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia and a few others are national leaders here. But in many states, validation of performance data is still largely unknown.
Perhaps the weakest element in most states is the process of communicating performance information to citizens. Some don’t even try. They publish their measures in the budget, and perhaps on the Web site, but the public may or may not know the information even exists. Louisiana’s Lane admits, “maybe we should devote a little more time to marketing. We put it out there, and we’re kind of waiting for people to find it.”
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Harry Hatry, director of the Urban Institute’s public management program, was one of the nation’s first advocates of managing for results. He remains one of the concept’s leading supporters. Yet for years he’s warned that one of the biggest challenges to the use of performance measurement and other managing-for-results techniques was the potential for overexpectation. If MFR was sold as a panacea, disappointment would lead to disillusionment, dismay and finally the death of the process.