Agencies and departments at all levels of government, and the public sector more broadly, are facing unprecedented pressure to cut their budgets and tighten their belts. This time, the usual budget-cutting tactics—deferred expenditures, hiring freezes and creative accounting techniques—will not be sufficient to achieve the demanded cost savings.

Yet trying to cut costs by looking harder at the budget is not an effective strategy, explain Monitor’s Bruce Chew, Josh Lee and Jessica Watson in this article. The authors instead present a new strategy for unlocking more value out of fewer resources.

There are three keys to this “doing more with less” approach:

1. Use a different lens to identify resource classes, not expenditures
2. Look outside your own organization to find collaborative partners and improve customer relationships
3. Create a different forum for weighing tradeoffs and making tough financial decisions

With this new approach, public sector leaders can push their organizations to be more efficient, more effective, and more creative than ever before at doing more with less.

Bruce Chew is a Partner at Monitor Group and an authority in strategy and operations management. Dr. Chew joined Monitor after having been a professor at Harvard Business School. His research and consulting focus on enhancing the performance of large organizations, in both the private and public sectors. A highly sought-after author and speaker, Dr. Chew has a Ph.D. from Harvard Business School and was awarded one of the University’s first Dean’s Doctoral Fellowships. He can be reached via e-mail at Bruce_Chew AT Monitor DOT com.

Josh Lee is a Partner at Monitor Group and a leader of the company’s Organization Strategy practice. He also co-leads Monitor’s High-Performance Bureaucracy® practice. He has more than 15 years of consulting experience across a wide range of industries in the public and private sectors. Josh is the author of “A Strategic Approach to Overhead Management,” and is a frequent speaker on topics related to management, organization and costs. A Fulbright Scholar, Josh is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Columbia University. He can be reached via e-mail at Josh_Lee AT Monitor DOT com.

Jessica Watson is an Associate Partner at Monitor Group and a member of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice area, with a focus on High-Performance Bureaucracy®. Over her seven years at Monitor, Jessica has served a range of private sector, government and nonprofit clients on projects related to improving organizational performance. She holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. She can be reached via e-mail at Jessica_Watson AT Monitor DOT com.