Chapter 7:

Key Terms:

• Critical Path Method (CPM): An analytical management technique that seeks the path with the smallest margin of extra resources with which to complete all assigned program activities. 
• Focus Group: A smaller number of individuals (generally a dozen or fewer) who share a common characteristic and are brought together to discuss a product or service under the leadership of trained observer.
• Management: The process of running an organization; the use of resources to accomplish goals; the individuals who are formally authorized to run an organization.
• Managerialism: An entrepreneurial approach to public or policy management that emphasizes a set of beliefs that better management (that is, a reinvigorated scientific management) will solve a wide range of economic and social ills.
• Management by Objectives (MBO): An approach to program and policy management that defines short-and long-term objectives and keeps a record of actual program results to determine effectiveness.
• Objective: A short-term goal; it must be met on the way to a larger overall achievement.
• Operational research (OR): A management technique that stresses efficiency by maximizing some “payoff” function clearly within the goals being sought; comes into play only after value choice have been make; replies on the use of probability theory, queuing techniques, and mathematical model building to allocate and use resources within a designated subsystem.
• Opportunity costs: the value resources would have when used in the best possible way or simply another specified alternative way.
• Organizational development (OD): A process for increasing an organization’s effectiveness by stressing that maximum effectiveness is achieved by integrating an individual’s desire for personal growth with organizational goals.
• Performance Management: The systematic integration of an organization’s efforts to achieve its objectives.
• Productivity bargaining: Method applied by public managers to use private-sector approaches to contract negotiation; links employee wage increases to various cost-cutting efforts, including increasing on-the-job productivity.
• Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT): A management analytical tool   that maps out a series of steps that will carry out a program.
• Quality Circle: Small group of 3 to 15 workers meet regularly to discuss, analyze, and solve problems they experience on the job.
• Reengineering: A fundamental rethinking and redesign of organizational processes to bring about significant improvements in costs or quality of services.
• Stakeholders: People affected directly or indirectly by an organization’s activities.
• Strategic Management: A philosophy of management that links strategic planning to an organization’s day-to-day operation and decisions.
• Strategic Planning: A set of processes used by an organization to assess a strategic situation and develop strategy for the future.
• Strategy: The overall conduct of major enterprise to achieve long-term goals; the pattern found in a series of organizational decisions.
• SWOT Analysis: A review of an agency’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Tactics: The short-term, immediate decisions that, in their totality, lead to the achievement of strategic goals.
• Total Quality Management: A new term for quality control in its most expanded sense of a total and continuing concern for quality and the production of goods and services; seeks organizational performance at an optimal level.