Improving and evaluating performance with the Public Sector Scorecard

The Public Sector Scorecard (PSS) is an integrated performance management framework incorporating strategy mapping, service improvement, and measurement and evaluation. It adapts and extends the balanced scorecard to suit the culture and values of the public and voluntary sectors. The purpose of this paper is to assess, with the aid of two case studies across organisational boundaries, how the PSS addresses a number of critical success factors for performance management and improvement in the public and third sectors.

The research takes a case study approach assessing the use of the PSS for the UK Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force, and for Sheffield Let’s Change4Life, a £10 million programme addressing obesity in children and families.

This paper concludes that the PSS is an effective framework to help organisations improve outcomes for service users and stakeholders without increasing overall cost, and develop measures of performance that help them improve and assure quality without motivating staff to achieve arbitrary targets at the expense of poor service to the public. Key to this is its emphasis on developing a performance management culture based on improvement, innovation and learning rather than a top-down blame culture.

There have been many research papers describing the problems and pitfalls of public sector performance management, but few which offer a solution. A particular innovation is how the theory of planned behaviour was integrated with a performance management framework for a behaviour change programme addressing childhood obesity.