Performance measurement and improvement of services has always been a core practice of Epstein and Fass. We provide training for government and non-profit managers in how to develop performance measures and use performance data to manage for results. We have helped local governments develop performance measures for all departments, and for community-wide goals. And we have helped organizations measure and improve specific services. We draw from a wide range of tools to help clients, from benchmarking, to our own special training techniques and analysis models.

We can help clients identify useful families of measures for their organization, e.g.:

• "End result" measures of outcomes for communities, populations, or customers, and key financial results for the organization;

• "Service performance measures" of quality, customer satisfaction, response times or cycle times, service efficiency, costs, and revenue. We can also include special measures for groups that emphasize project work, casework, and any kind of professional service (e.g., from engineering, to health and human services).

These engagements generally involve workshops in which department heads and staff develop draft performance measures for their services or goals, and we provide follow-up consulting to review and improve draft measures. The engagements may also involve up-front needs assessment or leadership facilitation to establish a strategic direction for performance measurement and improvement that fit well with the priorities, capabilities, and management and governance culture of the community. Depending on the engagement, policy leaders (e.g., elected officials, non-profit board members), citizens, customers, or other stakeholders may be included in these projects in some way–in addition to managers–to be sure measures will be practical for their uses of data, and relevant to the way they view the community or organization.

When helping clients develop performance measures, we always emphasize two things:

• Think ahead to how the measures will be used to make decisions and improve service performance, so the measures will be useful as soon as possible;

• Develop measures not only from a professional or management perspective, but also from the perspective of citizens, customers, policy leaders, and other stakeholders, to ensure measures matter to the people and community served.

While we can help clients with many commonly used measurement and analysis tools, such as benchmarking, we also have special tools and techniques for performance measurement and improvement engagements. For example, our "customer and stakeholder role playing" exercises in training and workshops help managers and service professionals develop outcome measures relevant to the community and people served, and quality measures relevant to their internal and external customers. We can also help managers develop "logic models" for how aspects of their service performance relate to each other, and drive broader customer or community outcomes of interest. For difficult to measure professional services, we have special techniques and models for analyzing the productivity of virtually any type of professional staff. We have used these techniques with staff as varied as engineers, economists, dentists, child welfare caseworkers, aging services professionals, environmental regulators, and city managers.