Service Delivery Performance Research Articles

The Impact of TQM on Highway Maintenance: Benefit/Cost Implications

While total quality management (TQM) has gained widespread popularity in government, little is known about its effectiveness. Surveys indicate that quality improvement programs and related customer service improvement efforts have been implemented by many state and local jurisdictions (National Governors' Association, 1992; Kravchuk and Leighton, 1993; Berman and West, 1995) as well as numerous federal agencies (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1992), but to date there is scant evidence about its impact on service delivery or overall organization performance. Given the substantial investment in time and other resources being committed to TQM processes on the one hand, and the considerable skepticism regarding the probability of success for TQM in the public sector on the other, it is essential to begin assessing the impact of governmental agencies' quality improvement efforts on their overall performance in terms of service quality, productivity, and effectiveness. Background The early literature on TQM in the public sector -- which has tended to be expository (Carr and Littman, 1990; Sensenbrenner, 1991), skeptical (Milakovich, 1990; Swiss, 1992), or instructional in nature (Cohen and Brand, 1993) -- has given way to accounts of implementing TQM in various agencies and the lessons learned from these experiences (Cox, 1995; Maher, 1995; McNabb and Sepic, 1995; Rago, 1996). However, these reports do not address the issue of TQM's effectiveness, and attempts to do so have been inconclusive. For example, a review of a well-established TQM program in the Florida Department of Transportation found that employees had favorable perceptions of its impact on the department's operating efficiency, but no financial or operating data were available to confirm this impression (Bowman and French, 1992). A study of long-standing TQM efforts at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which did track hard data on inputs and outputs across pre- and post-TQM periods, found no significant difference in productivity before and after TQM implementation, although the author suggests that TQM might have helped the IRS retain the benefits of earlier productivity increases (Mani, 1995). There are several reasons why evaluations of TQM effectiveness have not been forthcoming to date. First, many agencies' programs are their infancy and are concentrating on the early stages of quality improvement. Total quality management philosophy stresses the need for long-term commitment, emphasizing cultural change, skill development, and behavioral modification that would then lead to improved performance. Therefore, tangible improvement in service delivery may only be expected to come further along in the process. Moreover, TQM processes are intended to produce incremental, continuous improvement that will accumulate into meaningful change over the long run, as opposed to process reengineering, which is intended to produce dramatic improvement in the immediate future (Davenport, 1994). While agencies often document specific operational improvements and cost savings produced by quality process teams along the way, they often do not have measurement systems in place to track accumulated impacts of TQM programs over the long run. In addition, public organizations are not always clear regarding their objectives in implementing TQM programs. In addition, these objectives may shift over time from employee involvement and development, innovation, teamwork, and healthier organizational climates, to improved service quality and customer satisfaction, increased productivity, and more bottom-line-oriented cost-effectiveness. Finally, the fact that such large-scale organizational interventions can rarely be introduced as controlled experiments, and in any case tend to evolve over time beyond original intentions, creates severe methodological challenges for evaluating their impact. Often constrained by a lack of record keeping regarding TQM programmatic activity from the outset, and inadequate or inconsistent outcome measures over time, attempts to evaluate the impact of TQM efforts on organization performance are often limited to little more than testimonials or anecdotal evidence. …

Approaches to strengthening local government: lessons from Sri Lanka

This article sets out to describe recent approaches to strengthening local government within the framework of the World Bank's Municipal Management Programme (1985–95) in Sri Lanka. The article examines a number of innovations adopted within the programme that are of general relevance to the task of strengthening local government throughout the developing world. The article briefly outlines the background to the present system of local government showing that, whilst existing structures and functions remain relatively weak, a number of important innovations have been introduced to assist with the process of strengthening local resource mobilization and improving performance in service delivery, and enhancing certain aspects of accountability, particularly those areas concerned with the allocation and use of public funds. Since a number of these innovations have wide applicability to the process of local government strengthening and reform it is hoped that this article will demonstrate the practical relevance of certain key innovations for practitioners and policy makers elsewhere. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. Vol. 17: 251–265 (1997). No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 0. No. of Refs: 13.

Municipal benchmarks: assessing local performance and establishing community standards

Completely updated with new listings and statistics throughout, this comprehensive resource goes beyond the current literature on local government performance measurement and provides benchmarks on more than 40 key topics against which performance can be assessed in all areas of operation. Ammons has assembled a remarkable volume of benchmark data for a comprehensive range of municipal government services. Municipal Benchmarks will be of considerable help for municipalities in laying the groundwork for an accountable government. - Harry Hatry, The Urban Institute I am delighted to see that ideas for advancing our industry are alive and thriving. Ammons's collection does an incredible service to every municipal manager in the country, and perhaps the world. These benchmarks clearly set standardized ways of looking at measuring the performance of municipal service delivery. - Ted Gaebler, City Manager, Rancho Cordoba, CA (co-author of Reinventing Government)

An investigation of service‐based manufacturing performance relationships

Reports recent findings of a two‐phase study investigating new dimensions of manufacturing competitiveness, factory‐based services. Examines relationships between broadly defined service role performance and manufacturing performance. Data were provided by 64 manufacturing firms from the USA, Canada and the UK. Also addresses under what conditions a vital element of such service‐information would be of greatest benefit to the factory’s key internal customer ‐ marketing. A survey of manufacturing and marketing respondents within 32 organizations provides empirical evidence of the positive relationship between factory information measured as a service construct and delivery performance. Anecdotal evidence from interviews provides additional insight into the roles of organizational structure and information technology with respect to the information component of factory‐based service.

Strategic information resources management: Fundamental practices

How can we best manage our information resources? In these days of shrinking government budgets, increased workloads, and demands for better service, government managers no longer pose this question rhetorically. This article highlights six fundamental information resources management practices in successful organizations that can improve government service delivery performance.

Focus on Service Quality: Adapting Total Quality Management Principles to Services Marketing Education

This article describes the conceptual rationale, content development, and experience of teaching a new course, Understanding Service Delivery Systems, to senior year undergraduate students majoring in marketing and hospitality management at an international university. A major feature of the course is a group project in which students apply Total Quality Management (TQM) principles within a business environment by conducting a service delivery process improvement project. Students are also required to conduct research on the expectations, desires, and service delivery performance perceptions of customers as part of the project. Perceived student and industry benefits, as well as modifications and improvements for subsequent years, are highlighted.

Subjective and Objective Measures of Police Service Delivery

In the past decade, we have witnessed a confluence of two previously independent modes of research in the area of urban service delivery. The first mode of analysis involves measuring service delivery performance characteristics using data from official archives of public agencies. Sometimes called measures, these indicators are used to document such performance criteria as effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of policy inputs, outputs, and impacts. The second mode involves measuring a sample of citizens' and clients' attitudes about service delivery through some form of survey research. Citizens or clients are asked to evaluate the quality and / or quantity of a given service in general, or with respect to some specific aspect of the service. Most such research employing indicators of service delivery has focused on effectiveness. More recently, policy analysts have begun to raise questions about the extent to which the two analytical modes produce consistent or contradictory results. What variables account for variance in citizens' subjective evaluations of urban services in their neighborhoods? To what extent do citizens' subjective evaluations reflect objective service conditions in their neighborhoods? Answers to these questions are particularly important, since presumably one of the main purposes of citizen satisfaction surveys is to provide information for city officials to use in making decisions about service delivery. This paper addresses these and similar questions, and presents a variety of tests of the empirical relationship between objective and subjective measures of police service delivery. First, as a background to this study, some of the relevant findings of previous research are summarized. Second, the methodology, hypotheses, and data employed in this study are described in detail. Third, we present the results of our analysis and compare our findings with those of previous studies. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the two modes of analysis.

IMPROVING THE DELIVERY OF SPECIAL EDUCATION AND RELATED SERVICES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The utility of organizational behavior management (OBM) for improving the delivery of special education and related services in public school districts was investigated in three experimental studies. Each study employed a multiple baseline design to judge the efficacy of an OBM intervention on service delivery problems common to most public school organizations. The problems and OBM interventions were: (1) expanding the range of functioning of school psychologists through performance feedback; (2) training special service teams to develop valuable individual education programs (IEPs) with a behavioral, in-service training program; and (3) ensuring the implementation of a special education resource room program by means of program consultation. All interventions were implemented by public school program managers and staff. In each study, the particular intervention resulted in improvement in service delivery performance. Results of the studies are discussed within the context of the recently enacted legisl...

Ideology and Performance: Service Delivery in a Community Mental Health Center

This study examines the relationships between ideology and service delivery performance in an established community mental health center which is beginning major structural changes. Ideological pluralism among several separate and internally-cohesive units within one organization led to diversity in staff productivity. The implications of ideological pluralism for planned organizational change, policy implementation and administration are explored.