Factor affecting stage of an businesses program development

A third factor affecting the appropriate dimensions to include is the stage of an agency's program development. Stages included in a program's life cycle might be: developing, implementing, operating, and refining. All the performance dimensions mentioned may be appropriate to the operating and refining stages. But using them during the developing stage would be premature. The developing stage would, for example, be too early to measure cost-effectiveness. On the other hand, measuring direct output and policy conformance might be appropriate at that time.

This discussion suggests that a performance measurement system should be designed with the idea of changing from time to time. It should be flexible enough to respond to changes in a program's developmental stages and in user perceptions about the most important performance issues in corrections. Advocating flexibility is easy, but adding and dropping performance dimensions has two disadvantages.

First, it costs money.

Second, it truncates the time series that result from regular annual data collection.

Before dropping measures from the system, the manager might well consider that a time series not perceived as useful by today's users might be perceived as useful by future users.

Finally, whoever is funding the system may insist that his or her performance measurement interests be the sole basis for deciding what measures will be included.
 

The competitive edge of modern-day business emerges from creation or discovery of a performance management. A system that increases efficiency, decreases cost or enhances quality confers immediate competitive advantage on its creator and sets a standard for the rest of the industry to follow. But once disseminated across the field of competition, it becomes the standard. Now a new, yet more innovative, high performance system must be discovered that once more creates competitive advantage for its inventors.

As public-sector productivity gets increasing national attention, state and local governments seek more ways of improving their performance. Performance measurement systems may be helpful tools for improving both productivity and accountability. This paper identifies issues that governments should consider before implementing a performance measurement system.