Public Works provides public policy research and analysis, organizational development, and management consulting to government agencies, think tanks, and non-profits across the country.

Our mission is to help governments and policymakers develop groundbreaking policy initiatives and programs while achieving their objectives efficiently and cost-effectively.

Most consulting firms have myriad ways to spend the public's money. At Public Works, we focus on ways to help the public sector spend less and do more - producing, measuring, and improving desired outcomes. Our program ideas have been called "novel" and "ground-breaking." And we are helping governments across the country turn these ideas into realities.

And that's how, at Public Works, we're making good ideas work for the better.

Our philosophy

Public Works believes wholeheartedly in the value of the public sector.

That is why our senior personnel have spent their careers in public service, and this philosophy drives our activities in private consulting. We remain dedicated to ensuring that the public sector works as well as possible. But as a private sector firm, Public Works also knows that:

• In the New Economy, information is plentiful and cheap - insight is rare and valued. We provide useful insight based on accurate information.
• Our "just-in-time" management allows us to provide services when and where they are needed without maintaining high permanent staffing overhead that wastes clients' money.
• Technology reduces the importance of place. This reality allows our distributed staff to deliver better services with lower fixed costs.

Public Works uses a fluid and agile firm structure to hold down costs and deliver project-appropriate staffing on every engagement. Most of the firm's core employees have held senior positions in government, as chiefs of staff, cabinet officials, department directors, and the like.

Supplementing this core experience are approximately ten independent contractors who work with us on a regular and frequent basis, while up to 100 other consultants work with the firm on a project-specific, as-needed basis. Public Works' firm structure thus allows us to service any governmental need at the level of a large national firm, yet to be as flexible and cost effective as a small, local firm.

Our executive core

Our senior level personnel have all served extensive tours of duty in state government in policy-making positions. They include former state cabinet officials, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate chiefs-of-staff, and state agency directors, and agency policy directors.

We include experts on health care, aging, public health, children's and family services, criminal justice, environmental policy, and economic development -- precisely the people you would choose to make things happen at the highest level of your agency if you were drawing them from within government.

And as a firm, we have worked with both state agencies and governor's offices around the country. We embody the small size, low-key image, and sensitivity crucial to successful development of innovative solutions to challenging policy problems. Our practical and realistic solutions go beyond good ideas and but include the development of feasible implementation plans for programs, policies, and operations.

Our consulting network

While this core of leadership and research is present for all projects, Public Works brings to bear the expertise of a wide range of other former state and local government officials at the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level to address the specific policy and management needs of our clients. This allows us to provide the highest caliber of task-specific expertise that any client needs on any particular project, without the cost of maintaining such a large and expensive staff full-time in large and expensive offices.

Our consulting network encompasses nearly 100 professionals with extensive experience in federal, state and local government operations in such areas as administration, budgeting, program planning, operation, evaluation, quality assurance, risk analysis, and mainframe computer applications. Their collective subject matter experience extends from corrections, public safety, education, housing, logistics, insurance, social services and mental health to information system management and maintenance.

This combination of senior political executives and expert consultants provides the best combination of task-specific experience and political sensitivity to deliver the real-world results that top government decision-makers demand and deserve.

• To learn more about the people at Public Works, click here.