Abstract: Most performance indicator schemes in the public sector have been implemented on the assumption that they will yield benefits in terms of efficiency and equity. Less attention has been paid to the potential costs of such schemes. Drawing on experience from a range of sources, this paper identifies eight consequences of publishing performance data that are not necessarily intended, and which are likely to be dysfunctional. The paper gives examples of such phenomena from the UK public sector, and suggests ways in which they can be mitigated. While not challenging the desirability of publishing performance data, the paper concludes that the performance indicator philosophy is based on inadequate models of production and control. Most performance indicator schemes will therefore fail unless serious consideration is given to the deficiencies described in this paper.

Abstract: A systematic method for measuring construction time performance has been developed. This enables comparisons between individual project performances and best practice worldwide. Four factors affect construction time performance: construction management effectiveness, the sophistication of the client and the client's representative in terms of creating and maintaining positive project team relationships with the construction management and design team, design team effectiveness in communicating with construction management and client's representative teams, and a small number of factors describing project scope and complexity. This research has indicated that construction management team performance plays a pivotal role in determining construction time performance. It also reveals an important relationship between sound client's representative management effectiveness and good construction time performance. Detailed findings provide useful performance indicators that may be used to assist in defining bench...

Abstract: A bewildering variety of performance measures and indicators in health management is evident in the literature and in practice. Reviews measures useful for health management performance accountability, and expands on the traditional notion of health performance measures to incorporate nominal and ordinal measures. The research is performed in the interest of stimulating discussion in the public domain and with the intent of expanding current notions of the term “performance indicator”. Develops a comprehensive framework from measurement and accountability theory, and the medical management, accounting and accountability literatures are reviewed. Highlights the importance of using non‐ratio measures to capture outcomes, structure and processes influenced by management; and suggests that disclosures which include measures from all elements of the framework would most closely account for management activity.

Abstract: Using performance indicators to drive improved service delivery and cost‐effectiveness has been a recognized management technique in the public sector for many years. Most managers are now convinced of the possible benefits, at least in theory. Reality, though, is much less encouraging. Partial coverage, poor implementation and unrealized expectations are still the norm. Yet the potential for radical improvement by making the most of performance measurement is even greater than most people would believe. The question is how to unlock this potential.

Abstract: The paper examines UK PhD completion and withdrawal rates, in a competing risks framework, using the 1986 National Survey of 1980 Graduates. The statistical problem of thresholding of completion data is also addressed. We argue that our results suggest that there are problems with the use of PhD completion rates as performance indicators for academic departments. The principal results of the analysis are as follows. First, research council funding significantly increases only the male completion rate. Second, male and female completion rates are highest where the subject area of research is in the sciences or engineering. Third, ability increases the completion rate for men, but for women increases both the withdrawal and completion rates. Finally, a significant maternal role model effect is observed for female completions.

Abstract: This paper highlights the requirement for Executive Agencies to be more directly accountable to those outside their immediate management, especially con- cerning performance. The paper discusses the importance of performance information in external reporting and, through an analysis of 57 recent annual reports, examines the extent to which such information is disclosed. By comparing the results of this analysis with earlier evidence, changes in emphasis are identified. The research, although questioning the adequacy of performance reporting by Agencies, provides evidence of improvement over time.

Abstract: Some family health services authorities are now producing performance indicators for the general practices they administer.1 2 3 With the move towards a primary care led NHS,4 5 these indicators will become an important management tool. League tables of practice performance are a possibility: for example, practices could be ranked by rates of uptake of cervical smear tests and the proportion of drugs prescribed generically. Many general practitioners, particularly those who work in deprived communities, will find this development threatening and may think that league tables will unfairly label their practice as performing poorly. Family health services authorities must therefore ensure that performance indicators are interpreted appropriately.6 Performance indicators may be used to identify and reward high performing practices with increased allocations for staff and premises. Conversely, if resources are allocated according …

Abstract: The grouting interest in health care networks is extraordinary given the lack of a common understanding of what networks are and what they can accomplish. The purpose of this article is to develop a conceptual approach to the study of vertically integrated rural health networks. This article provides a network typology, a framework for assessing network performance, and examples of measurable performance indicators. It concludes with a description of the salient research questions that need to be addressed concerning the relationships between the environment, structure, and performance of vertically integrated rural health networks.

Abstract: ECOGRAI is a method to design and to implement Performance Indicator Systems (PIS) for industrial organizations. Based on the GRAI model, it can be applied on all the production functions (Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality, Maintenance, delivery...) with a global approach or more specifically on only one function. The results of the PIS design is a coherent set of specification sheets describing each Performance Indicator. The implementation and the operating of this system is supported by an EIS (Executive Information System) tool.

Abstract: League tables are weighted combinations of scores on performance indicators. The Times newspaper publishes an annual league table of British universities and the focus of this article is the 1994 table. The scores of ninety-six universities on fourteen performance indicators are ranked using weights which ‘reflect the interests of students’. The league table is intended as a resource which allows students to compare universities and therefore it is important for both students and universities that valid inferences can be drawn from its use. The table fails to meet any of the technical requirements which would assure its internal construct validity. The educational measurement literature requires that validity inquiry must include consideration of social consequences and it is demonstrated that the technical shortcomings of the Times table could have significant adverse impact, even in the top ten universities. It is argued that universities should forsake their current stance of non-co-operation and develop a shortlist of demanding technical standards, linked to the educational measurement literature, which could be referenced in effective attacks upon poorly constructed league tables.

Abstract: In recent years the police have introduced performance indicators and value for money initiatives, but financial and management structures have remained unchanged. Police reform introduced in England and Wales in April 1995 will enhance strategic planning but will place organizational performance above local or individual need. Performance measurement may threaten the operational independence of chief constables and alter the style of policing from that of service to enforcement. Different measures should be developed for different levels of accountability in police forces. Performance measurement can mean a better informed police‐public dialogue, but issues of quality must not be neglected.

Abstract: The public sector poses particularly challenging problems of control. Almost by definition, there are no competitive markets for its products, and it is not subjected to the traditional discipline of financial markets. Instead strategic control must be secured through political processes, which can take many forms. With the rapid reduction in the cost of data collection, governments are increasingly relying on various types of performance indicator to inform the political process, and thereby secure control of public sector management. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the implications of the use of performance indicators (PIs) for managerial control of public sector resources.

Abstract: School effectiveness research has provided us with the knowledge and techniques to produce fair performance indicators. But under what circumstances do performance indicators have the most influence? For ten years the A Level Information System (ALIS) has been feeding back quantitative summaries of educational performance to schools, department by department, in an effort to improve educational provision. During that time the feedback has regularly been accompanied by dissemination meetings at which the measures and methodology have been explained and discussed. This paper reports a survey and two experiments conducted within the framework of ALIS which were designed to gauge the relative importance of a range of factors on the impact of performance indicators on teachers from 70 schools and colleges. It compares the attitudes towards and the use of the system by: Heads of departments and members of the department; teachers from different curriculum areas; teachers with varying lengths of involve...

Abstract: The delivery of health services represents one of the most daunting challenges confronting contemporary management. The complexity of the issues involved suggests that health service policy makers seeking to allocate scarce resources would find the opportunities offered by large scale modelling attractive. However, the application of such models to strategic management of the health services has not been a success in the UK. This paper seeks to explain the failure by describing three important initiatives in the UK National Health Service that have occurred over a period of 20 years. The first is the deployment of the large scale ‘balance of care’ model, which was developed in the 1970s, and sought to allocate local government and health service resources between competing claims. The second is the performance indicator initiative of the 1980s, which concentrated on the measurement of a large number of processes and outcomes in the health sector. The third is the ‘internal market’ reform of the 1990s. These developments were informed, respectively, by the disciplines of operational research, accountancy and economics. Alternatively, they can be thought of as representing the planning, bureaucratic and market views of management. The paper argues that the traditional OR approach fails not because its model is an inadequate representation of reality, but because it does not acknowledge the priorities of the manager or politician who must take responsibility for implementing the model's findings. The overriding concerns of the accountable person are likely to be securing control and avoiding blame, rather than the pursuit of either allocative or managerial efficiency. In this respect, the models of accountants and economists are more attractive to managers and politicians.

Abstract: Managers, in their quest for efficient management tools, attach more and more importance to benchmarking techniques as action-oriented demarches to set functional goals. Yet, benchmarking having essentially been developed by Industry, different approaches coexist and still need to be federated and made coherent.

Abstract: There has been increasing debate about reaccreditation of general practitioners over the last few years with contributions from the General Medical Services Committee, the Royal College of General Practitioners and the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts. The implications of proposals in terms of cost, logistics and organization are discussed in this paper, in light of experience with the introduction of summative assessment for general practitioner registrars (trainees) and a programme of training practice visits in West Midlands Region. A model for reaccreditation for all general practitioners is proposed which is professionally led and sensitive to the needs of patients and health service managers. The basic proposition is that publicly owned family health services authority data could be used as initial performance indicators for professional competence. The model is dependent on the rebuttal of the null hypothesis: there is no link between the competence of a general practitioner and his or her achievements in the suggested performance indicators. If the performance indicators (educational commitments, prescribing data, health promotion activity and immunization targets, and service elements) can be shown to correlate with possession of the attributes for independent practice as defined by the General Medical Council, then a relatively inexpensive and simple system of reaccreditation could be envisaged. General practitioners who are recorded as achieving set performance indicator targets would be accorded automatic reaccreditation. Only substandard practitioners would be required to be assessed further by a visiting team of local general practitioner peers and, if appropriate, a remedial education strategy introduced. This method would complement the General Medical Council scheme for assessing an individual doctor's persistent poor performance, which could then be invoked as a last resort.

Abstract: Nursing home social work service providers (n = 209) evaluated a proposed set of clinical indicators developed by an NASW Work Group to use in measuring social work performance in that setting. Practitioners rated all of the indicators highly for clarity, relevance, and meaningfulness to service provision. Problems with feasibility of use were identified for two of the indicators. Perceived difficulties in implementation are identified and addressed. A rationale is presented for the utility for nursing home practice of a uniform, professionally validated set of performance indicators as a component of quality improvement efforts.

Abstract: This paper argues that it is feasible to develop good indicators of the performance of a particular welfare-to-work program, office, or contractor. Performance indicators can motivate local offices, contractors, and staff to be more effective in achieving the program's goals. Performance indicators can provide information on what program strategies lead to the greatest long-run success. To be most useful, performance indicators must be simple and timely and control for factors other than the program's effectiveness that influence whether welfare recipients "succeed." Program managers and policy makers would like to know the "value added" resulting from a welfare-to-work program. This "value added" is the difference in welfare recipients' lives due to the program, compared to an alternate world in which the program was nonexistent. The program-induced differences of most interest will depend upon our social goals, but might include earnings gains, reduced welfare dependence, improved self-esteem, and better job skills. The value added from a welfare-to-work program is hard to measure because it is costly and time-consuming to figure out what would have happened if the program did not exist. The change in earnings or welfare benefits for welfare recipients, from before to after the program, will be a poor measure of program effects. Many welfare recipients are suffering from temporary problems. On average, a typical group of welfare recipients will over time reduce their welfare dependence and increase their earnings, even without any special assistance. For example, in the Riverside County, California welfare-to-work experiment, the welfare recipients randomly assigned to the "control group" that did not receive any special services more than tripled their earnings over the three-year period after the experiment's start, and less than half were still receiving welfare after three years (Riccio et al., 1994, pp. 323-324). Social experiments in which individuals are randomly assigned to receive services or be denied services can measure the value added of a program. But using social experiments to monitor the performance of local welfare offices requires perpetually running social experiments in every local welfare office. Such widespread experimentation is unlikely. Among other concerns: is it ethical to deny services to some "control group" of welfare recipients on a regular ongoing basis in every local welfare office to help in program management? Performance indicators for a welfare-to-work program are imperfect proxies for the program's value added. Performance indicators may take data on program outcomes and adjust the data so they are correlated with the program's value added. This adjustment may consider factors such as the characteristics of the welfare recipients served by the program or the health of the local economy. The advantage of performance indicators is that they do not require experimental methods. The disadvantage is that performance indicators may sometimes give a misleading impression of the value added of a particular program, welfare office, or contractor. This disadvantage may be reduced by developing better performance indicators and by careful use of performance indicators. Robert Behn, in his book on the Massachusetts ET programs, suggests that performance indicators for welfare-to-work programs may be used for three types of purposes: (1) justifying the overall program; (2) identifying how to improve the program; and (3) motivating better performance by managers and line workers associated with the program (Behn, 1991). Each of these purposes requires a different type of performance indicator. For justifying a welfare-to-work program, a perfectly rational policy maker would want to know the value added from the program, preferably using experimental data. In the real world, a program might be politically justified by any data showing that outcomes improved for welfare recipients, as one would expect even for an unsuccessful program. Good anecdotes might be as politically relevant as quantitative data. To identify how to improve a welfare-to-work program, performance indicators must be positively correlated with program value added, but the value added need not be precisely measured. We need to identify which local offices, contractors, and staff members are more successful, but their value added need not be known precisely. Performance indicators for program improvement must be linked to information on the strategies of particular offices, organizations and staff members, so that we know why a particular program component is successful. To motivate better performance by local offices and staff, we need performance indicators that are timely and understandable. These performance indicators must be easier to increase by increasing the value added of the program rather than by taking other actions that reduce value added. For example, performance indicators for motivational purposes should be easier to increase by improving earnings of welfare recipients, rather than by selecting welfare recipients for the program who will look good on the performance indicators ("creaming"). Welfare recipients with the greatest earnings prospects are not always those who will have the most value added from a welfare-to-work program. Finally, for any performance indicator to help motivate performance, program administrators must have the will to use the performance indicator to allocate some resources. Performance indicators may also be distinguished by which part of the organization's performance is being measured, and by whom. Performance indicators may be used by federal officials to measure state performance, state officials to monitor local welfare office's performance, local offices to monitor contractors, and local offices or contractors to monitor individual staff. As one gets closer to the individual staff level of the welfare system, it becomes easier to use personal interaction and judgment to substitute for quantitative performance indicators. In addition, as one gets closer to the individual staff level, it will be more difficult to consistently interpret more complex performance indicators. Therefore, performance indicators should be simpler and less accurate as we get closer to the individual staff level, and should become more statistically sophisticated at higher levels in the welfare system. Thus, we need a variety of performance indicators, ranging from quite simple, timely, but rough proxies for value added to more sophisticated, accurate, and complex approximations to value added. The questions addressed by this paper are twofold: (1) how can we develop better performance indicators that will be both feasible and closely correlated with value added, and (2) once such measures are developed, how should they appropriately be used for program management? These questions will be addressed based on experience with performance indicators in job training and welfare-to-work programs, and other previous research on welfare and the labor market.

Abstract: This chapter critically examines the appropriateness of a comprehensive performance measurement system, based on standard performance indicators, to agricultural and rural development programs in poor countries.

Abstract: A new Information Collection Architecture (ICA) is presented that solves the data collection problem for real-time performance measurement of high speed computer communication networks. Despite some claims to the contrary, traditional data collection techniques either overflow available disk storage or exceed the real-time processing capabilities of embedded processors, and hence, they fail to support useful or accurate real-time analysis for network management. The ICA overcomes these deficiencies with a unique hardware/software implementation based on Finite State Machines (FSMs). We present a set of procedures for using the ICA to provide performance measurement for communication protocols. We also extend previous performance measures to include additional communications protocols. We provide a formal use of regular expressions to specify recognition sequences of interest for communication protocols. These recognition sequences correspond to the parameters used by performance models. We investigate alternative FSM structures for recognizing these regular expressions. We introduce a structure based on predecessor and successor component FSMs that allows greater implementation flexibility than the alternative structures. A prototype ICA data collection device has been developed and built to demonstrate practicality, feasibility, and utility of the ICA approach on 16 Mbps and 4 Mbps token ring local computer networks. We discuss the design and implementation of this device for a given set of performance indicators. We provide a formal definition of a time transformed FSM and show how to use this FSM for performance parameter recognition in high speed networks. We propose an ICA implementation architecture for real-time performance measurement in 1 Gigabit per second networks using presently available technology. We use the ICA prototype device to measure performance of operating token ring networks, and we compare these measurements with measurements taken by a traditional network performance monitor. Measured data from both approaches are also compared with simulation results. These comparisons show that the ICA accomplishes accurate performance measurement for real-time network management by collecting only a small fraction of the data required by traditional approaches.