(Workshop to help you Choose success indicators For Operational Plans, Strategic Plans, Performance Contracts and other systems for bringing explicit performance accountability to government activities)

While comparative advantage of nations is based on endowment of natural resources, the efficiency and performance of public sector is a key determinant of competitive advantage of nations. Consequently, progressive governments around the world have adopted policy instruments to improve the efficiency and performance of their government agencies. Examples of these instruments include the following: Operational Plans, Strategic Plans, Performance Budgets, Performance Agreements, Performance Contracts, and other Performance Management Techniques. International experience shows that success of these instruments depends primarily on the ability to choose appropriate success indicators for measuring the efficiency and performance of government agencies as well as incentive systems to motivate their use.

We believe that “What Gets Measured Gets Done.” As pointed by the authors of the book Reinventing Government:  if you do not measure results, you can not tell success from failure. And if you can not see success, then you cannot reward it.  As a result if you cannot reward success, you are probably rewarding failure.

While choice of appropriate success indicators is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient condition for performance improvement of government agencies. This workshop will examine various instruments that use success indicators and derive lessons from international experience. In particular it will focus on Performance Contracts because they have been acclaimed as an effective and promising means of improving the performance of public enterprises as well as government departments. Essentially, a Performance Contract is an agreement between a government and a public agency which establishes general goals for the agency, sets targets for measuring performance and provides incentives for achieving these targets. They include a variety of incentive-based mechanisms for controlling public agencies—controlling the outcome rather than the process. The success of Performance Contracts in such diverse countries as France, South Korea, Malaysia, Kenya and India has sparked a great deal of interest in this policy around the world.