Improving our system of performance management is key to better accountability, transparency, and effectiveness. We must manage for results, not the amount of resources put into an effort.  Focus should be on the outcome not the input. That way we will be able to know what our city government is accomplishing and how well it is accomplishing the important tasks. The city has worked on developing a system for far too long. We have recently begun to make progress toward establishing good outcome measures.

A good performance management system will help us measure how, and how much, we are progressing toward our community goals. As we periodically review these measures and our results, we must check-in with the public to see if we are still headed in the right direction and doing the right things.

One driving need for increased performance and accountability is the changing landscape at the county, state, and federal levels. As these other levels of government retreat from responsibilities they have previously supported, local governments have no one to pass the buck to. For example, when a county prosecutor says she will no longer prosecute cases involving theft valued less than $10,000, we are left with that responsibility and have little say in the matter, if we think bringing offenders to justice is important.  Actions like these require us to take up the slack without any additional resources. We will see many instances like this in coming years, so we must ensure all work that we do invest time and money doing is aimed at the right things and is effective.

A performance-management approach to budgeting and planning leads to better results and strengthens accountability and transparency of government.  Goals motivate, energize, and focus the efforts of city government.   Measuring performance motivates the organization to achieve the community goals and feedback from measurements can help improve the results.  Lessons learned from measuring performance also improve results across the city.

A good system of goals and performance measurement is a communications tool to the public about priorities and accomplishments. These indicators can bring the public to engage in the conversation about what their city is doing; even if it is to say the direction (goal or performance measure) isn’t the one they would choose or that they are fully behind the direction.    When the community becomes accustomed to the goals and results-based approach, a more robust public discussion can occur about “WHAT” is being done and “HOW WELL" it is being accomplished, because there is data available to indicate that.  That is a healthy debate to have in a democracy.  I hope we can get there to have that debate and ensure we are doing what we want, in the way we want it done.   First, we need to establish a system and work the bugs out of it.