Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Answers to this question will vary from very precise to very abstract. I.e. “the result of the service is
the distribution of social support to 3000 families each month” or “the result is the improvement of
people's cultural level”. In case of a very abstract definition of the result the auditor should ask if
there are more precise (quantitative) definitions, because the interviewee may think that the
question is about the mission of the subdivision. Additionally, the auditor may ask if the defined
result depends on the work of the subdivision. I.e. a specialist from the department of industry and
entrepreneurship (Chuguev) claimed that their result is the absence of debts of the city's
enterprises to the budget of the municipality and state, although the subdivision is only collecting
and distributing the related information.
Only if the auditor is assured that the result cannot be formulated more precisely, he can record
the abstract definition of results, and claim in the audit report that there are no quantitative criteria
for evaluation of the service results.
Negative formulation of results may point to the problems related to the measurement of results. In
most cases negative formulation of the desirable result is not achievable or is ambiguous (absence
of customer complains may mean that the department is working well, but also that complaints are
not recorded).
The auditor is not only collecting opinions of the employees about the criteria used to evaluate the
achievement of results. He needs to understand and report if the results are defined and the
criteria exist. It is of up most importance during the preparation of the audit report. When there are
no clear criteria or the interviewee provides various possibilities how the results COULD be
measured, although it is obvious that nobody thought about it before, the auditor should record this
information correspondingly: there are no criteria, criteria are of very general nature and not
measurable, criteria are inadequate, criteria are not documented, although the interviewees
provided their opinion that as criteria the following data could be used etc. It is important to
separate evaluation by the auditor from the opinions provided during the interviews.
Special attention should be given to the processes with contradictory criteria for evaluation of
results. I.e. in department of manufacturing, trade and domestic services one of the criteria for
evaluation of results is decreasing number of fines to the shop-owners, and another is increasing
revenues to the budget from the fines. It should be examined if there are priorities set, when
contradictory results are present, and who have set the priorities.
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