Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation (Working Smarter: Doing More with Less)

Benchmarking:  Targeting of specific goals based on previous performance levels, standards set by similar organizations, objectives created through a strategic planning process, or any combination of these and relevant source.

Cost-benefit:  Identifying and quantifying both negative impacts (costs) and positive impacts (benefits) of a proposal, then subtracting one from the other to arrive at a net benefit.

Decision analysis:  Techniques wherein decisions are likely to be made sequentially and under some degree of uncertainty.

Decision tree:  Technique that identifies various possible outcomes, given the risk associated with each.

Effectiveness:  Extent to which a program is achieving or failing to achieve its stated objectives.

Efficiency:  Relationship between inputs and outputs.

Institutional subsystem:  Responsible for adapting the organization to its environment and for anticipating and planning for the future.

Managerial subsystem:  Concerned with providing necessary resources for accomplishing a technical task and mediating between the technical and institutional subsystems.

Outcome evaluations:  Evaluations that focus on the results of program activity, the extent to which a program meets its objectives in terms of impact on the environment.

Participant-observer:  Someone either the target population or the agency who makes observations and draws conclusions based on firsthand experience.

Performance-indicator:  Specific, quantifiable goals that the agency strives for in pursuit of it more substantive objectives.

Performance measurement:  Careful and detailed measurement of the achievement of program objectives and outcomes by a program or agency.

PERT:  A way to monitor the time or costs of various activities required to complete a project, showing the sequence in which the activities must be completed.

Policy analysis:  Process of researching or analyzing public problems to provide policy makers with specific information about the range of available policy options and advantages and disadvantages of different approach.

Process charting or flowcharting:  Graphically demonstrating the various steps in an operation, the people who perform each step, and relationships among those elements.

Process evaluations:  Seeking ways to improve program implementation so as to better meet program objectives.

Reengineering:  Radically redesigning work processes and organizational structures to be in line with agency outcomes.

Stakeholders:  The many different persons who are involved in policy decisions and are affected by the results.

Strategic planning:  Matching organizational objectives and capabilities to the anticipated demand of the environment to produce a plan of action that will ensure achievement of objectives.

System:  Set of regularized interactions configured or “bounded” in a way that differentiates and separates them from other actions that constitute the systems environment.

System theory:  Effort to identify the interactions of various internal and external elements that impinge on an organization’s operation.

Technical subsystem:  Concerned with effective performance of an organization’s actual work.

Time series analysis:  Making a number of observations about the target population both before and after program intervention.