Tools for Decision Making: A Practical Guide for Local Government

ISBN-13: 9780367654320 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 502 str.

David N. Ammons; Dale J. Roenigk

Opis

This book guides readers to mastery of a wide array of practical analytic techniques useful to local governments. This updated third edition features analytic methods selected for their relevance to everyday problems encountered in city and county governments.

Spis treści

Preface  Part I – Introduction  Chapter 1. The Role of Analysis in Local Government  Part II – The Basics  Chapter 2. Central Tendency and Dispersion  Chapter 3. Performance Measurement and Monitoring  Chapter 4. Smoothing Data Trends by Using Moving Averages  Chapter 5. Sampling for Analysis  Chapter 6. Basic Statistical Testing: Correlation and Chi-Square  Chapter 7. Sensitivity Analysis  Chapter 8. Break-Even Analysis  Chapter 9. Detecting Meaningful Differences in Average Performance  Part III – Analyzing a Unit’s Capacity to Meet the Demand for Service  Chapter 10. Demand Analysis  Chapter 11. Work Distribution Analysis  Chapter 12. Using Performance Standards  Chapter 13. Staffing Analysis  Chapter 14. Staffing Factor Calculation: Projections for Uninterruptable Services  Part IV – What Does It Cost?  Chapter 15. Adjusting for Inflation When Comparing Revenues or Expenditures  Chapter 16. Basic Investment Calculations: Figuring Interest Rates and Yields  Chapter 17. The Time Value of Money: Opportunity Costs, Discounting, Compounding, Future Value, and Present Value  Chapter 18. Simple Options for Annualizing Costs of Capital Items: Usage-Rate and Straight-Line Depreciation  Chapter 19. Identifying the Full Costs of a Program  Chapter 20. Calculating Go-Away Costs for Privatization Decisions  Chapter 21. Life-Cycle Costing  Chapter 22. Lease or Buy?  Chapter 23. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: A Truncated Version of Cost-Benefit Analysis  Part V – Process Improvement  Chapter 24. Pareto Charts  Chapter 25. Cause-and-Effect Diagrams  Chapter 26. Process Flow Charts  Chapter 27. Control Charts  Part VI – Other Analytic Opportunities and Techniques  Chapter 28. Citizen Surveys and Customer Surveys  Chapter 29. Analyzing Survey Data: Revealing Graphics and Simple Statistics  Chapter 30. Financial Condition Analysis  Chapter 31. Random Chance or Bias? A Practical Use of Binomial Probability Distribution  Chapter 32. Forecasting  Chapter 33. Analysis of Operations via Benchmarking  Part VII – Presenting Analytic Evidence  Chapter 34. Presenting Analytic Evidence: Tables or Graphs?  Part VIII – Wrap Up  Chapter 35. The Place of Analysis in a Political Environment  Appendix A. Distribution of Chi-Square  Appendix B. Distribution of t  Appendix C. Future Value Interest Factors  Appendix D. Sum of Annuity Factor (SAF)  Appendix E. The Normal Distribution and Table of z-Score Probabilities  Appendix F. Excel’s Data Analysis ToolPak—Installation, Use, and Example