Article 33. Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Approach to Performance Measurement
There are lots of good management workshops that aim to help management implement performance measures. They have a lot to offer mostly in ways of getting employees to take ownership of the performance measures and to get managers to manage using performance measures. These problems stem mostly from the executive and legislative branches of government’s need to get more information with the implementation of Performance Budgeting and best represent the problems created with the top-down approach.
The top-down approach seeks to apply performance measures to the activities of the employee workforce. In other words just start measuring employee performance. This is a good example of the “We don’t think you are working hard enough.” method and causes employees to reject the efforts of management to implement performance measures. To solve this problem managers attend workshops like the one above.
The bottom-up approach uses work measurement to find the best method of doing a process either by having the employees find the best method (Work Improvement Teams) or using analysts (Cost and Schedule) to design the best method. Now having found the best method and eliminated all the things that don’t have to be done you are ready to start measuring and managing performance its as simple as that. For more information see Article 12. “Which Approach to use in State Government ‘Cost and Schedule’ or ‘Work Improvement Teams‘?”. For implementation of Work Improvement Teams see Article 11. “Adaptation of Manufacturing Quality Improvement Techniques to Achieve Efficient Government “.
