In recent decades, digital transformation processes have significantly impacted the new forms of flexible work. This demand for work flexibility has spread rapidly due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Foss, 2021; Stich, 2020). The current pandemic emergency, which began in February 2020, has had several waves that have resulted in significant changes, especially in public organizations. Many public organizations faced a greater degree of uncertainty. To manage uncertainty, the first organizational response was the massive use of smart working (SW) to ensure operational continuity (Mascio et al., 2020, Todisco et al., 2022). Smart working is a new form of work to ensure greater spatial and temporal flexibility for employees to improve individual well-being and organizational efficiency (Bednar and Welch, 2020; Ellerton, 2015). However, the introduction of smart working has created difficulties in non-resilient organizations, especially in the coordination and objectives clear definition that each employee must achieve. Therefore, adopting new methodologies and approaches to manage activities and new working tools is necessary to improve communication. The description of a new working relationship is no longer on control but trust and responsibility. More employee responsibility, aimed at ensuring an increase in organizational productivity, is based on identifying and implementing well-defined objectives, forsaking old organizational models based only on physical presence in the office, and implementing a routine. In this rapidly changing scenario, public management plays a key role in addressing the challenges arising from the pandemic emergency. (Ansell et al., 2021). On the one hand, public management must make smart working effective, intervening in optimizing projects and clearly defining the objectives to be assigned to employees. On the other hand, public managers must translate the challenges of smart working into development and growth opportunities for their organizations, promoting greater organizational resilience in public organizations focused on projects. Based on these premises, through interviews conducted with ten public managers of public administrations at the local Italian level, this article aims to understand how public management, during the pandemic emergency, was able to intervene in the definition of objectives for public employees. Furthermore, another aspect on which the following research work focuses is understanding how public management has managed to optimize significant projects for its administrations by adopting new methodologies and work approaches for the activities’ management in their administrations.