Practical Ideas for the Government That Has Everything, Including Productivity Problems

摘要

One of 5 booklets summarizing 18 HUD - sponsored capacity - building and sharing projects, this report presents field - tested ideas for local governments wanting to identify and solve productivity problems. Some ideas are simple, such as introducing workload measures, accountability, or scheduling. Others are not only complicated but difficult, such as introducing total performance management methods that entail seeking worker perceptions of supervision and management. The ideas are meant to be adaptable to individual city needs but not necessarily transferable from one need to another. Each writeup includes a description of the project, project titles, and ordering numbers for project documents. The projects include a Washington, D.C., effort to improve services to neighborhoods by coordinating citizen and employee action to clean up neighborhoods; an Oregon program to standardize and centralize licensing operations to cut the clerical staff so that less clerical help and application turnaround time is needed; and a Honolulu, Hawaii, project to introduce quality control and task reallocation to enhance park maintenance services using fewer staff. A group of Rhode Island local governments cooperated to design a handbook for creating performance measures (primarily workload and unit cost), recordkeeping systems to support them, and cost allocation or cost accounting systems. Several cities developed new measures for improving employee productivity and morale using organization development methods and total performance management. Wichita, Kan. created a ''how to do it'' handbook that combines successful practices of many governments for getting more value out of community development block grants.