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Author Archives: Mark Nelson
Denver, CO – Realizing peak performance levels, one department at a time
“To succeed in an era of scarcity, public agencies must do more than just measure their performance. Success requires a focus on larger organizational goals that lead to questioning longstanding practices and structures,” writes Charles Chieppo in Governing.
Chieppo’s article, Giving Public Workers the Tools for Efficiency, provides an overview of Denver Mayor Michael Hancock’ Peak Performance initiative, which is designed for each city agency to “understand who its customers are, how it delivers value to them, and most important, areas for potential improvement.”
This initiative is part of a nationwide trend: examining the state of services in order to find efficiencies. The approach to this is different than in the past. Identifying efficiencies is not about simply cutting services blindly—it’s about looking at real, empirical data to find ways to deliver higher value to citizens.
Denver, like many cities and towns, examined the data on its…
Can you drive your town without a dashboard?
When I hop in my car, I don’t give much thought to it. I know with a lot of certainty that my car is equipped to take me where I want to go. Now, I imagine if my car was stripped of its dashboard, I would quickly find myself asking questions such as: How fast am I driving? Do I have enough gas? Is the engine too hot? And I would surely be lost without my trusted GPS.
Just for fun, imagine yourself driving to work with no dashboard. You get in and quickly realize that you have no way of knowing if there is enough gas in the tank to get you there. What options do you have? You might start driving and hope you get there before running out of gas. You could call the fleet department (aka your spouse) and ask when was last time he/she put gas in the car and how many miles the…
Ready, Fire, Aim
There is an old story of a man shooting a gun. Over and over, he keeps firing but missing his target each time. If you happen to notice him firing, you would assume that he was an expert marksman, never stopping and just firing away. However, if you saw his target, you would see that nothing was hitting the target. When his friend stops him to ask, “Why don’t you slow down and take aim before firing?” his reply, “No, I’m too busy firing and I don’t have time to aim.”
This story is an old cliché, but one that is played out in municipal departments every day. Workers are busy working, however, there is often no aiming going on and no targets or goals are being established. If you ask your managers and workers to measure their progress or activity, the answer is always the same, “We are too busy delivering services for that.” Yup, firing away and…
ICMA 2012 – “Stimulate the Progress” of Local Governments
I’m writing this blog entry from my airline seat at 30,000 feet somewhere over the middle of the country, thinking about all the interesting people I met at ICMA 2012. I’m reflecting at the awesome number of opportunities facing local government leaders today—opportunities to adopt new technologies, enhance communications and improve citizen’s lives.
New technologies to enable local governments to transform how things are currently done were evident all around ICMA 2012. From the omnipresent use of social media and the ability to attend the conference virtually via the Internet, to the exhibit hall flourishing with new civic startup technology companies, change was in the air. The Code for America’s session on open source software and specifically Jim Collins’ (author of Good to Great) keynote address were inspiring to all.
Jim Collins spoke about innovation, presenting the concept of “preserving the core and stimulating progress.” The idea of preserving the core is something that I think we all…
Why Revelstone is looking forward to the Code for America Summit
As one of the seven companies selected for the Code for America Accelerator program, we’re really excited for next week’s Code for America Summit in San Francisco. Why? Not only will we be presenting our Compass performance analytics solution and seeing our fellow Accelerator teams like MindMixer, Captricity, Measured Voice, Aunt Bertha, LearnSprout and Recovers.org, but the overall event looks fantastic! We look forward to networking with the many forward thinkers that will be there and learning how they are innovating in their governments.
If you’re not familiar with the Summit, it’s an invitation only event for more than 200 leaders and innovators in civic technology. An impressive twenty cities were represented at last year’s event, and more will be at this year’s event.
Just some of the speakers are:
- Emer Coleman, Gov.UK
- Mayor Ed Lee of San Francisco
- Richard Price, a fire chief
- Nigel Jacob, new urban mechanic
…
What’s your answer to the local government squeeze?
A recent Pew Charitable Trusts report, “The Local Squeeze: Falling Revenues and Growing Demand for Services Challenge Cities, Counties and School Districts,” local governments “have been hit with a one-two punch.” They are faced with declining revenue and demands for increased service.
It’s easy to agree that municipalities have a massive challenge ahead of them. As Pew rightly states, the “local squeeze will be felt for years to come.”
According to Pew:
- State aid, which funds nearly a third of local government budgets, fell by 2.6 percent, to $12.6 billion in 2010
- In 2012, property tax revenues saw the first annual decline since the mid-1990s – and it was the largest in decades
- Property tax revenues fell in 2011, and are expected to continue falling in 2012 and 2013.
To make matters worse, the ways many cities and towns have addressed this are unsustainable:
- Raising taxes
- Reducing spending
- Cutting services
- Eliminating jobs
Eventually, there will be nothing left to cut. And citizens are never…
I believe governments can operate better
Why don’t governments have the newest and coolest software and technology?
I’m not sure I can answer that question, but Code for America is on a mission to change governments for the better. Have you heard of Code for America? It’s a small group of smart, talented and dedicated people with a mission to improve the experience of governments by delivering simple-to-use and beautifully designed software that helps governments operate in the 21st century. At Revelstone, we have the privilege of working with the Code for America team in the newly created Accelerator program.
I’m writing this post on the plane as I fly home from our first full week in Code for America’s San Francisco offices, and I couldn’t be more energized at the prospect of helping governments become more efficient. When we started Revelstone just a couple of years back, I sat in a room with my co-founders and we envisioned a world where municipal leaders could sit at…
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking Myth #5 – I don’t know where to begin
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments, yet its use is often limited to only the biggest of cities. Through our research and working with municipalities of all sizes, we have identified The Five Myths of Performance Management that have plagued municipal leaders for decades. At Revelstone, we are determined to help debunk these myths and demonstrate how you can start managing better with quantifiable metrics, depend less on anecdotal stories and help make data-driven decisions in your jurisdiction quickly, easily and cost effectively.
Myth #5— I don’t know where to begin
If you have read past blog posts here, you probably know that I spend a great deal of my time speaking with municipal leaders talking about performance management. “I don’t know where to begin,” is probably the one phrase I hear most often, giving rise to this myth. What I find interesting is that most municipal managers can extol the benefits of…
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking Myth #4—It’s too expensive
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments, yet its use is often limited to only the biggest of cities. Through our research and working with municipalities of all sizes, we have identified The Five Myths of Performance Management that have plagued municipal leaders for decades. At Revelstone, we are determined to help debunk these myths and demonstrate how you can start managing better with quantifiable metrics, depend less on anecdotal stories and help make data-driven decisions in your jurisdiction quickly, easily and cost effectively.
Myth #4—It’s too expensive
Since performance management has historically been practiced by the largest of cities with many resources, the perception is that they probably spend a lot of money on:
- Software with big, up front capital expenditures
- New hardware servers
- Consultants to configure the software
- In-depth training
- Endless amounts of data gathering
And in the case of the biggest and richest cities, this might indeed be true. …
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking Myth #3—I don’t have the data to compare to others
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments, yet its use is often limited to only the biggest of cities. Through our research and working with municipalities of all sizes, we have identified The Five Myths of Performance Management that have plagued municipal leaders for decades. At Revelstone, we are determined to help debunk these myths and demonstrate how you can start managing better with quantifiable metrics, depend less on anecdotal stories and help make data-driven decisions in your jurisdiction quickly, easily and cost effectively.
Myth #3—I don’t have the data to compare to others.
How many times have you sat in staff or council meetings discussing the latest issue and wondered, “How have other towns resolved this issue?” After all, there are nearly 40,000 municipalities in the United States and chances are that some other town has faced the same issue and resolved it successfully. Do you pick up the phone and call the…
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking: Myth #2—I can’t compare to others; I’m unique
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments, yet its use is often limited to only the biggest of cities. Through our research and working with municipalities of all sizes, we have identified The Five Myths of Performance Management that have plagued municipal leaders for decades. At Revelstone, we are determined to help debunk these myths and demonstrate how you can start managing better with quantifiable metrics, depend less on anecdotal stories and help make data-driven decisions in your jurisdiction quickly, easily and cost effectively.
Myth #2—I can’t compare to others; I’m unique.
You’ve heard this myth before… possibly in your own town. “We can’t compare to other towns because we have a _____ [insert one of the following: a shopping mall, a university, a downtown district, a volunteer fire department, etc.] and the other towns near us don’t have that.” It’s the classic apples-to-oranges comparison dilemma. While it may be true that your neighboring…
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking: Myth #1—My people are too busy.
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments, yet its use is often limited to only the biggest of cities. Through our research and working with municipalities of all sizes, we have identified The Five Myths of Performance Management that have plagued municipal leaders for decades. At Revelstone, we are determined to help debunk these myths and demonstrate how you can start managing better with quantifiable metrics, depend less on anecdotal stories and help make data-driven decisions in your jurisdiction quickly, easily and cost effectively.
Myth #1—My people are too busy.
Municipal departments are, in fact, short-staffed and very busy. But a common problem we see in many municipalities is that staff members sometimes do things that aren’t necessary. How often have you dug into a problem or task to ultimately ask, “Why are we doing this?” only to hear the common answer, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Is your staff really too busy…
The Five Myths of Performance Management and Benchmarking
Performance management is not a new topic in municipal governments. Excellent examples of a performance-based management approach are well documented in New York City and Baltimore’s successful CompStat and CitiStat programs. With governments struggling today to find efficiencies in their service delivery, the need for good data to base decisions on is needed more than ever. So why haven’t smaller local governments followed suit and adopted their own performance management programs like those that have worked so successfully in larger cities?
Our research has shown there are five common myths that have become so ingrained and accepted that the mere notion of a performance management program is almost automatically dismissed as impractical unless you have the budget and staff of a large city like New York City.
I’m writing a five-part blog series in an effort to help debunk the five myths of performance management:
What if they didn’t keep score at the Superbowl?
Can you imagine the Superbowl if they didn’t keep score? What if the refs said, “Sorry, we’re too busy, we don’t have time to track the score”? Would anyone find this acceptable? How would we know who won the game? How could you measure your success if the score wasn’t counted? Let me ask you an important question about your jurisdiction—can you tell if you are delivering services well and making good decisions if you aren’t measuring the important activities and outcomes? How often do you hear the same excuse, “Sorry, we don’t have time” from your workers when asked to measure or count performance?
Someone famously said, “Football is a game of inches.” Everything in football is measured and counted and we sports junkies track each and every stat. The newspapers are filled with wonderful statistical analysis to slice and dice the entire game from quarterback passing yards, number of first downs, totally yards rushed, etc. For fun, let’s imagine the Superbowl were managed the way most local government…
“It’s easy to do nothing.”
I spend a great deal of my time speaking with leaders of local governments about improving performance of municipal operations. This week, I was speaking with a business administrator of a small city and he acknowledged that it’s not uncommon for a town to be delivering services that could be improved or made more efficient. What he said next, surprised me, as if exposing a dirty little secret of managers, “It’s easy to do nothing and just let it be, and that has been the strategy of many towns for the past 15 years.”
Today, it’s a completely different story. With revenue shortages and little ability to raise taxes to cover budget shortfalls, administrators must find new ways to become efficient or risk having to stop delivering a service. I just learned of one New Jersey town that reduced garbage pickup to once a week. As you might imagine, the residents are not happy and very concerned about the smells that will likely come, when the weather gets warm this…
The 26 Mile Goal
On Sunday I completed a life-long goal and ran the New York City Marathon. Since I was 12, I’ve always wanted to run the NYC Marathon. When I was younger I made all kinds of excuses about not having enough time to train, however, secretly, I just couldn’t imagine that I could actually run 26 miles. It just seemed like an unachievable goal.
A few years ago, with a milestone birthday, I was struck with a simple idea—run half a marathon. It was sheer genius! I convinced myself that if I could run a half marathon, then I could think about trying to run a full marathon.
What I later realized was that I had set a realistic goal for myself. Not so much intentionally, but what I had done was set a long-term goal, something almost unconceivable to accomplish and then set smaller goals that were achievable to measure my progress. First I learned to run 5 miles, then 10 miles, then half a marathon. After a year of…
Moneyball your Municipality
Have you seen the new movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt, or read the book of the same title by Michael Lewis? It strikes me that there is an uncanny similarity from what the Oakland A’s faced in Major League Baseball to what local municipalities are facing in today’s challenging economic times.
The central premise of Moneyball is that the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed. Common baseball statistics such as “stolen bases,” “runs batted in” and “batting average” have historically been used as the gospel to gauge a player’s performance and are relics of a past way of thinking. The book/movie argues that the Oakland A’s front office took advantage of more empirical measures of player performance to field a team that could compete successfully against richer teams in Major League Baseball.
Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that new measures like “on-base percentage” and “slugging percentage” are better indicators of…
Should You Measure for Today or Tomorrow?
A common question I hear when talking to township officials about performance management is, “What do I measure?”
Deciding on what to measure involves focusing on today’s challenges and tracking areas that are in immediate need, or planning ahead and collecting information that may help you solve future problems. The choice you face is whether to concentrate on measures that address short-term issues to detect and solve today’s challenges or take a longer term approach and track measures that will help detect and solve future problems.
For example, if you are having current issues with evaluating the size of your police force, you would probably want to track the following measures:
- Number of police calls for service
- Average response time for emergency calls
- Overtime hours
Conversely, if you have increasing costs in your fire department, a common solution is to consider a shared services arrangement. You will be better prepared to make current and future decisions regarding this by tracking these measures:
- Number of calls responded to…