results

Too often, government operations are invisible and taken for granted.  This is not unlike how most of us approach the availability of electricity in my home – we don’t notice the heroic efforts and complexity in keeping it on until we lose power in a cold snap!

The topic of performance budgeting has been talked about for decades.  Most state governments claim to be doing it.  The Government Accountability Office and others have written numerous studies about how it could and should be done at the federal level.  But the City of Baltimore has put in place an outcome-oriented budgeting system that is now in its fourth year of operation.  What does it look like?

But it has been a long road.  In 2011, two European academics conducted a meta-analysis of 519 studies on performance-oriented management reforms undertaken across Europe in the previous two decades to determine if they resulted in improved processes, outputs, or outcomes.  They concluded the answer was “yes,” but not a resounding “yes.”  Their analyses showed 68 percent of the studies found improvements in administrative processes and activities, 44 percent in programmatic outputs, and 53

Background. Over the past two decades, the performance movement has made steady progress. It has resulted in a focus on performance and results via strategic and annual operating plans, a supply of performance information to track progress of these plans; a demand for performance information via quarterly reviews of progress on priority goals and annual reviews of strategic objectives; and an infrastructure with chief operating officers and performance improvement officers.

 1.      GPRA 2.0 (highest number of votes, but it’ll be so retro in 10-15 years!)

2.      Other (a close second, but with many options)

a.       GPRMA

b.      GPRA 2010

c.       GPRA II

d.      GPRA Plus

e.       Better Results

f.       Ignored (and the submitter even apologized, noting “unfortunate but true”)

3.      GPRA Mod (probably sounds too much like a TV show)

Agency Annual Performance Plans.  The Senate committee report notes:  “GPRA requires executive agencies to develop annual performance plans covering each program activity in the agencies’ budgets.”

It continues, noting that the new law:

Nearly three decades ago, New Zealand pioneered government reforms to make individual single-purpose agencies – a “vertical” solution -- more accountable and effective.  While successful, it exacerbated another challenge facing government agencies -- addressing “horizontal” societal problems, i.e., those that span traditional agency boundaries.  So, New Zealand undertook a new round of reform in 2012 to address a handful of persistent societal and economic problems by creat

I attended the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Senior Budget Officials December 1-2 performance and results network meeting on measuring and evaluating countries' stimulus programs. The countries making presentations at this meeting were: Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and United Kingdom.

I was struck by several things.