Tools for Decision Making
A Practical Guide for Local Government
by David N. Ammons, Dale J. Roenigk
3rd Edition
Publisher: Routledge
Book Details
| Print ISBN | 9780367654399 |
| eText ISBN | 9781000417081 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Publishing Year | 2022 |
| Edition | 3rd Edition |
| Language | English |
| Pages | 528 |
Tools for Decision Making: A Practical Guide for Local Government, 3rd Edition, is a textbook that presents analytical methods designed for everyday challenges in city and county administration. The volume draws practical tools from public administration, management, policy analysis, and industrial engineering to help municipal leaders evaluate public operations.
The text addresses core operational areas, including service capacity, cost determination, and process improvement. To ground each topic in realistic administrative practice, every analytical technique opens with a short fictitious case study demonstrating its direct application.
Written for students and local practitioners, the guide supports public administration courses focusing on analysis, program evaluation, productivity improvement, and service delivery.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Role of Analysis in Local Government
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
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
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
Chapter 24: Pareto Charts
Chapter 25: Cause-and-Effect Diagrams
Chapter 26: Process Flow Charts
Chapter 27: Control Charts
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
Chapter 34: Presenting Analytic Evidence: Tables or Graphs?
Chapter 35: The Place of Analysis in a Political Environment
Chapter Appendix A: Distribution of Chi-Square
Chapter Appendix B: Distribution of t
Chapter Appendix C: Future Value Interest Factors
Chapter Appendix D: Sum of Annuity Factor (SAF)
Chapter Appendix E: The Normal Distribution and Table of z-Score Probabilities
Chapter Appendix F: Excel’s Data Analysis ToolPak—Installation, Use, and Example
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