Most Government bodies and public sector organizations across the globe are facing a harsh climate of shrinking budgets while the demands seem to rise. The challenge of ‘doing more with less’ is very real for most, which is why we have chosen this as the title for my latest book, which I have co-authored with James Creelman.

The Credit Crunch of 2007/08 triggered a global recession and many countries are still far from full recovery. Watching the news this week about Japan falling back into recession and seeing the slow growth across Europe are stark reminders that that things are not back to normal for businesses. But things are even further away from normal for government and not-for-profit companies.

Government bodies across the world are feeling the aftermath of the gigantic sums of money governments had to pump into the economies to avoid an apocalyptic global depression. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act alone came with a price tag of $831 billion and governments had to find $930 billion to bail out European counties such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece. All this, together with decreased tax revenues, is leaving the government coffers pretty empty. What’s more, this won’t be a short-term phenomenon.

It is not simply a question of public sector leaders waiting to remerge once the recession clouds have lifted and have given way to blue skies of recovery. The problem is that there is a delay from the time commercial organizations emerge from recession and public funds recovering, the aftereffects of the recession will continue to hurt the public sector well into the future, even when recovery is deemed to be complete. The fact is that over the coming years public sector bodies are facing harsh economic realities, the likes of which has not been seen since the end of World War 2.

In our book: Doing More with Less: Measuring, Analyzing and Improving Performance in the Government and Not-for-Profit Sector we explain in detail how strategic performance management and lean thinking enable public sector bodies to identify and drive waste, or inefficiencies, out of the organization. Long-established in the commercial sector, public sectors are beginning to wake up to the performance improvement opportunities afforded by lean methodologies.

Identifying the key outcome objectives and then making sure that these are delivered in the most efficient and effective way possible are the hallmark of the approach taken by the organizations we feature in our book. Consider the UK police force Durham Constabulary (which has about 1370 officers and 950 police staff) as one exemplary example. Indeed, prior to the 2010 spending review that ushered in a post credit crunch Government-wide efficiency drive Durham Constabulary had already commenced major restructuring and reengineering programs to create more cost-effective customer-focused policing services. For instance, amongst other outcomes, a Durham Process Improvement Program analyzed critical value streams and removed much rework and duplication across the constabulary. “This led to significant changes to how we worked and delivered about ￡4 million in efficiency savings,” says Gillian Porter, Durham Constabulary’s Head of Performance and Analysis, adding that such successes will help the organization respond to today’s economic realities. “It’s very much about gaining clarity around what are not priority deliverables and what, from the citizens and victims viewpoint are the absolute ‘must-do’s’.”

Durham Constabulary’s example actually goes beyond a mere “balancing,” of effectiveness and efficiency requirements, recognizing that the public is getting more and more demanding of performance and so public sector bodies are increasingly expected to improve service outputs with the same or fewer resources.

So here is what this all comes down to: Public sector bodies are being asked to become both more effective as well as more efficient (not therefore becoming efficient at the expense of being more effective). Often seen as interchangeable words, we can define efficiency as “doing things right,” and effectiveness as “doing the right things.”

For many years, those of us working to improve performance management within the Government and public sectors have been actively promoting the establishment of mechanisms that substantially improve performance from both value and cost dimensions, which we have long argued must be at least on par with that expected in the commercial sector.

Increasing numbers of public sector organizations are using strategic performance management frameworks to plan, visualize and deliver to their identified goals and outcomes. They create one-page maps that identify their strategic priorities including outcome deliverables as well as the key drivers of success. Within our book we look at how the FBI, Audit Scotland, Christchurch and Belfast City Councils, and Emirates Identity Authority have mapped their strategies to identify what matters the most.

Here you can see the one-page plan used by Durham Constabulary:

A key reason for the popularity of tools like this is that they enable public sector leaders to successfully contend with a challenge that is normally far tougher for them than their private sector counterparts – prioritizing where to spend money.

Simply put, whereas commercial organizations can boil everything down to some form of shareholder value focus, for public sector bodies there’s a requirement to deliver equal value to a range of stakeholders: funders, consumers and partners, as examples. This can confuse the public sector leaders as to where they should prioritize attention and resources. Peter Ryan, Manager, Planning and Performance at our case study organization Christchurch City Council puts it well: “The leaders of public sector bodies have a great deal of difficulty in knowing what they’re there to produce in terms of outcomes and what they need to support that,” he says. “So their greatest shortcoming is that they lack a real sense of what their business is.”

Ryan, along with other practitioners and thought leaders that we interviewed for our book states that tools such as Strategy Maps are ideal for those public sector leaders that want to properly understand what they should be doing and where to prioritize their spending. In a future post I will describe in more detail how public sector leaders can create these one-page maps, so make sure you follow me if you don’t want to miss this.

As always, I am keen to hear your views on the ‘more with less’ challenge in government and public sector organisations. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Here are some other related posts I have written:

• Caution: When KPIs Turn To Poison
• The Seven Secrets of Top Performers
• The Top 5 Performance Management Tools: Good News And Cautionary Tales
• Big Data: The 5 Vs Everyone Most Know
• The 25 KPIs Every Manager Needs to Know

About : Bernard Marr is a globally recognized expert in strategy, performance management, analytics, KPIs and big data. He helps companies manage, measure and improve performance. His latest book is ’Doing More with Less: Measuring, Analyzing and Improving Performance in the Government and Not-for-Profit Sector

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