Performance management

1
Performance management

• Perversion of a vital concept

2
Corruptions of ideas

• It is not uncommon in the field of human
  endeavour to find that important notions get
  corrupted
• A good example is the one about the so-called
  Carrot and stick approach
• Many of you may share the common understanding of
  this concept in which the stick in question is to
  beat the donkey whilst the carrot is an
  inducement to perform
• In fact, the carrot and stick metaphor was coined
  to show the following situation

3
Distinctions

• In the field of management we have come to forget
  that the terms performance management and
  performance measurement are not interchangeable
• We tend increasingly to believe that performance
  measurement is performance management
• We forget that performance measurement was
  conceived as a tool to aid performance management

4
Performance measurement and management

• We forget, most of all, that Performance
  management is an activity conceived by
  management experts
• In which the public service organisation uses
  performance information in a particular way, to
  self-direct the development of its own
  performance
• Some people involved in the occupation of
  producing performance indicators seek to find
  ever better means of improving the validity and
  accuracy of performance measurement techniques
• There is a huge danger that the key messages of
  those who invented the idea of performance
  measurement as an occupation are being overlooked

5
How well are we doing?

• In my view, the performance measurement regimes
  in place in the UK over the last 10 years at
  least have directly contributed to several major
  national disasters with a combined effect in
  terms of excess deaths and other socially
  undesirable outcomes much greater than the
  terrorists behind 9/11
• Everywhere you look in the public sector we are
  beginning to hear more and more about very
  serious failings in the delivery of public
  services which can be attributed directly to the
  almost ubiquitous culture of inappropriate
  performance measurement and management
• There are a number of pernicious effects of the
  current culture which, only slowly, are public
  inquisitors, auditors and inspectors beginning to
  bring to light

6
Whats wrong?

• Perversion of best policy practice as
  organisations focus on what is measured rather
  than what is actually important
• A situation made infinitely worse when indicators
  are wholly inadequate for measuring what they
  claim to measure (e.g. Child protection as
  addressed in the 2nd Laming Report)
• Wholesale manipulation of the measurement process
  to conceal seriously bad practice
• Driving out of senior management good people who
  know what is happening is wrong the avoidance
  of senior management jobs and responsibilities by
  people with the right ideas, leaving such roles
  to others
• Senior managers paying with livelihoods health
  for challenging the stupidity of conventionality
  in performance management

7
The focus

• I could try to cover all of these issues but it
  would take me too long
• Some at this conference may be most interested in
  how we might improve our measures of performance
• I have chosen deliberately not to tackle this as
  I think it actually detracts from my main
  message.
• How information created to measure performance
  in child protection work is used must be
  considered or else, this enterprise could only
  help make things even worse

8
Perversion of best practice

• Schools
• scope of curriculum severely constrained to
  exclude all non-measured subjects
• socially undesirable selective admission and
  exclusion policies introduced
• rehearsal of tests replaced 35 taught sessions
  for 5 months of the year
• children unlikely or very likely to meet target
  left with teaching assistants
• efforts of trained staff focussed on booster
  classes for those just under target level at Xmas
• creation of sink schools leading to sink
  areas.
• Ambulance services
• To meet patient access targets of X being
  reached within 8 minutes, ambulances were
  relocated to areas with most emergency calls
  able to be reached in 8 minutes

9
Perversion of best practice

• Hospitals
• Neglect of sickest patients
• Focus on waiting times to exclusion of other
  concerns
• The Police
• to meet crime detection targets- efforts focussed
  on crimes which are easiest to solve, inducements
  offered to prisoners and others unlikely to be
  ever found guilty of crimes to admit guilt
• Child protection
• Schools lack engagement with child protection
  issues

10
Manipulation of performance data

• School SATS
• Ill pupils with good chances of passing ferried
  by teachers to school, others encouraged to stay
  at home
• baseline assessment results adjusted to produce
  higher measures of value-added
• Test questions illegally accessed in advance to
  support pre-test coaching
• Ambulance services
• Rounding of cases where ambulance took between
  8.1 and 8.9 minutes to reach patient
• Hospitals
• Holding patients in ambulances to delay their
  point of registration for counting wait time
• Counting triage or preliminary examinations as
  being seen

11
Manipulation of performance data

• The Police
• Fewer unlikely to be solved crimes recorded
  following crime reports -cheque book theft for
  example
• Improved recording of cases of personal violence
  as perpetrator is usually known to the victim
• Child protection
• Records of childrens case work management
  misrepresent actual contacts and case work

12
What to do?

• Those engaged in the performance measurement
  industry are as well-placed as any other
  professional group to do something about this
• The first thing they should grasp is that the
  present culture is based on premises of
  effectiveness in improving performance that lack
  a sound evidence base
• Secondly, the most damaging feature of that
  culture is that the information they produce is
  seen as a tool to give the Government the power
  to use sticks with which to beat the public
  sector
• The evidence from managerial research is that
  information is a powerful and effective tool in
  the right hands
• Although there is research evidence which seems
  to show that publishing performance data produces
  greater improvements in measured performance of
  organisations than when such performance data is
  fed directly to operational managers, this
  research is itself deeply flawed in that it takes
  no account of the effect of Gaming
• Indeed, it is the publication of performance data
  which directly increases the amount of gaming to
  make performance seem to improve when it may
  actually have worsened
• Performance information is most powerful and
  effective when the information is in the hands of
  those who produce it through a process of honest
  self-appraisal

13
Gurus of management

• The main personality associated with the
  development of performance measurement as an aid
  to performance management is Peter Drucker
• Although he was originally writing over 30 years
  ago and died a few years ago, his books are still
  in print and other authors quote him extensively
• His vision of public service organisations was
  that they would become the main source of
  employment and consumer consumption in the future
  so it was important that most effort should be
  put into working out how such organisations could
  be managed most effectively
• He observed that most such organisations at that
  time were pretty much poor performers and mostly
  experienced very poor quality management
• He argued that without improvements in the
  quality of management, this position would get
  worse
• His vision of the place of such organisations has
  been fulfilled very largely

14
Gurus of how not to manage performance

• It would be impossible to gauge fairly whether
  performance of public service organisations is
  any better or worse than in 1979
• My view is that he would probably say much the
  same thing about the defects of the system and be
  able to pinpoint some of the sources of the
  problem
• He would probably be turning in his grave at the
  way that the Government, in particular have not
  understood the proper purpose of management
  information which is to inform management

15
Implications for information producers

• Those who supply information to managers should
  retain a much higher status in public service
  organisations
• They should not be recruited as specially trained
  versions of the usual service delivery
  professions
• They should be recruited from the ranks of those
  trained in the creation, analysis and
  dissemination of information
• They should enjoy high income status working in
  separate professional hierarchies as specialists
  akin to legal advisers, IT engineers etc
• This may mean that the they should be outsourced

16
Implications for others

• Strategic managers should define the primary task
  of such information suppliers as the supply of
  relevant information to relevant operational
  managers
• Operational managers in this setting should
• Seek to understand the reasons for gaps between
  the performance they aspire to and actual
  performance
• Seek out potentially effective means of bridging
  such gaps
• Pilot such means apply results from
  high-quality pilot evaluation

17
Why does the Drucker approach work?

• The basis of the Drucker arguments remains that
  the kind of system I have described is highly
  motivational
• It empowers the operational managers by making
  them responsible for acting on the information
  they receive
• We know from so many examples of motivations
  research that this kind of empowerment is highly
  effective in raising standards of performance in
  public service organisations
• To bypass the operational managers by passing
  information direct to the Government or service
  consumers is positively disempowering and highly
  demotivating, leading to poorer results, not even
  sustaining present performance

18
What can you do?

• It depends partly on who you are but it is
  already clear that the penny has started to drop
  in Government circles, if a bit belatedly
• Do you have a choice?
• Those of you whose job it is to create management
  information for the eyes of the Government only
  should pause to consider whether you are part of
  the problem not the solution to poor performance
• Ask yourself the question whether the more you
  get involved in perfecting the supply of
  information to Government, the more you are
  making services worse?