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This week, we highlight three new titles from the ASPA Series in Public Administration and Public Policy.Market disruptions, climate change, and health pandemics lead the growing list of challenges faced by today’s leaders. These issues, along with countless others that do not make the daily news, require novel thinking and collaborative action to find workable solutions. However, many administrators stumble into collaboration without a strategic orientation.
Using a practitioner-oriented style, Strategic Collaboration In Public And Non-Profit Administration: A Practice-Based Approach To Solving Shared Problems provides guidance on how to collaborate more effectively, with less frustration and better results.
Linking collaboration theory to effective practice, this book offers essential advice that fosters shared understanding, creative answers, and transformation results through strategic collaborative action. With an emphasis on application, it uses scenarios, real-world cases, tables, figures, tools, and checklists to highlight key points.
The appendix includes supplemental resources such as collaboration operating guidelines, a meeting checklist, and a collaboration literature review to help public and nonprofit managers successfully convene, administer, and lead collaboration. The book presents a framework for engaging in collaboration in a way that stretches current thinking and advances public service practice.
A guidebook through the minefield of government contracting and procurement, Government Contracting: Promises and Perils describes the dangerous practices commonly applied in the development and management of government contracts and provides advice for avoiding the sort of errors that might compromise their ability to protect the public interest.It includes strategies for increasing profits for government contractors, rather than incurring burdensome costs, through compliance with government mandated subcontracting and financial management systems.
Drawing from his in-depth investigation of government agencies across the country, the author examines present-day scenarios that regularly lead public servants and government committees to manage contracts with tools that are less than optimal and to select contractors that may not be the best qualified. He then delineates practical processes, contracting documents, and contract management tools to mitigate detrimental outcomes and alternative approaches to supplant the imperfect methodologies.
The author includes a CD-ROM with the book that provides a number of practical tools that you can apply as well as examples of contracts and templates that are the best he discovered during his research. The book also outlines an approach for performing advance contract planning, conducting contract negotiations, and administering contracts useful when planning for the management of the contracting process throughout the contracting cycle, negotiating a contract that protects the interest of all contracting parties, and ensuring successful contractor performance.
Filling a gap in project management literature, Managing Public Sector Projects: A Strategic Framework for Success in an Era of Downsized Government supplies managers and administrators—at all levels of government—with expert guidance on all aspects of public sector project management.
From properly allocating risks in drafting contracts to dealing with downsized staffs and privatized services, this book clearly explains the technical concepts and the political issues involved.
In line with the principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) and the PMBOK® (Project Management Body of Knowledge), David S. Kassel establishes a framework those in the public sector can follow to ensure the success of their public projects and programs. He supplies more than 30 real-life examples to illustrate the concepts behind the framework—including reconstruction projects in Iraq, the Big Dig project in Boston, local sewer system and library construction projects, and software technology.
This authoritative resource provides strategic recommendations for effective planning, execution, and maintenance of public projects. It also:
- Highlights the differences between managing projects in the public sector versus the private sector
- Explains how to scrutinize costs, performance claims, and the backgrounds of prospective contractors
- Presents key safeguards that should be included in all contracts with contractors, consultants, suppliers, and other service providers
- Details the basics of project cost estimation, design and scheduling, and how to hold contractors responsible for meeting established project standards
In an age of downsized government and in the face of a general distrust of public service, this book is a dependable guide for avoiding management practices that are common to projects that fail and for adopting the practices common to projects that succeed in terms of cost, schedule, and quality.
