Public personnel management process capability assessment

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.