Masters in Public Administration - MPA / The absence of coordinated Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in the South African public administration from 1994 to 2005 highlighted the gap in standardised national evaluation system where the National Evaluation Policy Framework (NEPF) acknowledged that there was an unexploited possibility to utilise evaluations to enhance the public sectors usefulness, competence, influence, and sustainability. Within the Western Cape Government (WCG), systems for M&E to strengthen performance reporting exist, but the implementation of these existing systems is piecemeal with fragmented approaches to monitoring and evaluation across the various departments. This study investigated staff readiness for Monitoring & Evaluation at the Western Cape Education Department (WCED). To achieve this goal, it employed a quantitative research method with a cross-sectional sample. / 2024

According to research findings, SMEs are continuously faced with unexpected changes within their operating environment. The rapid development of technology master’s new competitors, new products and markets which creates a source of uncertainty for these organisations. These changes are for instance demonstrated through changes in customer demands, lower barriers and government regulations, offering both opportunities as threats. Considering that SMEs play a significant role for society and the worldwide economy, they genuinely need to strive for innovative and efficient solutions in their business. By focusing on smarter use of information through Business Intelligence, SMEs can stay competitive in such an environment. Nevertheless, while BI utilization for efficient decision-making has been highly attractive to larger companies for some time, this has not been a reality for SMEs. The reasons for this are several and challenges vary. However, it is necessary to meet some basic conditions to effectively take advantage of BI, namely, to align BI with corporate strategies. This study applied the BISC framework on one strategic theme, the operations management, in an SME in order to identify gaps between BI and corporate strategy in their business performance management initiative. Gaps were identified by analysing current As-Is state of BI assets and the To-Be state. This thesis aims therefore to contribute in the understanding of problems and potentials regarding the process of aligning BI with corporate strategies in SMEs.

In the United States, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) face a precarious future because of their heavy reliance on the financial support of government funding, other donor agencies, and philanthropic foundation resources. The purpose of this study is to understand how and to what extent leadership of NPOs can benefit from using funder-required performance data to improve organizational sustainability. Using Pfeffer and Salincik's resource dependency theory to explain organizational sustainability, this qualitative multiple case study of 10 NPOs in a northeastern U.S. state includes 14 interviews with NPO leadership, a document review of NPO 990 tax filings, annual performance reports, and board meeting minutes. All data were inductively coded and then subjected to a thematic analysis procedure. Key findings indicated 6 overarching themes associated with NPO sustainability and funder-required performance measures that impact program sustainability but are mainly used for compliance: (a) NPO adoption and use of performance measures; (b) data collection and evaluation for external compliance; (c) information pertaining to financial, operational, and administrative decision making; (d) NPO leadership decisions regarding internal constructs, operations, and management; (e) resource dependency; and (f) sustainability practices. The implications for positive social change include strategies for NPO leaders to use to ensure survival, continuous community impact, and awareness for policymakers regarding legislative and regulatory developments that may inadvertently harm NPOs.

Firms lose strategic business opportunities to create sustainable growth because leaders do not establish talent pipelines. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies used by the leaders of Saudi firms to develop talent pipelines. The conceptual framework for this study was the resource-based view. The overarching question that guided this study explored strategies business leaders in small and medium-sized enterprises in Saudi Arabia used to establish talent pipelines to create sustainable growth. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 8 business leaders of 4 firms operating in western Saudi Arabia and a review of company documents. The business leaders had successful experience and knowledge in talent and performance management. Data were analyzed using inductive and deductive content analysis. The results revealed 4 strategies business leaders in small and medium-sized enterprises in Saudi Arabia used: hiring the right people, establishing a performance management system, differentiating employees based on performance, and implementing employee retention strategies. The implications of this study for positive social change include reducing unemployment rates among Saudi nationals, growing Saudi workers' capabilities, and increasing Saudi families' standard of living.

The successful implementation of process improvement (PI) could reduce operating costs of the Department of Defense, which could lessen the impact of budget reductions and the mounting costs of the expanding global mission requirements. Organizations fail to achieve the return on investment for PI and expected savings because of leaders' inabilities and experiences in integrating critical success factors into PI to improve processes. The purpose of this single case study was to explore the strategies that logistics leaders use to implement PI in the military aviation industry. Six purposively selected group and squadron civilian leaders with over 10 years of experience in successful implementation of PI, working with the Air Force in the military aviation industry in Georgia, participated in the study. The theory of constraints was the conceptual framework for the study. Data collection was through semistructured interviews using open-ended questions, review of organizational documents, and archival records. Seven themes emerged from using a modified version of Miles and Huberman's data analysis approach, including coding of transcribed interview data and grouping significant statements into larger units to form themes. Emerging themes included leadership, continuous PI, organizational culture, climate, strategic management, performance management, and resource. These finding may contribute to social change by providing the United States and allied leaders with strategies to improve aircraft availability to increase flight operations for enhanced safety and humanitarian efforts for their citizens and allies.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / This study examines the implementation of the Performance Management System (PMS) in local government, with specific reference to municipalities in the Chris Hani District in the Eastern Cape. The research is premised on the assumption that even though a PMS has been adopted in municipalities with the aim of assisting them to function effectively, municipalities in the Eastern Cape, particularly in Christ Hani District, continue to experience performance challenges. The study presupposes that the implementation of the performance management system at the municipality, whether effective or ineffective, has a direct relationship with the performance of the municipality. The study includes a historical overview of local government with the aim of understanding government reforms introduced to assist municipalities to build their capacity to enable them to perform well. It utilises purposive sampling to identify the most appropriate participants based on the research objectives. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews and a review of relevant documents. As part of the analysis, summaries of the responses of interviewees were written in a meaningful way in line with the thematic areas determined in accordance with the research objectives. The municipality uses the Balances Scorecard as a performance management tool to determine the performance level of individuals and to detect areas that need corrective measures across the local municipalities. There are inconsistencies in the implementation, depending on how well the particular local municipality is resourced. In any municipality, the effective implementation of the PMS requires the municipality to reward excellent performers, which requires increases in the personnel budget to cater for monitory rewards.

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Performance policies propose to enhance the quality of services provided to vulnerable citizens. However, the ability to accomplish this goal is largely unsubstantiated. In the field of education, the No Child Left Behind Act outlined performance policy guidelines that held educators accountable for disadvantaged students outcomes and provided students with the option to seek the serves of alternative providers through a student transfer provision. This dissertation assesses the quality of states’ NCLB provisions that targeted minority and vulnerable student performance as well as utilization of the NCLB transfer provision allowing students to exit underperforming schools. It indicates that teachers’ union strength, minority student population, and past performance impacted the development of vulnerable student accountability provisions. The use of the transfer provision was limited by the strength of the accountability system implemented. As a result, the transfer provision is being poorly utilized and the states have negatively affected the educational opportunities of marginalized populations.

Distributed computing systems (DCS) host a wide variety of enterprise applications in dynamic and uncertain operating environments. These applications require stringent reliability, availability, and quality of service (QoS) guarantee to maintain their service level agreements (SLAs). Due to the growing size and complexity of DCS, an autonomic performance management system is required to maintain SLAs of these applications. A model-based autonomic performance management structure is developed in this dissertation for applications hosted in DCS. A systematic application performance modeling approach is introduced in this dissertation to define the dependency relationships among the system parameters, which impact the application performance. The developed application performance model is used by a model-based predictive controller for managing multi-dimensional QoS objectives of the application. A distributed control structure is also developed to provide scalability for performance management and to eliminate the requirement of approximate behavior modeling in the hierarchical arrangement of DCS. A distributed monitoring system is also introduced in this dissertation to keep track of computational resources utilization, application performance statistics, and scientific application execution in a DCS, with minimum latency and controllable resource overhead. The developed monitoring system is self-configuring, self-aware, and fault-tolerant. It can also be deployed for monitoring of DCS with heterogeneous computing systems. A configurable autonomic performance management system is developed using modelintegrated computing methodologies, which allow administrators to define the initial settings of the application, QoS objectives, system components’ placement, and interaction among these components in a graphical domain specific modeling environment. This configurable performance management system facilitates reusability of the same components, algorithms, and application performance models in different deployment settings.

<p>Although performance management (PM) is a common, vital system used in most organizations, both supervisors and employees have been routinely disappointed with PM experiences, despite extensive research. Recent studies have identified certain individual differences that impact PM effectiveness. Specifically, the inclination to believe that one’s core traits are either malleable (an incremental mindset; high IPT) or fixed (an entity mindset; low IPT), a concept called "implicit person theory" (IPT), predicts many important supervisor behaviors that subsequently influence employee’s behaviors and attitudes. Furthermore, there is substantial support indicating that employee IPT also predicts their own performance, behaviors, and attitudes. This research shows the many benefits of having ahigh IPTover a low IPT.In this study, Iexamined the matching or mismatching IPT between employees and their respective supervisors and whether this differentially predicts employee attitudes that relate to PM. Responses weregathered from 211 participants. In an initial survey, participants were asked to report their IPT and their perceptions of their supervisor’s IPT. Two days later, participants reportedtheir perceptions of procedural justice, satisfaction with PM, and motivation to improve performance. Employee perceptions of procedural justice and satisfaction were combined into a single measure measuring general affective reactionsto PM, after an exploratory factor analysisrevealed the two outcomes loaded onto a single factor. PROCESS Model 1 was used to examine the centralhypothesis. Ifound significant interactions of employee and supervisor IPT onmotivation and affective reactionsto PM. The relationship between employee IPT and motivation was positive and strongest when supervisors had ahigh IPT, and was positive but weaker when supervisors had a low IPT. Interestingly, the relationship between employee IPT and affective reactions was negative when supervisors had alow IPT, such that low IPTemployees reported better affective reactions to PM when they perceived theirsupervisorsto have a low IPTrather than a high IPT.This research contributes to the literature by demonstrating the nuances of how IPT predicts employee outcomes. Organizations can benefit from this research by increasing awareness of one’s IPT and implementing cultural changes alongside interventions to increase favorable outcomes.</p>