Conclusions about performance management

Several conclusions emerge from this discussion. First, performance measurement should not be confined to those events over which a program manager has near-total control. Doing so would ignore the questions about program outcomes that the public and their elected officials most want answered. Instead, outcomes, though often not controllable by a single actor, should be measured and the question of accountability approached by developing the concept of joint responsibility.

Second, the distortion of effort resulting from performance measurement is likely to be most severe when measurements focus upon program activities rather than program outcomes. Measuring outcomes has the additional advantage, then, of providing the organization with an incentive rather than a disincentive to achieve stated goals.

Third, one cannot isolate performance measurement system design and development from systems politics. Neither can one keep the information that the performance measurement system generates from being used in the political process.

Finally, the manager must resolve the dilemma of developing a performance measurement system flexible enough to respond to changing ideas about what is important to measure, yet stable enough to provide the comparisons over time needed when judging whether the performance experienced in a given year is adequate.