This volume shows how public agencies can be made more efficient and humane, providing practical guidance to enhance both service quality and client satisfaction at local, state and national levels. Examples focus on the issues of quality management, improving service delivery, job reorganization and worker empowerment.

Anyone hoping to improve teamwork, performance, and budgeting, training, and evaluation programs in their organization should look no further. Completely revised, Public Productivity Handbook, Second Edition defines the role of leadership, dimensions of employee commitment, and multiple employee-organization based relationships for effective intern

Confronted with rising citizen discontent, the Reinventing Government movement, and new technological challenges, public organizations everywhere are seeking means of improving their performance. Their quest is not new, rather, the concern with improving the performance of government organizations has existed since the Scientific Management Movement. Public Sector Performance brings together in a single volume the classic, enduring principles and processes that have defined the field of public sector performance, as written in the words of leading practitioners and scholars. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a performance compass for today's public managers, helping them to reconstruct the public's confidence in, and support of, government.Defined here as managing public organizations for outcomes, performance is examined in all its varied dimensions: organizing work, managing workers, measuring performance, and overcoming resistance to performance-enhancing innovations. The selected articles are interesting, thought provoking, and instructive. They are classics in that they have been widely cited in the scholarly literature and have enduring value to public managers who seek to understand the many dimensions of performance. The book is organized into three sections: Performance Foundations, Performance Strategies, and Performance Measurement. Excerpts from additional selected articles feature special topics and wisdom from performance experts.

Now in paperback in an Enlarged Edition, this volume explores the lessons of one of the most comprehensive attempts to improve public management. Metcalfe and Richards describe and assess Thatcher's Efficiency Strategy as an exercise in improving public management. They explain how the strategy has gone about improving administrative performance by increasing cost-consciousness in the use of resources and creating flexibility for managing change. They analyze major themes such as: decentralization, information systems and budgets as management tools, organization design, and the management of interdepartmental relations.

This study aims to help public sector practioners use productivity improvement to cope with fiscal stress. Covering aspects such as meaning, measurement, implementation, and maintenance, it is not overwhelming in size or detail, but is presented in a direct way that facilitates use.

The revised edition of this accessible text provides a balanced assessment and overview of state-of-the-art organizational and performance productivity strategies. Public and nonprofit organizations face demands for increased productivity and responsiveness, and this practical guide offers strategies based on current research and scholarship that respond to these challenges. The book's comprehensive coverage includes: rationale for productivity and performance improvement; evolution of productivity improvement; the quality paradigm; customer service; information technology; traditional approaches to productivity improvement; re-engineering and restructuring; partnering and privatization; psychological contracts; and community based strategies. In addition to updating the examples of the first edition, this new edition also highlights the growing use of enterprise funds, partnership models of privatization, and web-based service delivery. Each chapter concludes with a useful summary and all-new application exercises.

This book covers all the major aspects of change management for those working in public sector and not-for-profit organisations. It summarises key theories and approaches to change management and includes detailed, worked descriptions of key techniques used in change management processes and programmes, with extensive reference to case studies drawn from a range of public sector, not-for-profit organisations and other environments. - Written by a highly knowledgeable and well-respected practitioner in the field - Draws on the author's wide-ranging practical experience of major organizational development and change management in a wide range of situation Applies as well as describes theory - Provides practical and realistic solutions to real-world problems

Regardless of where we live, the management of the public sector impacts on our lives. Hence, we all have an interest, one way or another, in the achievement of efficiency and productivity improvements in the activities of the public sector. For a government agency that provides a public service, striving for unreasonable benchmark targets for efficiency may lead to a deterioration of service quality, along with an increase in stress and job dissatisfaction for public sector employees. Slack performance targets may lead to gross inefficiency, poor quality of service, and low self-esteem for employees. In the case of regulation, inappropriate policies can lead to unprecedented disasters. Examples include the decimation of fish stocks through mismanagement of fisheries, and power blackouts through inappropriate restrictions on electricity generators and distributors. Efficient taxation policies minimise the tax bill for citizens. In all of these cases, efficient management is required, although it is often unclear how to assess this efficiency. In this volume, several authors consider various aspects and contexts of performance measurement. Hence, this volume represents a unique collection of advances in efficiency assessment for the public sector by leading researchers in the field. Efficiency in the Public Sector is divided into two sections. The first is titled "Issues in Public Sector Efficiency Evaluation" and comprises of chapters 1-4. The second section is titled "Efficiency Analysis in the Public Sector - Advances in Theory and Practice." This division is somewhat arbitrary, in the sense there are significant overlapping themes in both sections. However, it serves to separate chapters that can be characterised as dealing with broader issues (Section I), from chapters that can be characterised as focusing on specific theoretical problems and empirical cases (Section II).