Services

Management Systems for Government

Government departments and agencies at all levels are challenged to improve program and service performance. Program survival often depends heavily on agency innovation and the ability to demonstrate value. Agencies not demonstrating results find themselves defending their program missions and budgets. The bottom line is that funding is tied to clearly demonstrating and articulating results. Agencies that cannot do so face the risk of having programs reformed, constrained or even terminated.

State and local governments face similar performance pressures. Governors, legislators and citizens demand that agencies and departments exercise transparency and demonstrate accountability and effectiveness. State budget crises have prompted further scrutiny from lawmakers and the public for agencies to prove program effectiveness. Challenges for leaders now revolve around assessing costs, justifying budget requests and communicating expected and tangible results in the large context of driving performance.

How do you meet these pressures head-on and monitor program effectiveness? By defining meaningful outcome and output measures. Many agencies are developing and incorporating performance management methodologies to drive performance improvements.

A sound performance management process can optimize every aspect of your organization as it aligns resources to achieve objectives, measures results against targets and identifies the best opportunities for improvement. Organizations (or even departments within the same organization) that have been implementing improvement methodologies in isolation of each other miss the increased value from their synergy. Performance management initiatives should support integrating existing methodologies across an organization.

With performance management, government organizations can proactively manage their programs by monitoring performance, exploring problems or issues and by calculating true costs of services and programs. This performance and cost information can be used in turn to develop/justify budgets. Agencies can expect to improve overall program success by focusing on the following: communication of results, performance optimization, insight into prioritization and resource allocation, cost reduction through cost analysis and management, and collaboration to collectively improve performance.

Childress & Associates has helped numerous federal, state, county and city government organizations put high performance management systems in place. Our government management systems fully comprehend today's challenges and effectively align resources to accomplish agency directives.