Reader Question 2. Which Government Organizations are Efficient?
Question: “Are there any Organizations in State Government that operate efficiently?”
Answer: This is a very good question and I can think of two areas that are very efficient. One is in managing elections done by County Clerks throughout the state and the second is public school Classroom Teachers.
If you examine these two areas you will find they have something in common the pressure of time and performance constraints and public visibility. Classroom teachers have the daily pressure of making lesson plans and teaching up to four classes a day. That’s why teachers who can’t keep up don’t survive after the first year. It is sad that the public generally does not recognize the amount of work done by teachers.
In the case of managing elections an incredibly efficient operation must occur in a single day, Election Day. Weeks of planning and preparation go into an election and if there is a problem everybody knows about it within hours. Just think of the worldwide attention received in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Since elections are conducted to strict legal standards throughout the state the only variation in the process aside from the number of poling places is in the method used in planning the election. A planning tool that I like is a simple wall chart with a list of the permanent election employees and by each name a time scaled sequence of jobs that the employee will perform during an election and exactly when that job is to be done.
If you look at the key elements: time and performance constraints and public visibility you will find that to achieve efficient government you must enlist these key elements in some form or another. If you had five days instead of hours to reveal who won an election the time pressure would be off election officials but bad performance is not an option due to legal and public visibility. This is just an example of an extremely tight schedule that is closely monitored for performance and open to review.
