Management Accounting in Public Service Decision Making

Chapter11

Management accounting and performance management/improvement in public services

Introduction

Performance management, including the measurement of performance, has always been an important subject in any type of organisation. In the absence of performance management, it is difficult to see how any organisation can make progress in the modern world in which it operates.

All organisations will have a range of objectives which may be: short term/long term, strategic/operational, financial/non-financial etc. In the absence of any system of performance management, an organisation will find it difficult, if not impossible to:

• identify how well it is performing against its pre-arranged objectives and the deviations from those objectives; ...