Public Personnel Management Process Capability Assessment

• Author: P. Erhan Eren,Onur Demirörs,Ebru Gökalp
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0091026019833412
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026019833412

Public Personnel Management

2020, Vol. 49(1) 111 –140

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0091026019833412

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Article

Public Personnel Management

Process Capability

Assessment

Ebru Gökalp1, Onur Demirörs2, and

P. Erhan Eren1

Abstract

Personnel management plays a critical role in the success of public organizations.

Our literature review shows that there is a lack of systematic guidance on how

to improve Public Personnel Management Process (PPMP) quality. Software Process

Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE) is a process assessment

framework that is successfully used by software organizations during the past two

decades. The framework can also be used as a baseline to generate process capability

models for different specific domains/sectors. We have utilized this approach for

the government domain and we developed the process definition of PPMP. To

observe the benefits and usability of the model, we have performed a multiple case

study, including the assessments of three organizations’ PPMP capability levels and

the development of action plans for PPMP improvement. The findings show that

the proposed approach is applicable for identifying the PPMP capability levels and is

capable of providing a roadmap for moving to the next level.

Keywords

Public personnel management, human resource management, process improvement,

process assessment, benchmarking

Introduction

Governments are under pressure to improve service performance while keeping expen-

ditures under control. As they attempt to adopt effective, transparent, and contributory

1Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

2Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey

Corresponding Author:

Ebru Gökalp, Department of Information Systems, Graduate School of Informatics, Middle East Technical

University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey.

Email: egokalp@metu.edu.tr, ebrug@baskent.edu.tr, ebruligokalp@gmail.com

833412PPMXXX10.1177/0091026019833412Public Personnel ManagementGökalp et al.

research-article2019

112 Public Personnel Management 49(1)

administration measures, they are faced with the challenges of transformation and the

need to reengineer governmental processes and systems (Ertürk, 2014). As a result of

financial problems experienced by governments during the 2000s, a transformation for

efficient and effective management of human capital has become increasingly crucial

in government institutions.

Personnel management represents a significant portion of expenditures in govern-

ment organizations (Pfeffer, 1998). It may be as high as 75% of the total operating cost

(Pynes, 2008). As stated in (Holzer, Isaacs, & Lee, 2007), “No aspect of productive

public administration in public organizations is more important than people—govern-

ment’s most extensive and expensive investments are people.” Due to the realized

importance of personnel management, there is a growing tendency toward viewing

human resources as assets in which government should invest (Jacobson & Sowa, 2015).

Private organizations have attempted to apply many different techniques in their

efforts related to personnel management. One of them is the technique of process

improvement which is described as a strategic planning methodology aimed at identi-

fying the improvable operations to provide simplified procedures and more efficient

workflows. Although process improvement will provide structured execution of con-

sistent and improved performance for the organization (Frame, 1999), the amount of

research on process improvement of Public Personnel Management Process (PPMP)

in governmental institutions is still limited in comparison with the private sector

(Gould-Williams, 2003).

It is important to note that process improvement initiatives are effected by the par-

ticular characteristics of the public sector, where rigid hierarchies, regular changes in

administrative directions, and constraints imposed by red tape exist. In addition, public

organizations have a multitude of extra organizational linkages and interdependency

across organizational boundaries. As a result of this, existing process improvement

approaches cannot be used as is and should be adapted to the public sector context

(Brown, Waterhouse, & Flynn, 2003; Greasley, 2004; Gulledge & Sommer, 2002;

Ongaro, 2004; Ongaro & Rouban, 2008; Roodhooft & Van den Abbeele, 2006).

There are various well-accepted Process Capability/Maturity Models (PCMMs),

such as Software Process Improvement and Capability Determination (SPICE)

(International Organization for Standardization [ISO], 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2012), and

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) (CMMI Product Team, 2010) for soft-

ware industry. These models are used as an evaluative and comparative basis for pro-

cess improvement and/or assessment, assuming that higher process capability is

associated with better performance. They are developed for the purpose of performing

assessments of software and systems processes. As a result of the observed benefits of

these models, which includes cost savings, increased involvement of employees,

improved and predictable quality as well as productivity, generating consistency regard-

ing process capture and use (Goldenson & Gibson, 2003), customizing them to differ-

ent domains other than software development is the subject of increasing interest in the

literature. Accordingly, many initiatives have been proposed for various domains such

as automotive sector (Automotive SIG, 2010), enterprise processes (Ibrahim, 2008), IT

security (Barafort, Humbert, & Poggi, 2006), IT service management (Malzahn, 2007),