This book explores how to design and implement planning & control (P&C) systems that can help organizations to manage their growth and restructuring processes in a sustainability perspective. The book is not designed to enable the reader to become an experienced system dynamics modeler; rather, it aims to develop the reader’s capabilities to design and implement performance management systems by using a system dynamics approach. More specifically, the book shows how to develop system dynamics models that can better support an understanding of: -What is organizational performance and how to frame and measure it; -How to identify and map the processes underlying performance; -How to design and implement a dynamic performance management system and link it to strategic planning; -How to tie strategic resource dynamics to processes and performance indicators; -How to link strategic resources, and performance indicators to responsibility and incentive systems. Using a dynamic performance management approach can improve an organization’s capability to understand and manage the forces driving performance over time, as well as set goals and objectives that may properly and selectively gauge results and match them to the key responsibility areas in the planning process. The dynamic performance management approaches covered in the book are beneficial to performance management analysts, enabling them to frame their professional field within the broader context of the system. The book also includes numerous case studies and dynamic performance management models for providing examples of how dynamic performance management works in practice. In addition, a literature review is included to provide a guideline for further improvements to those readers who wish to develop relevant, specific, and detailed system dynamics modeling skills and to establish the foundation for teaching system dynamics applied to performance management in organizational and inter-organizational contexts. This is particularly relevant for graduate students who have taken system dynamics courses and need to apply their own skills to business and public management.

A typical design procedure for model predictive control or control performance monitoring consists of: 1. identification of a parametric or nonparametric model; 2. derivation of the output predictor from the model; 3. design of the control law or calculation of performance indices according to the predictor. Both design problems need an explicit model form and both require this three-step design procedure. Can this design procedure be simplified? Can an explicit model be avoided? With these questions in mind, the authors eliminate the first and second step of the above design procedure, a “data-driven” approach in the sense that no traditional parametric models are used; hence, the intermediate subspace matrices, which are obtained from the process data and otherwise identified as a first step in the subspace identification methods, are used directly for the designs. Without using an explicit model, the design procedure is simplified and the modelling error caused by parameterization is eliminated.

This book focuses on the adoption of a Dynamic Performance Management (DPM) approach to support the planning and management of urban transportation systems. DPM allows one to embrace a dynamic and systemic perspective and, as a result, to frame the contribution of different stakeholders, in terms of outcome-based performance, at an inter-institutional level. The discussed DPM approach allows one to focus on the causal relationships and feedback processes that characterize urban transportation systems’ governance. Particularly, through the adoption of such an approach, it is possible to identify outcome-based performance measures that help to monitor and drive the governance network toward the creation of public value for the reference communities.Strategic Planning for Urban Transportation: A Dynamic Performance Management Approach begins with an examination of urban transportation, highlighting the main criticalities and future challenges of managing it. Next, the book examines the governance of urban transportation including how to identify and engage stakeholders. Finally, the book introduces the main application of DPM and system dynamics to urban areas, with specific regards to transportation. The framework is outlined, and a case study is provided as a practical example of how to apply the model. This book should be useful to urban transportation decision-makers at both the managerial and political level.

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions. Why, then, aren't all DBAs using them? Why do many DBAs continue to ignore them in favour of "tried and trusted" tools such as sp_who2, DBCC OPENTRAN, and so on, or make do with the "ready made" reports built into SSMS? Why do even those that do use the DMVs speak wistfully about "good old sysprocesses"? There seem to be two main factors at work. Firstly, some DBAs are simply unaware of the depth and breadth of the information that is available from the DMvs, or how it might help them troubleshoot common issues. This book investigates all of the DMVs that are most frequently useful to the DBA in investigating query execution, index usage, session and transaction activity, disk IO, and how SQL Server is using or abusing the operating system. Secondly, the DMVs have a reputation of being difficult to use. In the process of exposing as much useful data as possible, sysprocesses has been de-normalized, and many new views and columns have been added. This fact, coupled with the initially-baffling choices of what columns will be exposed where, has lead to some DBAs to liken querying DMVs to "collecting mystic spells." In fact, however, once you start to write your own scripts, you'll see the same tricks, and similar join patterns, being used time and again. As such, a relatively small core set of scripts can be readily adapted to suit any requirement. This book is here to de-mystify the process of collecting the information you need to troubleshoot SQL Server problems. It will highlight the core techniques and "patterns" that you need to master, and will provide a core set of scripts that you can use and adapt for your own systems, including how to: * Root out the queries that are causing memory or CPU pressure on your system * Investigate caching, and query plan reuse * Identify index usage patterns * Track fragmentation in clustered indexes and heaps * Get full details on blocking and blocked transactions, including the exact commands being executed, and by whom. * Find out where SQL Server is spending time waiting for resources to be released, before proceeding * Monitor usage and growth of tempdb The DMVs don't make existing, built-in, performance tools obsolete. On the contrary, they complement these tools, and offer a flexibility, richness and granularity that are simply not available elsewhere. Furthermore, you don't need to master a new GUI, or a new language in order to use them; it's all done in a language all DBAs know and mostly love: T-SQL.

This edited volume contributes to the ongoing research and practice on applying performance management to university governance. A comparative approach and international perspective of the issue is provided through extensive use of case studies and empirical findings. A specific focus is also placed on using performance governance applied to higher education institutions' Third Mission, and on enhancing decision makers’ ability to frame dynamic complexity. In this regard, specific attention is devoted to analyzing the cause-and-effect relationships in affecting public outcomes. This also includes managing trade-offs in both time and space, and detecting and counteracting unintended behavioral effects from the use of formal systems focused on quantitative measures for performance assessment.

Reshaping Performance Management for Sustainable Development explores how performance management plays a central role in improving the policy cycle and contributing to public organizations' management and accountability.

This book highlights the use of an outcome-oriented view of performance to frame and assess the desirability of the effects produced by adopted policies, so to allow governments not only to consider effects in the short, but also the long run. Furthermore, it does not only focus on policy from the perspective of a single unit or institution, but also under an inter-institutional viewpoint. This book features theoretical and empirical research on how public organizations have evolved their performance management systems toward outcome measures that may allow one to better deal with wicked problems. Today, ‘wicked problems’ characterize most of governmental planning involving social issues. These are complex policy problems, underlying high risk and uncertainty, and a high interdependency among variables affecting them. Such problems cannot be clustered within the boundaries of a single organization, or referred to specific administrative levels or ministries. They are characterized by dynamic complexity, involving multi-level, multi-actor and multi-sectoral challenges. In the last decade, a number of countries have started to develop new approaches that may enable to improve cohesion, to effectively deal with wicked problems. The chapters in this book showcase these approaches, which encourage the adoption of more flexible and pervasive governmental systems to overcome such complex problems. Outcome-Based Performance Management in the Public Sector is divided into five parts. Part 1 aims at shedding light on problems and issues implied in the design and implementation of “outcome-based” performance management systems in the public sector. Then Part 2 illustrates the experiences, problems, and evolving trends in three different countries (Scotland, USA, and Italy) towards the adoption of outcome-based performance management systems in the public sector. Such analyses are conducted at both the national and local government levels. The third part of the book frames how outcome-based performance management can enhance public governance and inter-institutional coordination. Part 4 deals with the illustration of challenges and results from different public sector domains. Finally the book concludes in Part 5 as it examines innovative methods and tools that may support decision makers in dealing with the challenges of outcome-based performance management in the public sector. Though the book is specifically focused on a research target, it will also be useful to practitioners and master students in public administration .