Made2Measure

Incentive: The Missing Ingredient in Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) in Courts Woody Allen is said to have once quipped: “I was in a warm bed and, all of a sudden, I found myself in the middle of your strategic plan.” What will it take for courts and other justice institutions to get out of their warm beds and embrace performance measurement and management (PMM)? What are the incentives? Business Incentives Do Not (Yet) Exist for Courts For private sector organizations, PMM is an imperative, an essential business evaluation tool that is a matter of survival. In the long-term, if profits are insufficient to cover expenses they surely soon will be out of business. In the short-term, if cash-flow does not cover employee salaries, they will close their doors sooner. Other than net profit and cash-flow, critical measures for businesses include return on investment, market share, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and employee engagement. For businesses moving the ne...

Advancing Performance Measurement and Management (PMM) in the Justice Sector Who else is doing PMM where? How is it working out for them? Answering these two questions will advance performance measurement and management initiatives more than any effort to date. For many years, I’ve been in the business of convincing courts and other justice institutions to develop political will and capacity (OK, mostly just trying ) to measure and manage their performance in an effective, accountable, and transparent manner. I used to think that widespread buy-in by the justice sector surely would be seen by the time of the development of well-conceived models beginning with the Trial Court Performance Standards in the late 1980s and early 1990s , to the CourtTools ten years ago , to the Global Measures of Court Performance in the last few years . But buy-in for PMM certainly has not been overwhelming. Instead, at best, it has been a slow slog for advocates of PMM. Who Else is Doing PMM...