Craft a strategy for implementing performance-informed budgeting in your public/
ID: 423503 • Letter: C
Question
Craft a strategy for implementing performance-informed budgeting in your public/nonprofit agency. What factors or variables limit your ability to apply performance-informed budgeting? How will you overcome them? How can agency leadership integrate the budgeting strategy and articulate needs? How can agency leadership involve all levels of the organization in the implementation strategy? In your opinion, will performance-informed budgeting benefit or harm your agency? Is your agency meeting or exceeding goals and metrics? Which specific outcomes, metrics, or indicators should your agency highlight to facilitate funding increases?
Explanation / Answer
Performance-informed budgeting is used for measuring and reporting government performance. This aims at improving the linkage between government performance and strategic planning. A 'portfolio budgeting' process would help the organization to set priority and bridge a gap between policies of the organizations, decisions of resource uses and policies to achieve them. One of the most affecting reason to performance-informed budgeting is the institutional barriers to allocation of resources. The government has not made any process to review the annual tax expenditures. The resources are not allocation uniformly accross the government agencies. Some agencies remain uninformed about the changes taking place in the performance budgeting. To improve this situation, the goal should be included in the governement performance plan which will be submitted with the budget and that will serve as a basis for quarterly progress reviews and reports.
Leaders should actually participate actively in the strategy budgeting into the organization. It is very important for a leader to understand his/her role. The leadership team should be transparent in communicating the information of budget plans across all the agencies and also the employees working in particular agency. Leaders should take the suggestions from lower level employees and then communicate the same to the different levels of management. The proposal should be approved by all levels of management. Likewise, the lower, middle and high level management will be involved in the implementation of the strategy and budgeting plan.
In my opinion, performance-informed budgeting may harm an agency because it shifts the focus of an agency from the reality to future planning of achieveing funds. If they will not implement this strategy, they can actually save money and invest it for achieving funds into other departments.
An agency should identify the opportunities for improvement and by reporting the results to relevant stakeholders. The leaders in an agency should involve the program staff in a positive way once the improvement plan will be designed.