Monitor’s High-Performance Bureaucracy® offering addresses the range of challenges faced by large public sector organizations as they seek to improve their performance. Leaders, managers and employees often have a sense that they could do better, and perhaps some specific ideas about what is not working well, but haven’t found a clear way to set out on the path of improvement. Monitor’s High-Performance Bureaucracy® frameworks, analytical methodologies, and practical tools help diagnose, select, plan and implement the necessary steps for success.

Experience shows that leading a bureaucracy is hard work. Bureaucracies serve multiple constituent groups as service providers, employers, and agencies within a larger governmental structure. Pressure to perform can be intense, and is often coupled with demands for transparency, evaluation, justification, increased efficiency, and advocacy of the organization’s point of view. In addition, many qualities which are often seen as synonymous with the term “bureaucracy” have developed within these organizations: resistance to change, workforce constraints, slow decision-making, complex administrative processes, and competing incentives.

While improving performance within these contexts is an uphill battle, it is also a surmountable one, as long as leaders are armed with a robust diagnostic assessment of the state of their organization and the tools to develop—and execute—on a roadmap to improved performance. There is more than one solution to fix these problems, and the answer depends on where you are, and where you are going. Monitor has identified three dimensions by which public sector organizations need to evaluate their performance: internal effectiveness, external impact, and the alignment between the two. Eight key performance drivers cover these dimensions. By understanding how well each of these drivers functions for an organization, we can understand how to develop its path to high-performance bureaucracy.