Making Government Work

In this book, Barrett and Greene present evolving theories of performance management, the practices necessary for a good performance-based government, and the pitfalls that can easily be encountered along the way―andhow to avoid them.

As performance management has evolved, it has encompassed many different tools and approaches including measurement, data analysis, evidence-based management, process improvement, research and evaluation. In the past, many of the efforts to improve performance in government have been fragmented, separated into silos and labeled with a variety of different names including performance-based budgeting, performance-informed management, managing for results and so on.

Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management by Katherine Barrett and Rich Greene is loaded with dozens of stories of what practitioners are currently working on―what’s working and what’s not. The benefits are ample, so are the challenges. This book describes both, along with practical steps taken by practitioners to make government work better. Readers will discover that while the authors strive to meet the documentation standards of carefully vetted academic papers, the approach they take is journalistic. Over the last year, Barrett and Greene talked to scores of state and local officials, as well as academics and other national experts to find out how performance management tools and approaches have changed, and what is coming in the near-term future.

Performance management has been in a state of evolution for decades now, and so Barrett and Greene have endeavored to capture the state of the world as it is today. By detailing both the challenges and conquests of performance management in Making Government Work: The Promises and Pitfalls of Performance-Informed Management, Barrett and Greene ensure readers will find the kind of balanced information that is helpful to both academics and practitioners―and that can move the field forward.

Described by Peter Harkness, founder of Governing magazine, as "by far the most experienced journalists in the country covering public performance," Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene are senior advisors and columnists for Route Fifty, visiting fellows at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, special project consultants to the Volcker Alliance, senior advisors with the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and more.



Greene is chair of the Center for Accountability and Performance at the American Society for Public Administration and they are both fellows in the National Academy of Public Administration. In the recent past, they have also worked as senior fellows with the Council of State Governments and senior fellows at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, and have served as long-time consultants to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Over more than twenty years, they were the management columnists for Governing magazine, and were senior fellows at the Governing Institute since its inception. The couple has worked for multiple other public sector organizations and have been researching and writing about performance management for nearly thirty years.