Commission Program Design Courses

Commission Program Design Courses

In conjunction with its sponsorship of research and development on
program design, the President's Management Council should commission the
development of a family of program design courses to educate and train
several generations of current and future policymakers, program
designers, and managers. If informed, reasoned program design is to
flourish throughout the federal government, training and education will
be important factors in that evolution. Given the wide variation in
design knowledge and needs across government, a multitiered approach to
education would be superior to a single course of instruction for
everyone. A comprehensive education strategy for program design might
include:

--a series of short seminars (1-3 days), each focused on a particular
mode of public service delivery such as federal subsidies, tax
incentives, voucher systems, government sponsored
enterprises/corporations, privatization of services, loan guarantees,
regulatory initiatives, etc. The target audience for such courses would
be agency program specialists (GS 12-15), congressional staffers, budget
examiners, and auditors who have need for in-depth knowledge of a
specific type of program design and its strengths and weaknesses.  These
seminars could be disseminated through agency training programs, the
Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) executive development centers,
the Department of Agriculture Graduate School, and commercial/non-profit
institutions such as the Brookings Institute, National Academy of Public
Administration, the Congressional Management Foundation, etc.;

--a longer residential course (5-10 days) which would provide a
comprehensive overview of program design covering several different
design modes comparing the relative advantages and disadvantages of
each. The target audience for this course would be program generalists
or senior government policymakers who require broader exposure across a
variety of programs. This course could be available through the Federal
Executive Institute, the Federal Quality Institute, nonprofit
organizations, and/or academic institutions;

--introduction of program design subjects into existing management
development programs such as agency executive development courses, OPM
seminars, senior military schools, and Senior Executive Service
candidate development programs; and

--a variety of academic offerings at graduate schools of public
administration, public policy, government, and political science. To
reach future generations of public servants, the design of government
programs should be taught in graduate curricula. If visible academic
institutions were to include program design courses as academic
electives or requirements, future civil servants would be better
educated and vigorous research may begin to emerge as faculty and
graduate students collect, synthesize, and create material for their
courses.

Schools of public policy and administration should heed the advice of
Professor Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in Economics, who suggested a
more active role for universities in teaching design:

The professional schools will reassume their professional
responsibilities just to the degree that they can discover a science of
design, a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable,
partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process . . .
[S]uch a science of design [is] not only possible but is actually
emerging at the present time. It has already begun to penetrate the
engineering schools, particularly through programs in computer science
and "systems engineering," and business schools through management
science. [Endnote 3]


Endnotes

3. Simon, Herbert, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd Edition
(Cambridge, MA:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981), p. 132.