Diana Sayed -

Master of Public Administration (MPA)

I am a senior officer in the public sector with people-centric nature and a keen impetus for financial organizational change. My ten years of professional experience in the Ministry of Economy and Trade in Lebanon and my MBA that I earned from France guided me to better comprehend different approaches to preparing public agencies implementing transformational policies and gave me insights on how a manager can influence people’s behavior to reduce their inertia to the change. The financial crisis that has been hitting my country two years ago illustrates clearly that there is an urgent need to implement financial and social reforms to address the current hardships that affected people’s lives in expensive and dramatic ways. I joined recently UGA_SPIA to complete my Master’s degree in Public Administration and policy where I am exploring the broader perspective of public service. In my current graduate assistantship, I am contributing to raising public awareness for Human Trafficking, the most lucrative and destructive business globally. It’s an honor to add to the efforts deployed by CenHTRO, an affiliated organization to UGA, which aims through its robust research to reduce the impact of human trafficking issue on societies.

Education

MBA | Audencia School of Management | 2011
BA | Saint Joseph University | 2004 | Business Management

Educational Experiences:

My International MBA in France allowed me to reimagine the life cycle of the businesses globally, I learned how to take a business for a better position to forge a niche on an international scale by using our unique strengths to better impact society. I gained a unique industry expertise paired with an extensive and practical knowledge of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). During my full-time program, I developed strong working relationships with cross-functional teams (a cohort of 30 peers) having diverse cultural backgrounds. In addition to being trilingual (fluently speaking English, French, and Arabic), I had the ability to communicate easily and form strong bonds with my colleagues and professors.

More About

Career Goals:

My current Master’s program MPA will allow me to experience closely the complexity of the public administration in the USA in terms of the laws, politics, taxes, and all the challenges encountered by the agencies or local governments. I will be able to understand the dynamics of the public job, how decisions are made, and how diverse points of view reach a common ground to engender a comprehensive and consensual project. In addition to experiencing closely the processes of policy implementation from the adoption through the execution to the auditing and evaluation, I will be able to interpret the diverse implications of the decisions made through the competencies and quantitative and qualitative tools I gained.

Relevant Work experience:

I was working as a Senior Accountant at the Ministry of Economy and Trade in Lebanon. Throughout my work experience since 2009, I was involved in expenditure analysis as well as budget preparation and execution. I recently led the development and deployment of a three-year budget for the Ministry using the medium-term expenditure framework, leading to a more sustainable budget planning and monitoring system at the Ministry. I have also worked with a team from the Ministry of Finance on a macroeconomic modeling and forecasting project (EFMIS) to estimate quarterly GDP growth for Lebanon using EViews with a data set from 2012 to 2017.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the setting of the systematic procedures for the implementation of a comprehensive performance budgeting system and the incorporation of the system into all phases of the budgetary process. My research interests are double-folded: • Public budgeting and Finance • Policy analysis and program evaluation

My aim is to conduct research addressing global challenges for Performance-Based Budgeting (PBB) and foster my capabilities in order to systematize the new practices:

1- Investigate and analyze what has been done in terms of the three stages of the PBB process: • adoption: the main reason for the actors to foster communication and performance management. • implementation: which is influenced by different variables pertaining to each system mainly the costing system. • use: the findings show that the use of performance information has limited impact on budget appropriation where the decisions are more political rather than rational. “Performance-based allocations is an unrealistic budget tool for most governments”

2- Focus on comparative analysis between some of the U.S cities within the state and between the states or other countries which evidenced limited implementation of the PBB to enrich the understanding of the possible factors that forestall agencies linking goals, performance measures, and resources.

3- To investigate whether the partial implementation is due to the disparity between the claimed and the achieved results, or to the intentional decisions of stakeholders. – To neutralize the disparity in the understanding of some conceptual issues like performance management and performance budgeting. Most governments consider PBB as a management tool that enhances the communication between stakeholders rather than better enhancing the fund appropriation. In the rush to balance their budgets and meet their goals, managers make less focus on whether Performance measurements are either effective or sustainable.