As mayor, city manager, or an executive of the city administration, you have no ambiguities about the fact that your residents will demand services ranging from public transportation, sanitation, safer streets, playgrounds, housing, clean water, economic development, emergency services to public utilities and even zoos. Inevitably, not only do residents demand service delivery they also care about the quality and quantity of the service.
As a result, of budget constraints and limited resources which have always existed, there is the need for prudent management practices to ensure that the cities achieve more with what they have. Inarguably, every resident’s request is important, but not all requests can be satisfied, so setting priorities and targets are necessary to improve service delivery for everyone. Hence, performance management has become important to hold managers accountable.
Cities across the country have embraced the concept of performance management otherwise referred to as PerformanceStat, a process of setting goals, identifying metrics, assessing performance, and evaluating employees’ performance and program outcomes to inform decision making. PerformanceStat is a continuous process where city government executives work with their staff to deliver results to city residents. Today, managers are focused on leveraging data, analysis, responsibility, discretion, and power to convene follow-ups to improve performance with the various Stat models.
Performance management presents tremendous value to the city administration and here are 30 reasons your city should consider establishing a Stat program:
- Enhances the effectiveness of city governance and helps the city to accomplish its goals and objectives.
- Provides opportunities for departments to communicate constraints to executives and negotiate solutions.
- Promotes rapid deployment of resources and direct focus to areas that can ensure big wins for the city.
- Promotes government accountability, transparency and responsiveness.
- Offers opportunities for capacity development for senior management, managers and staff.
- Provides avenues for residents to engage and learn of how their tax dollars are managed to deliver service.
- Ensures the setting of performance standards and benchmarks for managers.
- Encourages tactical problem solving, process improvement and proactive solutions to maximizing residents experience.
- Increase communication between agencies, departments and residents.
- Provides executives with a an effective tool to increase responsibility in senior management by setting performance targets and tracking progress against those targets.
- Allows for the setting of clear expectations from senior managers, managers and senior staff.
- Provides direction and pathways for managers to adapt to maximizing their performance and helping them to monitor the progress of their staff as well.
- Provides opportunities for the removal of barriers to improving productivity.
- Helps managers to become more aware of targets and expectations relating to the needs of the city.
- Facilitates the process of identifying resources, training and logistics necessary for managers to achieve city objectives.
- Allows for the measuring of progress helping managers to understand how they are doing and what they should be doing to improve outcomes for city residents.
- Improves productivity, maximizes results and enhances efficient use of resources.
- Promotes and facilitates communication between city executives, managers and staff.
- Ensures that city staff understand the importance of their contribution to achieving city objectives.
- Provides opportunities for recognizing and rewarding dedicated managers.
- Enhances teamwork, and increase staff productivity while improving collective accountability and responsibility.
- Identifies problems at their early stages and addresses them before they get out of control.
- Promotes efficient use of time, money, and resources.
- Allows for an opportunity to provide feedback to managers to better align their strength and competencies to improve work outcomes.
- Helps to better communicate city strategic goals and priorities to managers and promote understanding of what needs to be done at specified periods.
- Enables open conversation between executives, managers and staff about city priorities and promote harmony in a manner that contributes to achieving city objectives.
- Enables city executive to increase quality of service and improved value to residents.
- Helps city managers to better manage scarce resources and drive down cost of operations and management.
- Fosters timely intervention into practices that ensuring that managers stay on track to achieving set targets and results.
- Provides an opportunity for developing management strategies and tactics for achieving performance outcomes.