Week 3 Discussion

Problems and Applications

1.The one bureaucracy that virtually everyone must deal with at some point is

the Department of Motor Vehicles. For most, a visit to DMV is a miserable

experience—waiting in line, paying money, and dealing with grumpy people

behind the counter. Citizens crawl along in line, waiting to register a car or

renew a license, all the while trying to quell a gnawing feeling that the

transaction will unravel when they reach the clerk's window.

To be more specific, a preliminary study by the governor's office identified the

following six issues:

• Customers want fast, alternate ways to receive services and information.

• Customers arrive 1+ hours before the station opens, creating a lasting backlog throughout the day.

• Many actions required of the examiners do not directly support a goal of quickly serving the customer.

• Customers are not fully educated about (a) what is required of them and (b) the services offered through self-service channels and the county clerk offices.

• Many stations exceed rated occupancy.

• A high percentage of customers fail the knowledge test on the first and second attempts, further increasing station traffic.

Using the tools and techniques presented in this chapter—along with any

other ideas you have—suggest how a state might get its DMV to shed its

long-standing image as the monster of government bureaucracy. What, in

other words, do you recommend?

2.One particularly violent method of smuggling drugs across the U.S.-Mexican

border is known as port running. Port runners would load up to 500 pounds of

drugs in cars or small trucks, making little attempt to disguise or conceal it,

and then drive up to the inspection booth at selected border crossing points. If

the inspector asked for identification, or took too long, or asked to look in the

trunk, or attempted to pull the vehicle over for secondary examination, the

driver would accelerate away aggressively, smashing other vehicles out of the

way if necessary and running down the inspector or anyone else foolish enough

to get in the way—never mind the damage to the vehicle, the load was much

more valuable. Port runners picked crossing points where, within half a mile

of clearing the border, they could be lost in the backstreets of a densely

populated urban area, making pursuit and arrest virtually impossible.

In January 1995, Deputy Commissioner Mike Lane formed a team to

tackle the problem. The team had plenty of ideas about what to do.

Enforcement agents preferred pursuit, arrest, and seizures; inspectors

focused more naturally on changing inspection procedures; the intelligence

group wanted to study the smuggling organizations and take them down.

But most of that they had been doing already, and it was not enough.

Besides, their charge was not to make arrests or break down smuggling

organizations (although they were allowed to do those things if it helped);

they had been charged with eliminating the problem of port running.

Assume that you are on Commissioner Lane's team. Before working on

an action plan, the team must determine how it would assess performance.

How would it know if it was making progress, if not by numbers of arrest

and seizures? Obviously a decline in the number of port-running incidents

would be good, but even that would be open to interpretation. What is your

plan, and how will you evaluate success? What were the alternatives to

your plan, and why were they rejected?

SOURCE: Malcolm K. Sparrow, The Regulatory Craft (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2000).

3.Do you think an agency can or should have a successful TQM program

without using benchmarking?

4.Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of setting up a new agency to carry

out a program.

5.Find the critical path in the following network.