Made2Measure

The design of international development is ill-suited for our fast-paced world. It is not unusual for aid programs to take five or more years from blueprint to start-up and another five years for results to be reported, and even more time for the results to be “translated” into policy.   How Scientists Should Act Writing in the February 10, 2017 issue of Science , Erik Stockstad summarizes the message of Paul Cairney, a political scientist at the University of Stirling in the UK, author of the book, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making . Cairney’s message is for those scientists who want their findings to find their way into policy: Data does not speak for itself.   Scientists should be “sifters, synthesizers, and analyzers” to make the evidence “speak.” Cairney repeats the common refrain of policy-makers: “I don’t have the time to consider all the information. How do I decide?” Policymaking is disorderly. Scientists need to dispense with the notion t...

In a January 23, 2017 post ( Right Use and Politics in Performance Measurement and Management ), I argued that practitioners of performance measurement and management (PMM) must not ignore the reality of politics if they want to ensure the “right use” of PMM. They do so at peril of coming into the cross-hairs of foes who would “shoot the messenger” rather than consider data that they don’t like. The lesson that performance measurement data is not above politics came into full international view today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal article today written by Marcus Walker under the title Greeks Make Data The Enemy: Facing resurgent debt crisis, politicians indulge in conspiracy theories involving former   statistics chief . Andreas Georgiou, an American-trained economist and Greek citizen who moved from the U.S. and became Greece’s first independent head of statistics in 2010, stands accused by his foes of manipulating the country’s deficit figures in a plot t...

In previous posts here (see Ensuring the Right Use of Performance Data: A Cautionary Tale from Health Care , June 26, 2012) and other writings, I have urged the broadening of the scope of inquiry about performance measurement and management (PMM) beyond the “right measures” and the “right delivery” of the information provided by the measures (for example, by such mechanisms as real-time performance dashboards) to the politics of the “right use” of that information. Trained in the social sciences, scholars and practitioners of PMM may think they can exclude politics from their models, thinking that it sullies the discipline of PMM or that politics is the business of other fields. This is a mistake, especially for international development. The necessity of consideration of politics is argued, among many international scholars, by Francis Fukuyama in the first chapter of his   2011 book, The Origins of Political Order. The requirements of the “right use” recognizes that PMM – ...

Q : Adopting government-wide or justice sector-wide performance measurement and management   to make public service or justice service more efficient and effective is politically attractive, even if elected officials are drawn mostly by the symbolic values of the key success factors with which performance measures are aligned (e.g., legitimacy, fairness, and public trust and confidence in institutions).   Successful leaders and managers are drawn to performance measurement because it informs uncertain decisions. Beyond such models as the European Commission’s EU Justice Scoreboard ,   the Global Measures for Court Excellence   developed by the International Consortium for Court Excellence as part of its International Framework for Court Excellence, and the National Center for State Courts' CourTools , and their attendant exhortations to adopt performance measurement and management, are there any compelling success stories of effective use? A : Yes. Almost five ...

Bill Gates: My Plan To Fix the World’s Biggest Problems** Measure Them!   This is the headline of the lead article in the Review section of the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal   written by Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and co-founder of Microsoft.      The article was accompanied by a large picture of transparent globe wrapped by a tape measure covering most of the first page of the section.   Its message is the theme of Made2Measure. Because it comes from Bill Gates, we tend to listen. “In the past year,” Gates writes, “I have been struck by how important measurement is to improving the human condition. You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal .. .This may seem basic, but it is amazing how often it is not done and how hard it is to get right.” He writes specifically about foreign aid among other areas like education, health ca...

We have failed to breathe life into the prescriptions for the performance measures that we exhort courts to use on a regular and continuous basis. The connection between well known health indicators like blood pressure, cholesterol level, and blood glucose and our health and wellbeing is self-evident to most informed people.   We know that these measures mean something vital and something very important to us. In my experience, the same cannot be said about the connection between such relatively common measures of court performance as time to disposition , trial date certainty , and collection of monetary penalties and fundamental justice and fairness (see Ten Reasons Not to Measure Court Performance , Made2Measure , November 19, 2008).   Many judges and court managers see these measures as indicators of the relatively narrow concerns of those for whom it’s all about the numbers -- the number crunchers, the spreadsheet guys, and the IT folks who manage the case manageme...

Health care has provided lessons for court administration in the past (see Monitoring “Never Events in Court Administration , Made2Measure , September 23, 2008; Pursuing Perfection – A Lesson from Health Care , Made2Measure , November 1, 2006 . This time it provides a cautionary tale, specifically for performance measurement and performance management. The Story of PICS As reported in the Economist (“From petrol to prescriptions,” June 16, 2012. p. 65), the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham in the U.K. pioneered a new approach to patient care learned from the carmaker BMW’s engine assembly factory where over 99.9% of tasks were completed flawlessly. Big health systems in the U.K. and the U.S., in contrast, tolerate many more errors. Emulating BMW’s approach to manufacturing, the Birmingham hospital system installed a quality-control regime called PICS, which stands for “Prescribing, Information and Communication System.” PICS features a performance dashboard system on a...