This thesis suggests improvements, from a strategic perspective, to the practice of scoring projects in public sector organisations. It is argues that current approaches, notably project portfolio managing (PPM), are inadequate for many such organisations, and in fact prone to problems and failure. In particular, present scoring/prioritization approaches in such contexts, largely tend to focus on financial risk/return logic. It is argued that the end result of such a ranking approach is often a non-strategic portfolio project. To address these problems, the candidate proposed the refinement of the scoring approach for project portfolios via the incorporation of Kaplan & Norton's ideas in their Balanced Scorecard (BSC). BSC introduces, apart from purely financial considerations, other 'softer' perspectives (customer, internal business processes, learning and growth) which in combination place a more inclusive emphasis on the vision and strategy of the organisation. In this thesis, it is proposed that the combined PPM and BSC scoring approach amounts to more strategic project selection. Several case studies are conducted to illustrate the merits of the combined PPM/BSC logic. These include case studies in both private and public sector organisations.

Community service organisations play a crucial role in the delivery of many social services while functioning from a strong values base often associated with a particular religion. They attempt to respond to the needs of multiple stakeholders. This creates a complex and sometimes ambiguous set of accountability relationships. Government contributes significantly to the funding of most community service organisations, and often this is reflected in close working relationships between public servants in funding departments and managers of community service organisations. The nature of this relationship was changed as a consequence of a wave of public sector reforms beginning in the 1980s. These reforms aimed to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and accountability of government departments. Strategies adopted included funder-purchaser-provider models of service delivery, leading to the contracting out of some services previously provided by government and the adoption of more contract-like agreements with existing external service providers. This led to the development of additional mechanisms for measuring and monitoring performance. These were directed both internally towards public sector staff and externally to funded programs. The community services sector’s concern about the impact of reform on their functioning and survival provided the impetus for undertaking this qualitative study of the management of accountability in community service organisations in South Australia. Data were collected in 2000-2001 through interviews with community service organisation and public service staff, and through analysis of organisational documents related to accountability. Staff from twelve community service organisations, and state and federal public servants participated. While the analysis shows the costs to community service organisations and the damage to their relationship with government resulting from reform, it also identifies improvements to the management of accountability in some organisations. Governments at both state and federal levels have since adopted the language of partnership and collaboration. This occurred partly in recognition of the negative impacts of an over-zealous emphasis on distanced purchaser-provider relationships and partly from an increasing recognition of the failure of existing systems to resolve complex social issues. Follow-up data were collected in 2004 that identified changes in the relationships between the community service organisations and funding departments, and in the community service organisations’ management of their own accountability. Analysis of these data found a significance increase in formal relationships between community service organisations but limited change in the relationship with government. Through an analysis of the impact of public sector change on community service organisations in South Australia, this thesis contributes to the understanding of inter-sectoral relationships and the management of accountability in community service organisations.

<p>Leva för att jobba eller jobba för att leva?</p><p>En undersökning om arbetsmotivation</p><p>Ann-Catrin Jansson</p><p>Tidigare forskning visar att kommunalanställda trivs bättre på jobbet jämfört med övriga sektorer som industri- tjänste- och statlig sektor. Ett uttryck för arbetsmotivation är trivseln. Syftet med studien var att identifiera vilka psykosociala faktorer som påverkar trivseln på ett kommunalt servicehus. Studien genomfördes med en enkät som deltagarna (n = 36) besvarade. Enkäten hade 72 frågor, varav 63 frågor togs från QPS. En multipel linjär regressionsanalys (metod stepwise) användes för att analysera associationerna mellan QPS och trivsel, resultatet visade att låga arbetskrav och hög arbetsmotivation var signifikant associerade till trivseln. Associationen mellan ålder och QPS var emellertid låg. Undersökningen, som kan ses som en förberedande pilotstudie på grund av det låga antalet respondenter, visade på tendenser som kräver vidare forskning.</p>

<p>The purpose of this study is to ascertain how present methods in branding, used in private sector companies, are or could be transferred to the public sector organizations.</p><p>It is done by means of a case study of Micasa Fastigheter done through participating observation. It also includes a survey of key decision makers included in the branding process, on different political and administrative levels.</p><p>Swedish municipalities’ and county councils spend over 50 percent of the Swedish gross national product, their operations affect most individuals just about every day and information and advertising from and about the operations of public sector organizations (PSOs) is vital for the existence of the citizens. How the PSOs communicate what they spend the tax payers’ money on has its own set of rules. The operations of PSOs are controlled by quite a number of laws and regulations. None of the laws apply directly to the methods of communication, yet PSOs have historically been very strict with most types of marketing. The results show that in the last couple of years this has changed and municipalities in particular have started to actively work on and communicate its brands. Stockholm is no exception. The reason for the change is the development of marketing in non-profit organizations, the occurrence of social marketing and image marketing and possibly the globalization and Internet.</p><p>Micasa Fastigheter is a municipal company that has gone through a branding process during the past 2.5 years. The company has step by step passed through the same stages in its branding process as a private company, the only exception being the very little advertising. It is thus possible for a municipal company to brand itself without clashing with the laws and regulations that govern the public sector. A result that, according to my survey, is due to a maturity in marketing issues amongst decision makers in the City of Stockholm, a general focus in the Swedish society on branding and, the people in charge of the branding process.</p><p>A look at the municipality of Stockholm is a good start since most trends start in the capital but a more thorough look at a substantial number of Swedish municipalities would be interesting for future study.</p>

In den vergangenen Jahren gewannen in der Personalwirtschaft Begriffe wie War for Talent und Fachkräftemangel immer mehr an Bedeutung. Unternehmen der Privatwirtschaft betreiben daher gezielt Personalmarketing - öffentliche Verwaltungen bisher kaum. Obwohl die Kombination aus einer überalterten Belegschaft, sinkenden Schulabsolventenzahlen und einem weitgehend unattraktiven Arbeitgeberimage insbesondere für öffentliche Verwaltungen die Gefahr eines eklatanten Mangels qualifizierter Nachwuchskräfte birgt. Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage nach wie Personalmarketing in öffentlichen Verwaltungen bereits erfolgreich betrieben wird und welche Erfolgsfaktoren sich daraus für den Einsatz in anderen Verwaltungen ableiten lassen. Mit Hilfe der Analyse eines Best Practice-Ansatzes und auf der Basis der für die Privatwirtschaft bereits identifizierten Erfolgsfaktoren werden diese für den erfolgreichen Einsatz von Personalmarketing in der öffentlichen Verwal-tung herausgearbeitet. Der Fokus des Praxisbeispiels liegt dabei auf der Rekrutierung von Nachwuchskräften für den mittleren und gehobenen allgemeinen nicht-technischen Verwaltungsdienst. Als Best Practice-Beispiel dient das Ausbildungsmarketing der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg. Im Ergebnis decken sich die grundsätzlichen Erfolgsfaktoren mit denen der Privatwirtschaft. Dazu gehören u. a. das Vorhandensein eines strategischen Konzepts, die Formulierung klarer und messbarer Ziele sowie das systematische Überprüfen der Effektivität und Effizienz des Personalmarketing sowie einzelner Instrumente. Für öffentliche Verwaltungen ist es zudem besonders wichtig das Arbeitgeberimage zu verbessern. Dies sollte bei der Ansprache von Nachwuchskräften mit Hilfe moderner Medien, durch Einblicke in Verwaltungsaufgaben und die Einbindung von Eltern und Schulen geschehen. / Within the last years keywords as war for talents and skills shortage constantly gained in importance. That is why private sector entities take actions to attract talents - meanwhile public sector entities hardly do so. Even though the combination of an over aged workforce, the decline of school graduates and their widely unattractive employer image carry the danger of a striking deficit of young talents for public sector entities. The following thesis therefore tries to answer the question how public sector entities already attract talents successfully and which critical success factors can be deduced from that. By the analysis of a best practice approach and based on the factors of success identified for the private sector the thesis develops the critical success factors for the attraction of talents for the public sector. The best practice approach is focused on the recruitment of school graduates for the apprenticeships of the public sector in Germany. It presents the activities of the city of Hamburg. The critical success factors basically comply with those identified for the private sector. That includes amongst others the existence of a strategic concept, the formulation of explicit and measurable goals and the systematic testing of the effectiveness and efficiency of both the attraction program in general and every single instrument. For public sector entities in addition it is indispensible to improve their employer image. When attracting young talents this should be done by the use of modern media, by providing an insight into public sector tasks and by involving parents and schools.

In many public sector organisations, the use of Information Technology (IT) has become important for sustaining and extending public service delivery. This has caused there to be a critical dependency on IT, which calls for a specific focus on effective IT governance. Accordingly, the success factors for effective IT governance must be determined and adhered to if an organisation wishes to increase the contribution of IT towards achieving its objectives. Much research has been carried out on IT governance effectiveness and the necessary success factors, but not with a focus on organisations from a developing country such as Tanzania. The context in these organisations is characterised by IT resources, knowledge and culture constraints as well as by an increasing level of IT investment and applications. In this research, we analyse how IT governance practices are implemented in Tanzanian public sector organisations (TaPSOs) and benchmark their levels of maturity. Furthermore, we analyse and identify the critical success factors (CSFs) that contribute to effective IT governance in TaPSOs. Subsequently, we analyse the effects of these CSFs on IT governance performance and develop and evaluate a CSFs framework for implementing effective IT governance in TaPSOs. We find weak IT governance practices, especially in terms of processes. This was also pointed out by the lower level of IT governance maturity in TaPSOs in contrast to public sector organisations in developed countries. Furthermore, we find that the identified CSFs have a significant effect on IT governance performance in TaPSOs. In addition, the designed CSFs framework is found to be important for providing guidelines to be used by IT and business management personnel for implementing effective IT governance. This CSFs framework for implementing effective IT governance in TaPSOs consists of the IT governance focus areas, CSFs, activities, roles, IT resources and environment in which it should be implemented. In contrast to existing frameworks from the research literature, the designed CSFs framework offers a holistic view by focusing on the five IT governance focus areas.

The purpose of this study is to ascertain how present methods in branding, used in private sector companies, are or could be transferred to the public sector organizations. It is done by means of a case study of Micasa Fastigheter done through participating observation. It also includes a survey of key decision makers included in the branding process, on different political and administrative levels. Swedish municipalities’ and county councils spend over 50 percent of the Swedish gross national product, their operations affect most individuals just about every day and information and advertising from and about the operations of public sector organizations (PSOs) is vital for the existence of the citizens. How the PSOs communicate what they spend the tax payers’ money on has its own set of rules. The operations of PSOs are controlled by quite a number of laws and regulations. None of the laws apply directly to the methods of communication, yet PSOs have historically been very strict with most types of marketing. The results show that in the last couple of years this has changed and municipalities in particular have started to actively work on and communicate its brands. Stockholm is no exception. The reason for the change is the development of marketing in non-profit organizations, the occurrence of social marketing and image marketing and possibly the globalization and Internet. Micasa Fastigheter is a municipal company that has gone through a branding process during the past 2.5 years. The company has step by step passed through the same stages in its branding process as a private company, the only exception being the very little advertising. It is thus possible for a municipal company to brand itself without clashing with the laws and regulations that govern the public sector. A result that, according to my survey, is due to a maturity in marketing issues amongst decision makers in the City of Stockholm, a general focus in the Swedish society on branding and, the people in charge of the branding process. A look at the municipality of Stockholm is a good start since most trends start in the capital but a more thorough look at a substantial number of Swedish municipalities would be interesting for future study.

Background: Kaplan and Norton developed the Balanced Scorecard in 1992. This framework has given the management the opportunity to better understand how the organization is functioning. Communication is the vital factor for success with the Balanced Scorecard and the organization. Nowadays, in a world of rapid change and competition the organizations face an untold quantity of leadership challenges, and by applying the Balanced Scorecard the management will get the chance to achieve results by putting their strategies into action. The Jönköping County Council is responsible for the healthcare within its area, and is one of numerous organizations that have implemented the Balanced Scorecard. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the reasons the healthcare department within Jönköping County Council applied the Balanced Scorecard, how they use it, and to understand from their perspective how it benefits them. In addition to this we will present advice from employees to the management that is considering implementing the tool. Method: This is a qualitative study with an abductive approach, where we used both primary and secondary data in this research paper. The primary data was gathered through interviews with different departments at Jönköping County Council, which contributed to different views on the use of the Balanced Scorecard. Theories about the Balanced Scorecard were gathered through secondary data. Results/conclusions: Overall the management at Jönköping County Council are pleased and satisfied with the Balanced Scorecard. In addition to this they are all motivated and engaged in using the framework. However, they believe that the main drawbacks with the Balanced Scorecard are to make employees understand and connect the daily work to the framework, as well as finding the “correct” numerical values that reflects the organization. The benefits according to the management are the multidimensional view of the organization through the four perspectives in the Balanced Scorecard, and also the fact that they now have a framework which encourage the staff to strive to achieve a unison vision through action plans. The nursing staff was not aware of the term ‘Balanced Scorecard’ or the four perspectives, and therefore wanted to get more information about it from their executives, since they are expected to work in accordance with the framework. Through interviews with the upper- and middle management and the nursing staff we can draw the conclusion that the Jönköping County Council implemented the Balanced Scorecard since they wanted to have a system that could be used at all levels within the organization, this to get an overview and a better control of what is happening within the business.

ERP systems which initially were developed for manufacturing organizations have in recent years spread to public sector organization. It is put forward that public sector organization differ from private organization and this might affect how successfully an ERP system is implemented. ERP systems are rarely studied in public sector organization and few researchers have explored the fit between ERP system and organizational structures. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore what relationship that exists or do not exist between ERP system and organizational social structures in a military organization, and how this has affected the implementation and use. This is done through a qualitative case study of the Swedish Armed Forces with data from semi-structured interviews with 14 platoon commanders and 3 company commanders. The findings suggest that there is a misfit between the ERP system, PRIO, and the social structures in the organization which have made the implementation and use problematic. The technical shortcomings, such as the user interface, are not the main problem and employees might have been negative about the system anyway. This since platoon commanders and company commanders do not think platoon commanders are the best suited to do the tasks with PRIO.

This dissertation focuses on the interactions between local public sector organisations and institutions in the development of performance measurement (PM) targets and indicators. The research is grounded in the performance measurement and management literature and adopts a joint new institutional and resource dependence perspective. Empirically, the research, which is qualitative and theory-building, consists of case studies undertaken in local public sector organisations in England. The iterative comparison of theory and data has enabled the investigation of a number of relevant themes. In the last decade, the British Government has placed great emphasis on the consistency of objectives, targets and indicators from national to local levels with the aim of enhancing performance, transparency and accountability, and of driving behavior. However, this research shows that the influence of several organizations and the co- existence of various PM initiatives generate confusion and overlaps locally. Moreover, in the cases considered the unmanageable number of indicators and the lack of clarity regarding the drivers and purposes of PM have led to confused massages and counter- productive approaches to the measurement and management of performance. From a theoretical view-point, the favourable comments expressed by interviewees regarding the current PM regime contrast with critics of New Public Management. Furthermore, legitimacy-seeking and efficiency-enhancing rationals have emerged as intertwined and loosely coupled. This is in opposition to what is maintained by early new institutional theorists. In line with resource dependence theory, PM systems were found to be significant components of power systems in organisations. Through the examination of the roles of PM and the investigation of relevant concepts such as 'golden thread' and performance culture, this research aims to make an impact on policy-making and to improve the ways in which targets and indicators are set and used, hence having a positive effect on the services delivered.