The Results That Matter Team brings together practitioners experienced in government and nonprofit strategy management, performance management, community indicators, citizen engagement, community action, and international development. We all share a strong belief in results-based governance of communities and results-based management of community-serving organizations.Also, we recognize that no one organization can improve most important public outcomes on its own. So we provide ways to manage the complexity of collaborative strategies, strengthen community partnerships, and use data effectively to develop results-driven collaborations.
The New York-based consulting firm Epstein & Fass Associates is the team’s organizational lead. Important partners are the Los Angeles-based KH Consulting Group and the Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center, based in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Epstein & Fass Associates
- Paul Epstein, Principal; Co-Author, Results That Matter
- Lyle Wray, Ph.D.
Associate; Co-Author, Results That Matter - Paul Coates, Ph.D.
Associate; Co-Author, Results That Matter - Martha Marshall
Associate; Co-Developer of the Governance Model
KH Consulting Group
- Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough, Ph.D., President
- Charlotte Maure, Resource Consultant
Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center
Epstein & Fass Associates
Epstein & Fass Associates helps clients design performance management strategies that fit their vision, goals, and community context. Since 1985, the firm has served local, state, federal, and nonprofit organizations and the United Nations. The firm has helped clients capture productivity savings, improve service outcomes, and build long-term capacity for continuous improvement. Epstein & Fass is a leader in results-based practice and research, helping clients implement advanced strategic practices such as balance scorecards and contributing to performance measurement research published by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, the Institute of Internal Auditors, and the American Society for Public Administration. With its role in developinCommunity Balanced Scorecards and the Effective Community Governance Model, Epstein & Fass has extended that leadership by giving citizens, organizations, and communities new ways to achieve results that matter.
Paul D. Epstein, Principal, Co-author, Results That Matter
Paul Epstein has over 30 years’ experience in public service performance measurement and improvement, strategy management including balanced scorecards, community engagement, and sharing innovation. He is a recipient of the American Society for Public Administration’s (ASPA’s) Harry Hatry lifetime achievement award for distinguished performance measurement practice. He has assisted local, state, federal, United Nations, and nonprofit organizations including public health departments, hospitals, standards setting organizations, professional associations, and community-serving organizations across the U.S. and around the world. He has helped entire local governments develop performance measures, and government agencies develop and use balanced scorecards, strategy maps, and strategic plans. With Lyle Wray, he developed the Community Balanced Scorecard (CBSC) to manage collaborative strategies to achieve public outcomes no single organization can achieve on its own. With Dr. Wray and others, he developed the Effective Community Governance (ECG) Model featured in the book Results That Matter (2006), of which Mr. Epstein is lead author. ECG stresses engaging community members in public performance management so results achieved are results that matter to the community, and also engaging people in more roles than governments typically ask them to play, to unleash their full creativity and energy to improve their community. With Alina Simone, he developed public health applications of CBSC used by community health partnerships, and international development applications of CBSC and ECG used in Russia. His two other books are Using Performance Measurement in Local Government (1984 & 1988) and Auditor Roles in Government Performance Measurement (lead author, 2004), and he co-authored three chapters in the Public Health Quality Improvement Handbook (2009). He also helped the Governmental Accounting Standards Board develop criteria for effective public performance reporting, used by state and local governments across the country. An ASPA committee he chaired was cited by the U.S. Congress in passing the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993. That year he was tapped by Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review to help reinvent the federal government. Years before, he was Manager of Citywide Productivity for the New York Mayor’s Office, where he played a key role in integrating productivity initiatives into the budget process, leading to over a billion dollars in annual savings and revenue. Mr. Epstein has an engineering degree from MIT, and has taught graduate public management at NYU, the University of Hartford, and Baruch College.
Lyle D. Wray, Ph.D., Co-author, Results That Matter
Lyle Wray is Executive Director of the Capitol Region Council of Governments (Hartford, CT). For over 25 years, his work has emphasized measuring and improving public services and engaging citizens. With Paul Epstein, he developed Community Balanced Scorecards, now being used by community health partnerships. When he was Dakota County (MN) Administrator, he led the county to performance management, with monthly graphic performance reports of results against targets. And he brought public deliberation to the county budget process, through citizen focus groups and broader public meetings. Before that, he was Director of Human Services, the department with public health responsibilities. Dr. Wray previously was a court monitor for federal court institutional reforms and deinstitutionalization for persons with developmental disabilities in Minnesota. He also headed developmental disabilities services in Newfoundland and Labrador, and outcomes measurement in the Minnesota Department of Human Services. For 11 years, Dr. Wray was Executive Director of the Citizens League in Minnesota, when he teamed with Paul Epstein to co-lead Sloan Foundation funded research on citizen engagement and performance measurement and co-author the related book, Results That Matter (Jossey-Bass, 2006). Dr. Wray pioneered the concept of citizens playing multiple roles in community improvement, first published in ICMA’s Public Management and developed further in Results That Matter. In workshops in the U.S., Thailand, and Indonesia, he has used citizen roles to help practitioners determine how to help citizens become more effective at improving their communities. His civil society development work has also taken him to, for example, Armenia, the Philippines, and Korea. Dr. Wray has also been Director of the Ventura County Civic Alliance, a regional civic organization in California and has served as a consultant to government and non-profit organizations. He teaches graduate courses in public service outcomes measurement, e-government, and public service reform. Dr. Wray has a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.
Paul M. Coates, Ph.D., Co-author, Results That Matter
Paul Coates is Director of the Office of State and Local Government Programs and Associate Professor of public policy and administration in the Department of Political Science of Iowa State University. He received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University. Like Paul Epstein, much of Paul Coates’s career has been focused on helping state and local officials improve public management, and he recently had the opportunity to make citizen engagement a key focus of his work. Along with Dr. Alfred Ho, Dr. Coates directed the Sloan Foundation-funded Citizen Initiated Performance Assessment (CIPA) project in nine Iowa cities from 2001 to 2004. CIPA involved citizens in the process of creating performance measures for city government. The office Dr. Coates currently heads at Iowa State provides training, applied research, and technical services to state and local government in Iowa. In addition to having spent more than 25 years with Iowa State University, he has also been Executive Director of the Iowa State Association of Counties, Director of Extension to Communities at Iowa State University, and an Associate State Planner with the Iowa Governor’s Office of Planning and Programming. Dr. Coates also has experience providing assistance on performance measures at the national and at the international levels through various State Department and USAID projects in Eastern Europe.
Martha W. Marshall, Co-developer of the Governance Model
Martha Marshall is a Virginia-based consultant with over 25 years of experience helping government and nonprofit organizations improve performance and manage for results. She was a member of the original Sloan Foundation-funded research team that developed the Effective Community Governance Model. Ms. Marshall has assisted over 50 cities, counties, and states across the U.S. She helps organizations improve outcomes and efficiency, redesign their budgeting process to invest in results, and strengthen their accountability systems. When she worked for the Office of Executive Management of Prince William County, Virginia, Ms. Marshall helped the county design and implement its nationally recognized Results-Oriented Government System that aligns strategic planning, budgeting, program planning, performance accountability, and evaluation. While this system was being developed, she engaged citizens extensively and deliberatively throughout the process to ensure it would focus on results that matter. Also, for five years she managed the county’s citizen survey project. Ms. Marshall has conducted research and training with the Urban Institute, the International City/County Management Association, the Innovation Groups, and the National Civic League. Among many articles, guides, and training materials to her credit, she co-authored “21st Century Community Focus: Better Results by Linking Citizens, Government, and Performance Measurement” in Public Management (1999) and the facilitator’s handbook for the University of Vermont’s video series “Managing for Results: The Key to More Responsive Government.” Ms. Marshall is also a frequent facilitator, lecturer, and trainer on performance measurement and balanced scorecard approaches to strategic management. She earned a Masters of Urban Affairs/Urban Management from Virginia Tech, and she has served as adjunct public administration faculty at George Mason University.
KH Consulting Group
Since its inception in 1986, the KH Consulting Group has served more than 200 clients in 25 states and on 5 continents, and brought a results focus to all its work, from organizational design, to financial restructuring, information systems, marketing, human resources, and business process reengineering. KH has leveraged its strengths in strategic planning and performance measurement, including the use of balance scorecards, to help community colleges and numerous local government agencies manage for results. In all these initiatives, KH has extensively reached out to gain the perspectives of the client’s stakeholders—from internal users to residents and businesses affected by client policies and services—so clients will achieve results that matter for the communities they serve. The two key KH consultants who have worked most with the Results That Matter Team are Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough and Charlotte Maure.
Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough, Ph.D., KH President
Gayla A. Kraetsch Hartsough has been the President of KH Consulting Group since 1986. She helped Paul Epstein introduce the Effective Community Governance Model to local government leaders in Los Angeles, resulting in a KH-Epstein & Fass project to use the model to evaluate pilot implementation of the County of Los Angeles’s “lead department” approach to improving services for unincorporated communities. A few years earlier, Dr. Kraetsch Hartsough led an engagement that identified several strategies the county is now testing to make services more responsive to residents of unincorporated areas, including the lead department approach. Other Los Angeles County engagements she has led have involved strategic planning for Public Health, Public Works, Public Library, Internal Services, Regional Planning, the Community Development Commission, and the Office of the Treasurer-Tax Collector. She has also assisted city, state, and federal agencies; higher education and K-12 educational systems; nonprofit organizations; transportation systems; utilities; education enterprises; and health care providers. She has extensive expertise in public policy, strategic and master planning, service delivery, community needs assessments, stakeholder involvement, and the political realities of local government in California. Before founding KH Consulting Group, Dr. Kraetsch Hartsough was a Management Consultant for Towers Perrin and a Program Officer for the Academy for Educational Development. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, she was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Award in higher education administration.
Charlotte Maure, KH Resource Consultant
Charlotte Maure has been a senior consultant on many of KH’s strategic planning and performance management engagements, including the unincorporated area services project for the County of Los Angeles. She and Paul Epstein have teamed up on several engagements, including balanced scorecards for the Los Angeles County Internal Services Department and Public Health Department, and a strategy map and performance measures for the county’s Human Resources Department. She also worked with Mr. Epstein to use of the Effective Community Governance Model as a template to evaluate how Los Angeles County piloted the “lead department” approach to improve services to the unincorporated Florence-Firestone community. Ms. Maure has also implemented telecommunications, systems, and administrative projects responding to fundamental change in public sector environments that have become more cost-competitive and results-focused. Prior to working with KH, she was Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of General Services for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a department responsible for annual purchases of $325 million, a fleet of 1,200 vehicles, food and catering services, and design and construction of over 1 million square feet of office space. She has a Master of Public Administration in Intergovernmental Management from the University of Southern California.
The Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center (SCISC) is the largest independent foundation dedicated to supporting grassroots democratic development in the region. Its mission is to promote the development of civic initiatives and citizen responsibility for addressing community issues through strengthening partnerships among civil society institutions, government, and business. Founded in 1995, SCISC is based in Novosibirsk, Russia, and has a network of affiliate organizations in 14 oblasts that brings expertise in strengthening communities to all parts of Siberia. SCISC has received grants and financing from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Learning, IREX, TASIS, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Eurasia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charitable Organization “Russian-German Exchange,” Open Society Institute, AED-Armenia, AED-Kazakhstan, Save the Children Fund and a wide range of Russian foundations, corporations, and government entities. SCISC has developed a strong reputation as a center for information and analysis regarding Siberia’s non-profit sector, and as a source for NGO leadership development for civil society innovators throughout the former Soviet Union. SCISC is considered a leader in community development and has provided training to NGO leaders, educators, and public officials across Russia and in other former Soviet countries. Consistent with its encouragement of citizen participation in all aspects of civil society development and public policy, SCISC co-developed a project with the Results That Matter Team to bring the Effective Community Governance Model to Russia, and has worked with RTM Team members Alina Simone, Paul Epstein, and David Swain on implementation. Through this project, funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation with additional support from several regional governments in Siberia, SCISC and experts from its affiliate organizations have been assisting communities throughout Siberia in planning and implementing projects to improve their governance practices, community measurement strategies, and citizen engagement.