Spring 2006 Course Description
Policy Research Project
Description: In recent years, governments have come under increasing pressure to improve the quality and cost effectiveness of service delivery. Governments must plan to do more with less, delivering more and greater outcomes in a more efficient manner.
The trend in government performance measurement has been to develop targets and measures on which to base decisions about agency performance. To date, most measurement of government performance has focused on ?input? measures (e.g. number of police officers employed) or ?output? measures (e.g. number of drug arrests made). Ultimately, however, it is the ?outcomes? resulting from a government agency?s or program?s work that are of primary interest. Unfortunately, these outcome measures are difficult to define, and sometimes more difficult to measure since agency?s do not always collect and track outcome measures. Since ?you get what you measure,? it is important for agency/program leadership to focus on measuring outcomes so that they can find innovative ways to balance outcome achievement with program efficiency or cost-effectiveness.
In 2003, Accenture developed the Public Sector Value (PSV) Model to fill the current gap in performance measurement techniques. The model adapts the principles of commercial Shareholder Value Analysis to a government context from the perspective of a government?s primary stakeholders ? its citizens. The PSV Model considers two dimensions of value (outcomes and cost-effectiveness). When implemented, the model provides a baseline for comparison, over time, for a particular agency or against similar agencies. PSV also gives agency/program leadership a framework to use to make resource allocation decisions that will balance outcomes against cost-effectiveness. PSV looks at relative change, whether or not an agency is doing better or worse than last year, and what actions were taken to cause improvements or problems. Ultimately, the PSV Model is one tool, along with other performance measurement methods (i.e., Balanced Scorecard, etc.) and other ?management? measures (used to determine if an agency is performing well or poorly), for politicians, agency directors and citizens to use to assess the performance of individual agencies.
The purpose of this Policy Research Project (PRP) is to use the Public Sector Value (PSV) Methodology, developed by Accenture, to analyze ?value created? by a four state and local public sector organization(s). The project will also:
- Provide the government clients, decision makers, legislators and the citizens a basis for making more informed decisions about resource allocation, cost-effectiveness of services provided, and outcomes produced.
- Provide students in the project with real-world experience in measuring and analyzing the performance of public sector organizations and in determining value to the public provided by the organization.
- Provide Accenture with additional real-world feedback on the validity and usefulness of its PSV Model as a tool for assessing value created by government organizations.
The results of the project will be a report documenting an analysis of the performance of the client agencies over a several year period, and the usefulness of the PSV Model.
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