La gestione del ciclo della performance in contesti critici. Il caso del Comune di Castel Volturno

The staff assessment of the performance of public administrations is an issue that, although with alternating, never lost interest and on which the Legislative Decree no. 150/2009 (cd. Brunetta Reform) has rekindled the spotlight from the second decade of the new millennium. The evaluation function includes the practical exercise of an activity, which requires the possession of skills, professional skills and specific knowledge on the part of the subject to which it is attached. This activity is exercised by means of strict procedures and encoded and is intended to provide a review of skills, behaviors and contributions expressed by one person, or by a set of entities that operate in a coordinated manner. It is, therefore, a procedure which is directed by an all 'administration internal organ established to measure and evaluate an expected result related to the satisfaction of the needs for which the same administration was formed without neglecting to verify the manner in which the result was achieved. To set as the discipline and even more so, for the purposes intended by the legislator of 2009, the implementation of the evaluation procedure, which involves the same way and with the same intensity individual subjects, individual structures and entire administration, is constituted by a phase evaluation that lends itself to be measured and managed. In public small administrations, also historically corresponding to municipalities, measurement and performance management does not find easily the aims and objectives of the standard and almost never fails to highlight the potential of the individual. The interests, rights and those involved are different positions and responsibilities as well as the administrations concerned by the process in question. At first it seemed that the legislator of 2009 had only served to unify the areas of interest of the measurement and evaluation for all public administrations indicating the criteria to be cyclically follow and set up the activities that each of the parties involved had to play. Reality has shown a different scenario and in some ways unexpected. In fact, even if on the one hand, as mentioned, seems to have been simply taken the conversation on the performance of public administration staff in practice than in the past, the interest of the citizen has been greatly stressed. Hence the quest for motivation that has increased the curiosity and interest of the citizen, not excluding the possibility that more than a real justification or a cause, it may just be a side effect of the fact that the reform provides for the same transparency and performance reporting. Part of the research is dedicated to the identification of limitations to the proper management of the performance cycle caused by the public administration reform process with particular reference to the local one. With the elaborate analyzes the conditions that the performance appraisal process may suffer in connection with the more or less critical context in which it is activated and one tries to identify those internal and external factors that, if on the one hand approaching the citizen and the various categories of stakeholders to the public employee, on the other hand affect the entire cycle of the performance, up to nullify the purpose. Hence the consideration that internal stakeholders and external, interested and / or involved performances by the argument, assume connotations and different characteristics depending of the public with whom they interact, or to which they belong. This means, then, that when it comes to the topic performance without a deep knowledge of the public sector and its stakeholders, you run the risk of losing their train of thought, to generalize and not to come to any observation, consideration, conclusion purposeful or at least interest. It is not that there are no elements that unite all public administration that they believe in the possibility of a uniform application of the Cycle of Performance, as indeed wants the provision of the law, such as: the presence of at least two subjects, the estimated and the evaluator, a methodology commonly called permanent evaluation system or evaluation system as well as prediction of premiums attributable to the rated entities. The paper will examine some particular critical issues that affect only one type of public administration, the local one: the dissolution of the governing mafia and the state of financial distress assessing effects and impact on the assessment procedure, as well as the adequacy and compliance of the instrument adopted by the body to measure and evaluate performance. The work includes a practice through which houses a reading performance management activity is given in a critical context represented by the Municipality of Castel Volturno located in the province of Caserta. A very particular context, one of a kind, represented by the absence, at that time, an organ of political and administrative elective address, because the body at first police station, was dissolved for mafia and simultaneously declared financial difficulties, an unusual condition that can affect the valuation processes and at the same time to limit the effectiveness of the assessment tools in relation to the Brunetta reform purposes. [edited by Author]