Introducing performance management in universities.The case of the University Aldo Moro of Bari

The aim of the paper is to highlight the contribute of statistical techniques in the implementation of the performance management system in a Public administration and, in particular, the analysis is carried out on the route followed to adopt the performance cycle in the University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’. From 2009, in fact, Italian universities have been engaged in the adoption of a performance management system and the National Agency for Evaluation of University and Research (ANVUR) has been recently entrusted to manage it. Since the 1980s, most of the OECD countries have been concerned by a broad process of managerial reform inspired by the principles of the New Public Management (De Bruijn, 2002) which highlighted, among others, the need to focus on measuring, managing, and assessing performance. In public administrations, and also in universities, performance management is considered to be the tool to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, quality and fairness of policies, programs, projects and services; moreover, it draws and focuses the attention of decision makers on the results and their causes and, at the same time, makes employees aware of what is expected from them and informs the stakeholders of the purposes, objectives, results of the organisation and the methods through which they were achieved (Bracci et al., 2014). The adoption and effective use of performance management in Italian universities, more than in public administrations, is arduous and often encounter issues, mainly due to the lack of a “quantitative approach” in measuring the productivity, the efficiency and efficacy of activities but also consisting in a partial development of the system, a formal approach in the design, an incomplete measurement of the performance dimensions, a failed use of the information produced. The adoption of a performance management system takes place according to the following steps: design (of the performance management system), implementation (introducing the system in the organisation), use (of the information the system produces), evaluation or assessment (continuous and systematic of the achievement of the system’s purposes); impacts (recording/analysis of the effects of the performance information produced by the system concerning the issues on the agenda, decision-making processes, individual behaviour and the same organisation). Starting from the experience of the University of Bari, in the paper we show that, in each step, statistical techniques play an important role: for the identification of variables and dimensions, in the data collection and organization, in the mapping of the University’s databases; in the general mapping of the working processes and rethinking of the functioning logics of the organization (as in a Balanced Scorecard), in the definition of elementary indicators, performance measurements, weights, and so on. Finally, they could allow the analysts to achieve one synthetic indicator that expresses the score of a unit.