The Performance Pulse: Managing Performance to Achieve Strategic Outcomes

This guide is intended to help senior decision makers and managers across the public services to design or redesign their organisations’ performance management systems.

Public sector organisations have grown used to externally imposed requirements to report information on their costs and activities, but this is set to change. The policy and practice of national external performance measurement is being rolled back. The timely publication of this guide comes as greater freedoms for public bodies to develop and devise performance information and measures to suit them, and to use their performance management systems for improvement, come on stream.

This publication focuses on how to devise systems to suit your strategy and goals, not on how to generate information on their activities and results for external use. It covers the principles, ideas and practice involved in performance management. As organisations review their systems and ask ‘what does performance mean for them?’ and what measures and reporting will convey this information to their stakeholders, this guide offers relevant and up-to-date experience in performance management and how it can lead to improvements in performance.

By having a performance management system in place, organisations can focus on the better use of its resources and meeting desired goals and objectives. But many organisations still find this process difficult to manage. This guide covers the broad perspective of performance management. It sets out the principles of sound performance management and discusses the various tools and techniques which can be used when developing and operating performance management systems.

This publication is available as a book and a bookmarked PDF.