A quality management-based approach to evaluate public services: A case study in Brazil

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach to identify and measure the best practices of quality management in public services. While many studies focus on service quality from the user's perspective, this work pays attention to the service operation management, aiming to evaluate public services' best practices based on the management perspective. This study was developed in cooperation with the Brazilian Government, which conducted an exploratory interview with managers of 289 federal services. Then, we performed a data mining to better understand trends, patterns and correlations from the answers obtained. As a final outcome, a questionnaire-based model was developed, called BrQM (Brazil Quality Management), in order to assist public administration managers in evaluating the quality of their services. The proposed model encodes 8 dimensions with score variables to guide evaluation actions so that public institutions can improve their services by identifying good practices in quality management adopted by other services in the same sphere.