Editors’ Preface

Over the past decade or so, government at all levels has begun requiring short- and long-term plans, including strategic goals, measurable objectives, a system for assessing outcomes, and periodic reporting on results. More recently, decisionmakers have attempted to tie budget and other resource decisions to agency performance.

Ironically, this shift to a more results-oriented management system has not had a noticeable effect on public-sector organizational culture. Such a transformation would surely have nudged organizations out of their bureaucratic silos and stovepipes, where behavioral changes would be apparent.

Numerous basic books and training materials that present the fundamentals of public management are available. A variety of books and journals address more abstract and theoretical issues, and a few periodicals are aimed at explicating and sharing best practices in response to some of the more vexing challenges confronting public-sector practitioners around the world today. Typically, these publications are written with an eye toward a particular community of practice (e.g., human resources, budget and finance, acquisition and procurement).

In recognition that the aim of public service is the highest level of performance possible, this book addresses the challenges and solutions that all aspects of an organization—indeed, the family of public-sector organizations—face. The 17 chapters of this strategically oriented public management book are intended to serve the needs of both mid- and senior-level practitioners as well as academics involved in applied research or who teach public administration at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In a multisector workforce—one populated by career and non-career employees, political appointees, and contractor staff—we offer this book as a guide to navigating cross-boundary goals and challenges.

From their own particular perspectives, the authors of this book explore the extent to which key elements of public-sector entities—staff and line, headquarters, and field—have become sufficiently integrated with the larger organization’s strategic planning and management system. They consider a wide spectrum of issues and challenges: How can the highly segmented silos of bureaucratic subcultures be transformed so that they regularly collaborate in meeting common challenges? How are technologists, acquisition officials, budget and financial managers, human capital leaders, program operations staff, and other policy development officials working together to achieve priority strategic goals? How are all government agency players held accountable for meeting outcome requirements at periodic performance reporting meetings? How do they all get a seat at the table? How can contractors (e.g., private-sector vendors, public nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) also be held accountable for meeting outcome requirements? How can we ensure that all network participants serve as strategic members of the organization’s team?

How This Book Is Organized

To frame this discussion, we have grouped the chapters of this book into five broad areas of responsibility found in virtually all public management settings:

Part 1: Strategic Program Operations: Planning and managing core mission functions to maximum effect

Part 2: Strategic Budget and Financial Management: Accountability

Part 3: Strategic Human Capital Management: Recruiting, developing, and utilizing people effectively

Part 4: Strategic Knowledge and Technology Management: Absorbing and benefiting from new technologies

Part 5: Strategic Acquisition Management: Balancing and controlling sourcing.

In addition, the book addresses one overarching concern that should be part of any successful public management repertoire:

Part 6: Strategic Performance Management: Pursuing measurable results.

Each chapter within these six parts offers perspectives from different levels of government and a variety of programmatic and occupational settings. The authors of each chapter share their unique experiences, offering insights and guidance that we believe public management practitioners will find directly relevant—and applicable—to their own environments and situations.

Part 1: Strategic Program Operations

With respect to planning and managing basic mission-linked line programs and related administrative support functions (e.g., facilities, purchasing, fleet), how can people working within previously entrenched bureaucratic cultures share responsibility for achieving results? What are different levels of government (and the nonprofit/NGO community) doing to prepare for and respond more collaboratively to catastrophic disasters? How are lessons learned and new techniques in one setting institutionally shared with others? How have government and public nonprofit organizations worked together successfully internationally and in other cross-cultural environments?

Chapter 1: Kicking off this discussion, James H. Thurmond shares his experiences and reflections on planning and managing core mission functions at the municipal level. Drawing from his more than 30 years of public service at the local level, including his work as director of community development and city manager in a number of towns in the Southwest, Thurmond explores how local government managers respond to major problems in an interdependent world. He probes whether they look outward beyond their organizations to identify and diagnose problems and to understand their contours, causes, and interrelated parts. He suggests that a best practice is to conceptualize the problem from a perspective that is both internally and externally focused.

Chapter 2: Next, Jackie Werth and Dale R. Fleming offer their perspective on planning and managing core mission functions in San Diego County, California, particularly in the context of several major initiatives of the county’s Health ＆ Human Services Agency (HHSA). Reflecting on their years of experience in strategic and operational planning and complex project coordination at the local level, as well as Werth’s tour as senior evaluator for the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO), the authors demonstrate how strategic alignment—variations of business process review (BPR)—have helped organizations improve performance and work effectively within increasingly constrained budgets.

Chapter 3: Rounding out this discussion of strategic program operations, Tim E. Winchell, Sr., provides insight into planning and resource decision-making at the federal level. Given his experience in the federal government and years of research, classroom instruction, and consulting, he finds an increased emphasis on strategic planning, team-based problem-solving, and customer-focused program assessment. Nonetheless, classic command-and-control structures remain in place in many agencies. While internal agency cultures vary markedly, management planning and resource allocation processes are surprisingly consistent and have changed little over decades. Winchell identifies the structural and regulatory bases for these behaviors and offers recommendations for enhancing federal productivity.

Part 2: Strategic Budget and Financial Management

In the area of budget and finance, as agency responsibilities have grown in size and complexity, how have agency strategic emphases shifted to address priority oversight needs? Performance measurement aside, what pressing demands must be addressed in the area of financial ethics, particularly in terms of deeply entrenched assumptions and organizational behavior, and how are organizations responding? In recent years, government organizations have been required to address a wide range of administrative and programmatic risks in the management of their mission responsibilities. What new technologies, tools, and techniques are being used to assess and mitigate risks and ensure proper internal controls? Given the increased emphasis on performance measurement and the attempt to tie budget and other resource decisions to agency performance, how are organizations managing and sharing costs and employing more results-oriented budgeting techniques?

Chapter 4: Getting us started in this area, Nancy Fagenson Potok and Aaron B. Corbett lay out the landscape for managing risk in the highly interdependent federal fiscal environment. Based on Potok’s senior-level fiscal experience in the federal government and both authors’ research and consulting with public-sector organizations, they explore the processes of identifying, analyzing, measuring, and controlling risks within an agency’s standards of acceptability. They focus on the three phases of risk management: identification, measurement, and management.

Chapter 5: Extending the topic of risk management and fast-forwarding to a priority concern early in the Obama administration, Robert Shea and Philip Kangas hone in on minimizing risk in the federal government’s economic stimulus efforts by avoiding fraud, waste, and abuse in recovery project spending. With oversight responsibilities spread across the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, GAO, agency-level inspectors general, the White House, and ultimately citizens (through www.recovery.gov), external scrutiny will be intense. How should agencies, already stretched thin by copious audit, investigation, and reporting requirements, go about tackling these new and ambitious responsibilities?

Chapter 6: Sheila Beckett shares her recent fiduciary leadership experience in managing a very large, complex, and dynamic governmental health plan. The Group Benefits Program is one of the most successful programs in Texas state government. It is the health plan that others attempt to emulate and other groups of public-sector employees seek to join. Beckett presents several reasons the program has been able to sustain this reputation: its emphasis on the customer, balanced with fiscal responsibility; global coverage; frequent communication and collaboration with all financial partners and other key stakeholders; a good contracting process for retaining private-sector partners; transparency and regular disclosure to government and legislative leaders, employee and retiree groups, and the press; and a credible and effective formal appeals process for the denial of health benefits.

Part 3: Strategic Human Capital Management

The human capital challenge is framed by new demographics and the need to recruit, engage, and retain young professionals. Considering the anticipated departure of a high percentage of baby boomers over the next three to five years (including many from the senior ranks of government’s career leadership) and the difficulty of attracting younger generations to public service, what are organizations doing to address this challenge in each occupational segment of the workforce? How are workplace learning efforts focusing on measuring performance and linking pay and performance? Given the complexity, wide variety, and pressing nature of the challenges facing today’s government organizations, what are agencies doing to prepare their current and future leaders and managers to drive change over the next several decades? How do these strategies cut across entrenched organizational subcultures? And what needs to be done to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater—issues of ethics, accountability, and flexibility in the face of hard times?

Chapter 7: Based on years of observing trends through his research and consulting, William Trahant offers a road map for federal strategic human capital planning. He notes that increasingly, federal agencies are developing strategic human capital plans to help them meet changing mission requirements and ensure a purposeful, long-term approach. He describes the factors that are critical for a federal agency to implement strategic human capital planning effectively. Trahant presents a comprehensive, structured approach to assessing an organization’s current and long-term human capital needs, with strategies and actions aimed at meeting those needs.

Chapter 8: Based on his years of experience in the area of public-sector practitioner training and education, Howard R. Balanoff provides an overview of the strategic role that Certified Public Management (CPM) programs play in integrating professional development efforts for public and nonprofit managers. Woven throughout this chapter are examples of how some states and local communities have creatively begun to use CPM coursework and certification to improve organizational performance as well as to retain young professionals by rewarding public-service career paths.

Chapter 9: Balancing the need for change with the traditional emphasis on ethics and accountability, Bart Bevers recounts avoidable misadventures in personal behavior that illustrate a common threat to public trust right within our own organization boundaries. He offers some practical takeaways on ethical values and principles and how they can be applied to an enduring, normative system of decision-making.

Chapter 10: In her chapter on creating a healthy workplace culture while managing deficits and downturns in Austin, Texas, Toby Hammett Futrell underscores the importance of the public manager’s influence on corporate culture during the turmoil of downsizing. Her prescription: the three Cs-communication, control, and change. She believes that “… for a public manager, the ‘brass ring’ is forging an effective partnership with employees,” and she offers concrete examples of tools available to most of us that can serve as vehicles for succeeding on these fronts. These include town hall meetings, rumor control hotlines, employee workforce committees, focus groups and straw polls, celebrations, and other additions to the manager’s customary repertoire.

Chapter 11: Given his pivotal role as head of this country’s premier training and development professional society, Anthony Bingham offers his thinking and suggestions on why talent matters and what public-sector agencies can do to maximize their talent strategically and systemically. He notes that a recent study identified the best practices of effective talent management and the tactics most strongly associated with success as driving talent management from the top of the organization to ensure its support by senior management; ensuring that talent management efforts support key agency strategies; aligning all components of talent management to support optimal performance; managing talent management with a long-range perspective, but with the ability to respond to changes in capability requirements as needed; and using talent-management metrics.

Part 4: Strategic Knowledge and Technology Management

How do agency strategies ensure that organizations will keep pace with new technologies and the rising expectations of all relevant users—citizens, the business community, and a younger, more web-savvy workforce? How will government 2.0 potentially transform the public-sector landscape as it becomes a priority for the Obama administration? How are government agencies taking advantage of virtual office technologies while addressing cybersecurity issues and other emerging public-sector challenges? What are agencies doing to incorporate telework and other flexible workplace arrangements, and how can these efforts be integrated into a larger initiative to evolve the workplace of the future? How will agency initiatives help transcend the boundaries of federal, state, and local governments and foster collaboration among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors? And how are government agencies engaging citizens today, particularly in the context of new communication technologies?

Chapter 12: Alan P. Balutis uses his considerable senior-level experience as a former federal chief information officer (CIO) and more recent professional IT management roles in the private and nonprofit sectors to frame the technology challenges for 21st-century government. He points out that the current administration is building on and expanding e-government initiatives, increasing government’s openness and transparency, making use of Web 2.0 collaborative tools, and exploring cloud computing and other mechanisms to reduce infrastructure investments. Moreover, technology is now seen as an enabler that helps organizations deal with major challenges in such policy arenas as health, transportation, energy, and the environment. Encouraging signs include federal agencies harnessing new technologies to publish online information about their operations and decisions in ways that are readily available to the public; providing better levels of transparency and openness and devising new tools to let citizens participate and have their voices heard; and supporting workers’ expectations that the same productivity, multitasking, and mobility tools they grew up with at home will also be in their workplace.

Chapter 13: Next, as an observer of technology developments and applications for most of his distinguished career, Alan R. Shark reflects on webcentricity and highlights challenges for public management. He explores the enormous power, pitfalls, and possibilities of integrating webcentricity into government applications, noting the extensive planning, experimentation, exploration, and careful navigation that will be required. He cites five webcentric trends that public managers simply cannot ignore: the pocket computer/phone, transparency and citizen engagement, social networking phenomena, virtual and viral immediacy, and social and virtual presence.

Chapter 14: Complementing these perspectives on how technology presents both challenges and opportunities, Tracy Haugen makes the case for Web 2.0’s knowledge-management potential in the public sector. She reminds us that many supporting players are involved in program execution—other agencies and jurisdictions (state, local, or foreign governments), the academic community, and nonprofits—and that these elements complicate the modern government work environment. The dynamic nature of the governmental workforce makes capturing the magnitude of the knowledge management challenge daunting. Knowledge managers must consider the different segments and sources of work products when designing a strategy that captures workers’ tacit knowledge and encompasses the multisector workforce.

Part 5: Strategic Acquisition Management

Increasingly, government work requirements are sourced to private contractors. Given the need to measure and report on the performance of all parties, how are organizations communicating oversight and accountability roles and responsibilities in such a demanding, resource-stretched environment? How have government organizations successfully engaged the private sector, achieving high performance while remaining faithful to their missions and codes of ethics and protecting the proprietary needs of their business counterparts? Moreover, what is being planned to ensure performance measurement and distribute responsibility appropriately in a multisector workforce? What are agencies doing to achieve coherence in these blended workforce arrangements while complying with legislative, regulatory, and other stewardship requirements?

Chapter 15: Drawing on his extensive experience as a senior administrator focused on contracting policy and implementation in New York City government, Robert Shick examines contracting for services at the state and local levels. He addresses the state of contracting for services, focusing on the most important lessons learned over recent years. Shick believes that government contracting is a holistic process that encompasses interdependent elements, including the make-or-buy decision; the contract document; the solicitation and selection of contractors; contract administration; evaluation of contractor performance; and the use of contractor performance information to make future contracting decisions.

Part 6: Strategic Performance Management

The shift during the past decade or so to measuring outcomes and reporting on results has led to a more strategic focus on public-sector performance. To what extent have various government and public nonprofit organizations fostered a performance culture? How do they ensure that all contributors across the organization understand the link between the procurement process and vendor performance, as well as between setting budget priorities and justifying and reporting on measurable outcomes? Have organizations invested in training and development to compare their performance against common standards or to learn how other public-sector organizations use benchmarking and other methods to improve and evaluate performance? With respect to fostering an organization-wide performance culture, what efforts are being made to pass along lessons learned from other public-sector organizations?

Chapter 16: Given his experience at the local government level and research interest in performance management, James Horton contributes an in-depth look at Citistat, a cross-departmental program used to evaluate city management in Baltimore, Maryland. Citistat cities conduct frequent meetings using data to discuss past performance, future objectives, and performance strategies to accomplish those objectives. The major drivers of this strategic management method include the active engagement of the city’s top executives; the timeliness and scope of the data; questioning, feedback, and follow-up; the consequences for good, poor, and improved performance; a focus on problem-solving, continuous experimentation, and learning; and the institutional memory of the city’s top executives. Taken together as part of an integrated management system, these components provide a blueprint for city leaders.

Chapter 17: Based on first-hand experience in Europe and more recently in the southwestern part of the United States, Peter McHugh compares local-level performance management in the United Kingdom and United States. He notes that local United Kingdom governments have sharpened their performance management skills and in the process have developed a range of relevant tools and approaches that nurture a performance culture. McHugh focuses on six of these skill areas and contrasts the situation with that at the local level in the United States, namely creating a holistic performance management framework; aligning resources and activities with corporate goals; benchmarking against similar-profile organizations; performance reporting to citizens; tracking performance in partnerships; and using software to support the performance management process.

We expect that a significant number of readers will be practitioners currently enrolled in CPM programs around the country. The national CPM program is currently offered in 36 states throughout the United States (http://www.cpmconsortium.org). Also, through related networks and training and development programs that serve public-sector organizations worldwide, we anticipate that this book will be relevant to hundreds of thousands of other managers at all levels of government, the public nonprofit sector, and nongovernmental organizations.

Moreover, we are optimistic that a much larger community of practitioners, academics, students, and others in the consulting and training and development fields will find this book helpful. We believe it is particularly timely as everyone from government leaders to first responders seek to understand and solve management challenges in an increasingly interdependent and hopefully transparent environment.

Howard R. Balanoff

Warren Master

October 2009