Performance, quality, management - How statistical offices try to do better

Paper for Kuala Lumpur seminar
By Willem de Vries, UNSD New York

This paper is about three issues that are closely linked: performance measurement, benchmarking and quality management.
Increasingly, national statistical offices want to know how they are doing, as well as to demonstrate to their constituencies that they are providing a good service at reasonable cost. In order to do that, performance has to be assessed and if possible measured through ‘performance indicators’. Comparison with other agencies and statistical offices abroad, or against past performance (e.g. how long did it take to produce quarterly GDP numbers in 1995, compared to 2001) or against future objectives (e.g. in the year Y we want to produce and publish the CPI within 3 weeks after the reference period, and how much have we progressed) are possible ways to measure performance; this is generally called benchmarking.
Finally, since quality (in a broad sense) is one of the essentials of official statistics, performance measurement and benchmarking are usually part of larger quality management programs.

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