A plethora of performance – effectiveness – efficiency measurement methods have been developed and implemented to public organizations since the mid-nineteenth century. However, the ’60s have been considered a milestone for the measurement methods embraced by the public sector, initially in the United States and later in most of the OECD countries, when sophisticated accounting and financial performance methods were developed. During the first era, of the ’60s and ’70s, the public administration became process-oriented and adopted output assessment methods. The second era of measurement methods’ implementation to public organizations started in very early ’80s and continues today. During the second period, the public administration’s strategy started becoming extroverted focusing on the outcomes assessment rather than the output, shifting from financial performance assessment methods to those of efficiency, effectiveness and performance. The main goals set for the second period are expenses squeeze for public organizations, efficiency and effectiveness attainment, transparency and accountability. The implementation of performance – effectiveness – efficiency measurement methods within public organizations is a condition for measuring and assessing the output and outcome of the administrative units, and for establishing operational optimization plans, though, it is not adequate to ensure the accomplishment of the aforementioned goals. Political and managerial commitment to the implementation and handling of measurement methods, the application of the proposed methods’ reforms to the operational units, personnel experience to the usage of measurement methods, and readiness for change are considered vital prerequisites for success. It has been established that the more sophisticated the method, the more demanding it turns to be. As a consequence, the failure rate is greater for the performance assessment methods (i.e., for the Balanced Scorecard) than the straight financial performance ones or the efficiency measurement methods. Given the drawbacks of most of the existing performance – effectiveness –efficiency measurement methods, which are already adopted by public organizations, and the attributes of public administration, we have developed a comparative effectiveness measurement method called Quality-driven – Efficiency-adjusted Data Envelopment Analysis (QE-DEA). This method introduces synchronous analysis of operational efficiency and citizen satisfaction for a group of homogeneous operational/administrative units. It’s not demanding in terms of data collection, imputation, elaboration and report, hence, skilled personnel are not required. Nevertheless, similar to the rest of the performance – effectiveness – efficiency measurement methods, QE-DEA goal attainment depends on political and managerial commitment to restructuring the assessed public organizations according to a road-map provided in order to improve their effectiveness.
