Why It Matters
Treating contracts and grants as partnerships, instead of compliance documents, can transform workforce programming. Active management, powered by data and collaboration, unlocks better service delivery and value from your investments. An overemphasis on compliance can create the wrong incentives and miss learning opportunities, while proactive engagement fosters continuous improvement, cost-efficiency, and innovation in service delivery. Government agencies can transform grants and contracts into catalysts for better outcomes and accountable stewardship of their funding.
Overview
Active contract management (ACM), developed by the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL), in partnership with state and local governments, requires government agencies to proactively partner with service providers to improve ongoing service delivery and achieve better outcomes. For ACM success, workforce agencies should build collaborative relationships with service providers, focusing on a shared goal of improving outcomes for program participants, instead of punitive, compliance-based relationships. Data access is crucial, including receiving performance data from and sharing administrative data with providers to support continuous learning and improvement. Workforce agencies can also achieve better outcomes by facilitating shared learning and the exchange of best practices between providers.
For more information on active contract management, including the typical structure of an ACM meeting and considerations for implementing ACM effectively, see Harvard GPL’s publication: Active Contract Management: How Governments Can Collaborate More Effectively with Social Service Providers to Achieve Better Results.
Harvard GPL’s Six Tools for Implementing Active Contract Management offers hands-on, practical resources and guidance to help workforce development agencies implement ACM, including identifying key performance metrics, analyzing data, and building trust between the agency and service providers.
Defining ACM
Government workforce agencies can use active contract and grant management to achieve high-quality outcomes even after award. While traditional contract management might focus on ensuring compliance, ACM focuses on regular collaboration between government agencies and service providers to:
- Set shared expectations about performance management during the application phase.
- Analyze performance data throughout the service delivery period.
- Identify service delivery trends and challenges early on and in real time.
- Problem-solve rapidly and continually to course correct.
- Identify opportunities to rethink and improve service delivery systems on a long-term basis.
Examples
- Rhode Island’s Department of Labor and Training used active contract management to achieve better outcomes in its sector-based workforce development program, Real Jobs Rhode Island. The Department found that active contract management led to more targeted recruitment and better job placements for participants.
- Rhode Island’s Department of Human Services (DHS) uses active contract management to improve supportive service delivery and employment outcomes in Rhode Island Works, the state’s Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program. DHS meets with service providers each month to review key data on referrals, enrollments, barriers to employment, and job placements and discuss ways to improve service delivery in real time. Since its inception, more than 830 unique clients have enrolled in services and the work participation rate in contracted services improved by one-third in just six months.
- Washington, D.C. procured a new one-stop operator to improve coordination of services for jobseekers at one-stop career centers in the District. The contract uses active contract management, requiring regular performance data reviews and check-ins between the one-stop operator, one-stop partners, the Department of Employment Services, and the Workforce Investment Council. These meetings offer an opportunity to review key performance indicators, including the number of referrals and enrollments and the length of time from referral to enrollment, and course-correct in real-time.
- Use these templates and sample language to add active contract management strategies to your agency’s grant or contract.
Embedding Equity
Equity Considerations for Active Contract Management
- Consider who is at the table in the ACM process. Frontline staff, partners, and even participants can provide unique perspectives to inform or contextualize the work as well as unearth inequities that may exist. Consider, even if these individuals are not a standing participant in every meeting, what mechanism can be used to elevate their voices and address potential bias in the data or analysis.
- Build in opportunities for qualitative data collection and analysis from representative populations as it often helps inform the quantitative data. See examples such as the Urban Institute’s Community Voice and Power Sharing Guidebook, which offers practical advice on community-engaged survey development, or Chicago Beyond’s Why Am I Always Being Studied?, which aims to level the playing field between researchers and communities, for ways to do so that are respectful of individuals and their lived experiences.
- Explore the development of personas and user journeys, key methods in human centered design, as components of ACM work to help maintain alignment between the real individuals the work intends to serve and the results the intervention is producing.
Getting Started
How to Get Started
- Determine which existing or upcoming contract or grant is a good candidate for ACM. Contracts that extend over multiple months, provide services to the community, build repeatable processes or involve multiple work streams tend to provide more opportunities for adjustment than contracts purchasing a piece of equipment, access to a database, or training course.
- Incorporate information and any requirements about ACM into the RFP. Provide information sessions, or other technical assistance, to allow respondents to address any questions up front. This might include reporting cadence, required participants, and roles and responsibilities of the agency and the contractor or grantee. Make sure that ACM related activities will be allowable contract expenses. Download this template for ACM language to include in your grant or contract.
- Collaborate with the procurement and contract management/compliance functions of the agency so they are aware that ACM will be used and have the opportunity to provide insight on how best to rapidly implement changes to contract scope or performance that may be required as a result of lessons learned through ACM.
- Invest early in relationship building with the contractor or grantee. This includes acknowledging imbalances of power that exist between funder and funded organization, encouraging proactive and open dialogue, and establishing a shared approach that is focused on jointly understanding and addressing issues instead of punitive performance compliance.
- Develop an agreed upon set of objectives as well as leading and lagging indicators. Use this to inform the development of a performance improvement roadmap. See Harvard Government Performance Lab’s Six Tools for Implementing Active Contract Management for useful worksheets. Make sure to consider how the equity of outcomes will be assessed using the chosen indicators, keeping in mind that understanding differentiated outcomes may require disaggregation data.
- Establish the mechanism to collect, share and analyze the data. This can include real time dashboards, quarterly reports or other formats. Information should be easily digestible yet provide enough detail to allow for dialogue and decision making.
- Operationalize your ongoing checkpoints, leaving space for continuous improvement along the way. This may include the addition of new data sets and the adjustment of data collection and reporting mechanisms, as well as changes to processes or policies.
Want more templates?
We have a full list of ready-to-use templates and language for each of the strategies