Tag: Performance Management

What Works in Public Sector Management | MLD-125 with Elizabeth Linos

Greg Dorchak

In this age of deep societal challenges and growing complexity, when government at all levels is tasked with implementing a wide and growing range of policies to ensure and improve the public good, public managers and those working with governments can find it very difficult to move the needle on important programs and policy initiatives.
With her course MLD-125 What Works in Public Sector Management, Professor Elizabeth Linos introduces graduate students to the central elements of public management and policy implementation, with a focus on three core challenges that public managers face: managing programs; managing people; and managing change.  A sampling of the questions explored in this course include:

  • How can governments use data and evidence to improve program performance and what do you do when the data is bad?
  • How do we reduce administrative burdens in government and why does it matter?
  • How can we recruit, retain, and support frontline workers?
  • What are the big dilemmas around algorithmic decision-making, nudging, participatory government, and other innovations that an effective public manager should consider?

Using academic theory from public management, real-world case studies, and a series of guest speakers who work in and with government, students will learn about the barriers and opportunities to make a difference through government.  While most of the cases studied will focus on federal, state, and local government challenges in the U.S., Linos draws on best practices and studies from around the world.

Portrait photo of Elizabeth Linos smiling
Elizabeth Linos

Dr. Elizabeth Linos joined HKS in July 2022 as the Emma Bloomberg Professor for Public Policy and Management.  Linos is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College with majors in Government and Economics. She earned her PhD in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2016, and went on to spend 5 years as Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley
Between college and graduate school, Linos worked directly in government as a policy advisor to the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, focusing on social innovation and public sector reform. While pursuing her doctorate, Linos spent two years as Vice President, Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team – North America, working with government agencies in the U.S. and the U.K. to improve programs using behavioral science and to build capacity around rigorous evaluation. In 2021 she was appointed, and now remains, a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Linos’ research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, she uses insights from behavioral science and evidence from public management to consider how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce, how to reduce administrative burdens that low-income households face when they interact with their government, and how to better integrate evidence-based policymaking into government. To those ends, Elizabeth founded and now directs The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government with a mission to empower the public sector by producing cutting-edge research on the people of government and the communities they are called to serve. For more information, follow the work of The People Lab on BlueSky.

MLD-125 will be offered in the fall semester. For questions about these courses, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.

A male government official and three female student fellows from the HKS Government Performance Lab meeting in a conference room around a table in front of a whiteboard.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds with Jeffrey Liebman

Greg Dorchak

For the past ten years, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy Jeffrey Liebman has led the HKS Government Performance Lab which provides technical assistance to state and local governments interested in improving the results they achieve for their citizens. During that time Liebman and his team of experts, many HKS students and alumni fellows, have become experts at using analytics, outcomes-focused contracts, and cross-sector collaborations to help improve social service programs at the city and state levels. The GPL helps governments address thorny questions, like how to use data to find individuals who had fallen through the cracks, or how to restructure contracts to incentivize providers to serve the most difficult clients. Originally founded as a platform to explore the efficacy of Pay for Success (PFS) projects like Social Impact Bonds, where the governments agrees to pay for services only if they are shown to be successful, and allowing them to test promising new interventions and collaborative stakeholder models, the GPL evolved in response to a need Liebman and his team discovered across the agencies in which they worked. “Our government partners began to ask whether the same models we developed in PFS could be applied to help government social service agencies run their core operations better,” says Liebman.

Portrait photo of Harvard Professor Jeffrey Liebman in tan suit and tie in front of an HKS building
Jeffrey Liebman

Government leaders were seeking data-driven, boots-on-the-ground technical assistance, so Liebman rapidly expanded the GPL, placing students and HKS alumni with backgrounds in data analysis, public policy, and implementation in the field with a variety governments and agencies selected through national competitions. Projects began with programs aimed at reducing prison recidivism and reintegration for young people exiting the juvenile justice system, then expanded to include initiatives in maternal and infant health, high-quality pre-K, and addressing homelessness. Working across jurisdictions allowed Liebman and his team to discover and refine a set of approaches that responds to the recurring, problematic issues governments face.  For example, one of the key insights Liebman’s team uncovered during its PFS work was that procurement and contracting were too often seen as back-office compliance functions instead of used as powerful levers for systems change. GPL developed a signature framework for Results-Driven Contracting to help governments achieve high-priority strategic goals and drive improvements in service delivery.

This and other lessons are now taught at HKS each Fall in MLD-630: Government Turnarounds.  The course delivers proven strategies that government leaders have used to turn around troubled agencies and improve government performance. In teaching, Liebman draws on a mixture of lectures, case studies (often with guest visits by the case protagonists and other experts), and student presentations. Topics covered include:

1. Setting strategic goals and getting your organization to follow through on them.
2. Data-driven leadership strategies for improving agency performance, such as performance stat and delivery units.
3. Using results-driven contracting strategies to improve procurement.
4. Techniques for recruiting, training, re-energizing, and retaining talent.
5. Strategies for overcoming inertia.
6. Strategies for sustaining reforms.

MLD-630: Government Turnarounds is good complement to other MLD Courses in Government and Urban Innovation such as MLD-102 Getting Things Done: Management in a Development Context (Andrews); MLD-601 Operations Management (Fagan); MLD-605 Systems Thinking and Supply Chain Management (Fagan); MLD-618 Leadership, Social Change, and its Challenges: Boston as a Case Study (Winship & Jackson); and especially, MLD-412 Greater Boston Applied Field Lab: Advanced Budgeting, Financial Management and Operations (Bilmes) and  MLD-620M The Data Smart City: Driving Innovation with Technology (Goldsmith)

If you have any questions about this course, or any other in the MLD curriculum, email Greg Dorchak, MLD Area Administrator.