No.78   July 1, 2004   New Methodology to Select Projects in Public and Public Utility Service Operations   Ryoichi YAMAGISHI        In recent years, moves at assessing performance by means other than financial indexes have been spreading primarily within central and local government offices and agencies. However, in introducing performance evaluation systems, focus is now being given to accountability and organizational evaluations. Efforts to accumulate experience as objective data and use that data to improve operations as well as operational efficiency have not necessarily been stressed.         By focusing on the aspect of "accumulating experience as objective data and using the data to improve operations as well as operational efficiency" in developing performance evaluation systems, Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has developed two methods of objective project selection and has been introducing these methods in actual operations. The two methods are project selection to achieve goals at minimum cost and project selection within a finite cost.        These two methods are used to select which of ten or more candidate projects of several totally different types are to be actually implemented. In both of these methods, projects are selected by a two-step process: (a) evaluating each candidate project through certain procedures and (b) selecting the projects to be implemented in accordance with prescribed logic. The principal feature of these methods is that selection of the projects to be implemented can be based on evaluations from totally different aspects that are suitable for individual projects of totally different types.        This paper uses several cases to briefly introduce the logic portion applied to the project selection in particular from among the overall project selection procedures. Contents I Conventional Project Selection Relying on Precedents II Past Approaches to Performance Evaluation that Presented Weaknesses in Operational Improvement III Individual Project Effects and Combination of Projects to Achieve All Goals IV Selecting Projects within a Limited Budget V Expanding Fields of Application GO to PDF