Now that general disillusion with performance measures has set in, what tools will public sector managers be using in future to deliver their services?

Performance measurement has taken firm root in the public sector and has been the watchword of central and local government programmes for the past decade or more. However, the age of innocence has long gone. Not just auditors and others with responsibility for performance review, but the public at large are now alert to 'gaming' and the manipulation of targets and performance indicators to present a better image of a range of services to the public and to regulators.

Originally, some ten-fifteen years ago, the case for improved methods of performance measurement in the public sector was unanswerable. It was a technique that held out the prospect of providing a factual evidence base to assess whether or not a good service and value for money was being achieved. It was meant to reflect best practice in the private sector where "what gets measured gets done".

So a whole battery of centrally defined targets and "key performance indicators" (KPIs in the jargon) were put in place as the basis on which virtually every public sector programme and service would be judged. Regulators and teams of inspectors would apply these KPIs to determine whether or not a service was "excellent", "good", "fair" or "failing".

Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of publishing the reported KPI results for individual organisations was not only the onset of the "league table" mentality, but also the response of "perverse behaviour". People adapted their actions in order to produce a better KPI score without necessarily improving the service and, in some cases, making it worse. Here the analogy with the private sector broke down: instead of getting "what gets measures gets done" we ended up with "what gets published gets manipulated".

The public were quicker to notice the disparity between the published records on KPIs and continued failure to deliver desired outcomes than the regulators or the armies of inspectors. For the public it is the end result that matters; whereas the regulators and the inspectors focussed on process and things like whether the organisation under scrutiny has the "right" set of policies and procedures in place and whether it has good internal information systems providing data on each of the stipulated KPIs.

Eventually the Government saw that targets and KPIs were not delivering. One of the first areas that have experienced the move away from targets has been the politically critical National Health Service. Where the NHS leads, other parts of the public sector will follow.

The way ahead lies in the recognition that KPIs are simply a means of gathering relevant information about individual aspects of a service or programme. Their weakness is that they tend to focus on the quantifiable; on what can be counted. But they are merely part of the bigger picture that needs to include the qualitative aspects too. As one chief executive of a local authority put it to us when we researched one of his public facing service delivery departments:
"In 25 years I've never had a complaint about a strategy or a policy document. People complain about an experience so let's keep our feet on the ground."

It is the quality of the initial response you get that determines the quality of our public services. For example the way in which the receptionist at our local GP deals with us; the responsiveness of the landlord to a tenant reporting the need for a repair; the comfort and cleanliness of waiting rooms.

Many public services need to do a lot better in delivering a good quality experience to the customer - and not just by aping the private sector trend of having call centres (or "customer service centres" as so many public officials prefer to describe them).

The approach now being developed involves a set of tools that complement each other and which taken together provide a fuller picture of the service delivery reality on the ground. This approach recognises the central importance of the customer rather than centrally imposed targetry. The focus is on outcomes rather than internal processes.

This new model for assessing performance and delivery is summarised in the following diagram. It poses the key questions which need to be addressed before a view can be reached on whether any particular service is delivering its objectives. It reflects the holistic service approach rather than the traditional KPI approach of deconstructing the service into a number of component parts without recognising their interdependence.

The post-Gershon drive for efficiency needs to recognise that only by getting information about the crucial qualitative aspects of the service will we know whether or not how well our public services are performing. Simply focussing on costs is not enough. It is the qualitative aspects that truly differentiate between the excellent, the good, the fair and the rest.

Close window