Unifying Planning and Management in Public Organizations

Better planning procedures applied to both program and human resource management is key to improving productivity in public organizations. As the cornerstone of the management process, planning establishes the direction, limits, and outcomes to be achieved; it provides the road map for the orderly management of transition. But sometimes planning processes have been confusing and unproductive exercises for line management because the process has been cumbersome, the key issues have not been addressed, or there has been insufficient commitment to ensure implementation. These problems are result of expansionism in the public sector during the past three decades. A growing economy has supported swelling of all levels of government. But as governmental operations have become larger and more complex, approaches to planning have often become unwieldy. This period of expansionism has ended. For only the fourth time since 1919 and the first time since the late 1940s, there is decline in public employment. Reestablishing economic strength, reducing inflation, and restoring confidence in fiscal policies are squeezing government agencies from every direction. Decreased tax revenues, reduced outside assistance, inflationary erosion of the buying power of public funds, and increased demands for public services form the environment within which public agency planning must prove its value. Budget cuts at all levels of government have forced the issue of more with less, and in some cases of doing a little less with lot less. Meeting these demands for increased productivity will be impossible without the adoption of improvements in program planning and human resource management. Improving program management through better planning is necessity for better productivity; applying good planning practices to managing human resources is another. Decreases in productivity in manufacturing during the past several years have become national issue. Whether productivity has had corresponding decrease in public agencies is unknown because information systems on the subject are inadequate. But whether productivity has declined or not, it is clear an increase in return on tax dollars spent is necessity. Although substantial tax funds are spent to construct office buildings, buy equipment, build jails and penitentiaries, and provide welfare payments to the needy, the bulk of the appropriations are for the salaries of the employees. These employees-the human resources providing the public services so much in demand-often represent 70 percent to 80 percent of an organization's budget. Attempts to improve productivity are usually linked to technological advancements, but it seems evi

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• Strategic Planning in U.S. Cities

  Open Access•Gregory Streib, Theodore H Poister•The American Review of Public…•1990

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