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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Enabling success: performance excellence

A government agency introduces a target that 90% of benefit applications must be processed within five days. Staff begin rejecting complex applications quickly, and register those needing investigation as new cases to restart the clock. Reported performance rises to 95% but citizen satisfaction falls. Which concept does this best demonstrate, and what is the appropriate response?

This is gaming of targets: staff manipulate case handling and classification to hit the five-day measure while service quality deteriorates. The appropriate response is to complement the speed target with quality and outcome measures and to audit the reported data, not to abandon measurement.

  1. AGaming of targets; introduce balanced outcome measures and audit data integrity alongside the targetCorrect
  2. BBenchmarking failure; abandon all performance measurement in the agency
  3. CGoal congruence; reward staff further for hitting the five-day target
  4. DEconomy gains; reduce the number of staff to lower processing costs

Explanation

Staff are manipulating how cases are classified to meet the target, which is gaming, and quality is being sacrificed. The response is to add outcome and quality measures and verify data. Abandoning measurement or rewarding the behaviour would not address the distortion.

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