David N. Ammons

Performance-Comparison Projects in Local Government: Participants' Perspectives

How do officials of participating local governments assess the value of their involvement in performance-comparison projects, including related costs and benefits? In this article, three prominent projects involving city and county governments are examined from the perspective of the participants themselves, revealing gaps between high expectations and subsequent results, but nevertheless suggesting an array of benefits for participants.

Benchmarking as a performance management tool: experiences among municipalities in North Carolina

Benchmarking takes three distinct forms in the public sector, each serving a different purpose. When applied properly and with care, benchmarking is a performance improvement technique that can yield tangible results, as demonstrated by the North Carolina cities of Greensboro, Wilmington, and Winston-Salem.

Performance Measurement and Managerial Thinking

T he accountability argument for performance measurement is powerful and persuasive. How can a government be truly accountable if it only tracks the dollars moving through its system and barely mentions the services rendered through the use of these resources? Many governments have supplemented traditional evidence of financial stewardship with facts and figures on services to demonstrate the scope and magnitude of their offerings. Few would argue that accountability has not been enhanced as a result. Although logical, the argument for performance measurement as a tool of service improvement is more easily challenged. Performance measurement proponents enthusiastically contend that better information will lead to better decisions, that measures can influence the beneficial redirection of resources, and that the practice of measurement will generate improvements in performance. These arguments sell well among favorably predisposed audiences. Tougher skeptics, however, are not buying. Performance measurement skeptics say that meaningful measures for their functions are difficult or impossible to develop, that they can ill afford to divert scarce resources from service delivery to performance measurement, that their antiquated computer systems make performance measurement impractical, or that they have tried performance measurement and did not see the promised benefits. Unless performance measurement proponents and researchers can provide tangible evidence that measurement is practical for their function and that the service improvement value of measurement outweighs its cost-and can provide plenty of such evidence-these skeptics are unlikely to be swayed.

The Future of Local Government Will Current Stresses Bring Major, Permanent Changes?

The Great Recession’s damaging effects on the finances of cities and counties have led some observers to predict dramatic, widespread, and enduring changes to local government in response to fiscal pressure. However, the history of change in local government suggests otherwise, as does the experience of individual cities and counties that have confronted fiscal duress in the past. The authors of this article suggest that financial problems will not overwhelm the balance among an array of competing pressures that already confronted local governments long before the recession. Although some cities and counties will respond to the downturn with major, permanent changes, most will not. For local governments as a whole, equilibrium among the host of tensions they face will continue to resist dramatic moves and favor only gradual change.

Signs of Performance Measurement Progress Among Prominent City Governments

A review of budgets and other performance documents of cities at the forefront of performance measurement efforts finds evidence of advances in the reporting of measures of service quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. A cross-sectional review of performance marks further indicates that the caliber of service (i.e., the levels of service quality, efficiency, and effectiveness) required to be ranked as a performance leader for many municipal functions has improved over a two-decade period. However, a longitudinal review of a subset of individual cities provides only minimal support for the proposition that an advanced level of performance measurement acts as a catalyst for improved performance.

City Manager and City Administrator Role Similarities and Differences Perceptions Among Persons Who Have Served as Both

The hiring of chief administrative officers, also known as city administrators, in municipalities with the mayor–council form of government has contributed to the professionalization of these city governments. Although some observers suggest that the role of city administrator is the functional equivalent of city manager, survey responses from 276 persons who have held both jobs note similarities and important differences.

Tenure of City Managers: Examining the Dual Meanings of “Average Tenure”

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM suggests that turnover among city managers is frequent, that the average tenure in a given managerial post is brief by most professional standards, and that the odds of remaining for more than a decade in a single community are infi nitesimally small. Some city managers compare their own tenure and turnover prospects with those of managers in professional baseball, where careers are tenuous and longevity is rare. Scholars have examined city manager turnover, usually in attempts to explain the causes of turnover, its consequences, or the relationship between tenure and other variables. Rarely have systematic studies focused primarily on identifying more precisely the typical time interval between the appointment and departure of local government managers. This research note focuses not on the reasons for managerial turnover—i.e., the “push” factors that force a manager from the current post or cause the manager to want to leave or the “pull” factors that attract the manager to a new opportunity (Kammerer et al. 1962; Feiock and Stream 2002; Green 1987; Barber 1988; DeHoog and Whitaker 1990)—or on characteristics of municipal structure associated with managerial longevity (Whitaker and DeHoog 1991; Booth 1968; Kammerer et al. 1962). Nor is the focus on the relationships between community or attitudinal characteristics and tenure (Feiock et al. 2001; DeSantis, Glass, and Newell 1992) or the consequences of frequent turnover (Clingermayer and Feiock 1997; 2001). Instead, the focus is on the common method of gauging average managerial tenure, the potential for misinterpretation and misuse of the “average tenure” statistic derived by this method, and the ramifi cations of such misinterpretation or misuse.

Performance Management in Local Government: Is Practice Influenced by Doctrine?

ABSTRACT Successful performance management is presumed to be dependent on several practices and organizational conditions prescribed in performance management doctrine, including the presence of sound performance measures, a clear sense of goals and objectives, devolved decision authority, engaged executives, and incentives and sanctions tied to performance. Their presence, according to doctrine, is necessary for performance management to function properly. The authors of this study examine the presence of these prescribed practices and conditions in 66 U.S. cities and counties that have been recognized for their performance management efforts, and in a subset of these governments perceived by the authors as more fully engaged in performance management than others in the set. They find considerable evidence of doctrine’s influence on the adoption of some practices, but much less on others. Variation in reported benefits among the performance management reputational leaders provides evidence in support of the efficacy of some of these prescribed practices individually and hints at the efficacy of the set of practices in combination.

Industrial Engineering: A Productivity Improvement Discipline Underutilized by Government

A survey of the members of the primary association of industrial engineers (IEs) confirms that relatively few IEs work in government, especially for state and local governments. Underutilization exists despite evidence that IEs can improve governmental productivity through a variety of analytic techniques. More wide-spread use of IEs in government would be encouraged by forging stronger interdisciplinary ties between public administration and industrial engineering.

Performance Management Purpose, Executive Engagement, and Reported Benefits among Leading Local Governments

The authors of this article examine a pair of organizational factors for their contributions to the levels of performance management success among a set of seventy-two U.S. local governments, all of which enjoy reputations for good performance management. The factors examined are, first, the purpose accorded to performance management in each organization and, second, the engagement of senior managers in reviewing the performance of operating units. The authors find that local governments that regard performance management to be their management philosophy perceive greater benefits on particular dimensions of performance than those regarding it to be a system or simply a means of upgrading performance measurement. Greater benefits are also reported by organizations whose executives routinely review the performance of operating units.