Research by Author & Topic

Publications by Harry P. Hatry on Public Management, Services

The Urban Institute and National League of Cities developed this series of 10 guides for city and county elected officials, and their staffs, to help them obtain and use information about the results of their governments' services in helping their citizens. The Guides address such issues as: improving strategic planning; improving budgeting decisions; reviewing programs throughout the year; helping motivate their government's employees and contractors; and two-way communications with citizens on what citizens are getting for their money. Specific actions are suggested, and examples are provided.

Accountability is core to high-performance government, efficient service delivery, and taxpayers’ confidence in local government. In turn, performance measurement is key to accountability. Performance measurement is the subject of How Effective Are Your Community Services? This book highlights the practical steps necessary to select measures of service quality and use them efficiently. It enables you to assess whether you’re doing the right things and how well you’re doing them.

Harry Hatry, a national expert on performance measurement, provides examples of nonprofit and government agencies that have installed and used systematic processes to regularly monitor and improve the quality of their services to the public. Service improvement, not merely measurement, is the central theme. The author also introduces a recently released series of six guides on how nonprofits and government agencies can develop key outcome measures and manage for results.

Any organization with an outcome measurement system will quickly accumulate lots of data. Before those raw data can be used to help improve services, they need to be converted into useable information, through the process of analysis. This guide provides step-by-step basic procedures that can be used each time the outcome data become available. Even though nonprofits provide diverse services, this approach can be applied in most programs. Ongoing analysis, completed on a regular basis, can provide a stream of key information about clients and results that can help organizations improve their services.

[IBM Endowment for the Business of Government] This report, which includes 16 case studies of federal programs, finds that many program managers are using outcome information to trigger corrective actions, identify and encourage successful practices, motivate employees, and for planning and budgeting. It offers recommendations to federal managers such as: making outcome data more useful by breaking it out by customer and service characteristics; providing materials and training to managers and staff to encourage their use of outcome information; holding program review sessions with staff after outcome reports become available to identify where improvement is needed and to suggest improvement actions; identifying and rewarding offices, programs, and facilities that achieve good outcomes; and using outcome data to help identify successful practices and to help identify common problems and solutions.

This report describes, and provides examples of, how nonprofit health and human services organizations use outcome information internally. It is based on an examination of the practices of eight health and human services nonprofits in the Washington DC-Baltimore MD metropolitan area. It also discusses factors that appear to contribute to, or hinder, use of outcome information by nonprofit organizations. The organizations examined most commonly used primarily qualitative outcome information to adjust services for individual clients. We also found many cases of use of quantitative outcome data to identify successes, problems and patterns in outcomes across clients, to identify the potential need for program modifications. This represents a "newer" approach to the use of outcome information by NPOs. However, a number of organizations that collected outcome data did not actually tabulate it, leaving it to supervisors and caseworkers to mentally "process" the data to identify patterns and trends.

As nonprofits strive to become more accountable, effective, and efficient, they are being encouraged to develop indicators for outcomes and collect data regularly that measures the impact of the services provided. While the information is often sought by funders, it can be a valuable source of feedback for the nonprofits themselves. On June 6-7, 2001, a Symposium on Outcome Management for Nonprofit Organizations was convened at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. This report of the meeting sets forth actions by funders, national service organizations, local service providers, and other nonprofit groups that can help enable the sector to better measure outcomes and use the resulting data to help improve services.

The purpose of this report is to identify good practices and lessons learned by states that have moved ahead in governing-for-results and to provide recommendations for improving those efforts. This document is a compilation of findings about the state of the art and the practice of governing-for-results.

In the continuing effort to improve human service programs, funders, policymakers, and service providers are increasingly recognizing the importance of rigorous program evaluations. This report lays out the basic principles of program evaluation design. It signals common pitfalls, identifies constraints that need to be considered, and presents ideas for solving potential problems. These principles are general and can be applied to a wide range of human services programs.