We’re excited that our Founder and CEO, Marv Weidner, has started sharing some of his thoughts and expertise in short videos. We’ll be posting these here and at marvweidner.com as we do them, and we hope you find them useful.
Marv’s a pretty sharp guy, and in 20 years of working in state government in Iowa, he learned all of three things. Here, he talks about the first thing he learned:
Our long-time friend and consulting partner Carla Penny volunteers actively around animal welfare issues, and has some thoughts to share about how performance measurement can drive better results -
Defining an organizational mission and correctly identifying performance measures are all too often treated as complying with a bureaucratic requirement. This is unfortunate. Good measures have the potential to seriously impact the problems organizations are trying to solve for their customers. By engaging and focusing the agency’s and the community’s attention on the whole story, they are better able to do the right things that
make a difference.
One case in point is Animal Services. There are few issues more likely to ignite passions and controversy in parts of a community than the euthanasia of companion animals at the local animal care and control shelter. Open-intake shelters are statutorily required to accept all comers and usually implement a range of services to reduce euthanasia through preventive programs (licensing, spay/neuter, education, feral trap-neuter-release, etc.) as well as placement/retention programs (foster, adoption, behavior training, etc.).
Strategies such as these address both the supply and the demand sides of pet overpopulation and, when successful, will ultimately lead to fewer animals euthanized in shelters. The shelter euthanasia rate, therefore, is a good, all-round reflection of shelter success at decreasing intake as well as achieving live outcomes through adoption, etc. However, when the euthanasia rate measure eclipses other important information, it not only distorts the picture but can lead to misplacement of resources and even perpetration of greater harm to animals.
So what are good measures for animal shelters? The answer is “it depends.” The particular selection of performance measures should be determined by how the agency defines its mission, what the community is concerned about, the agency’s ability to collect data, existing and potential strategies and their intent, the precise nature of local practices that encourage pet overpopulation, etc.
At a minimum, animal services organizations should consider additional performance measures that will help provide a more complete view into operations. These may include:
In addition to telling a richer story, each of the measures has the potential to affect staff behavior. What, for example, might be the impact on animal care staff if “% of animals contracting illness in the shelter” were a measure that was reported and discussed in monthly staff meetings? Would hygiene practices for cage cleaning be improved?
The bottom line is that shelters must choose the story that needs to be understood by staff, decision-makers and stakeholders and then create the measures that will reveal that story.
Our April 2010 webinar featured Long Beach Animal Services and their remarkable story of manaing for results to drive change in an agency in crisis. You can see the presentation materials from that webinar by clicking here.
From Marv, our CEO and Founder –
I’ve been sharing recently the Key Principles that drive our work as a company.
They’re simple and clear to state – and extremely powerful put into action.
The First Principle, though not popular in some quarters these days, is absolutely true: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.
The Second Principle came into focus for me when we took on reforming welfare in the State of Iowa: If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.
The Third Principle came to me while I served Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as his Director of Policy and Strategic Planning in 1993-1998. Gretchen Tegeler, my boss and the Director of the Office of Management, gave me the task of building an integrated management system that better focused Iowa State Government on results. Gretchen was on the Welfare Reform Council, so she experienced first hand what can happen when Government focuses on results.
The Third Principle is:
Customers experience better results and government is much more ‘on purpose’ when government focuses on results in everything you do – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, reporting, employee performance and collaboration.
Over those years in Iowa, we fundamentally changed and integrated our strategic planning, budgeting and performance measurement efforts to focus more on results.
We ended up in some good places, but we didn’t start out that way.
For my first review of the 20+ strategic plans for State Departments, I spread them all out on the floor of my office. I got down on the floor with a legal pad and started
counting which goals were focused on the customer — and which ones were instead focused on, or stated in terms of, what the government itself would experience.
The score was 9-1 – State Government has it. Customers lose! Government wins!
No kidding – only 1 out of 10 goals was stated in terms of what the customer would experience. That pretty much defined the cultural problem we were facing.
Managing for Results was born from the failure of government to focus on its customers. What we discovered is that it is possible to integrate your essential management systems – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, employee performance, and to align operational performance with strategic goals. Budgeting for Results was born in Iowa in the early 1990s as we integrated Results Performance measures into the State Budget. Department Strategic plans began focusing on measurable results for their customers.
We created the Governor’s Leadership Agenda (which was Gretchen’s idea) which included 20 Strategic Results around which interdepartmental collaboration was directed. Each quarter, the department directors who were responsible for achieving the Governor’s Strategic Results met with the Governor to report on the measurable progress made to date and the interdepartmental plans they had for making continuous progress going forward.
Likewise, to reinforce the culture, Governor Branstad began asking about Results and Cost in his budget and policy meetings with Department Directors. Nothing sends a message about what is really important more than the questions asked by the Boss.
All this to get State Government focused on its core results, or purpose, for customers.
In our work with our customers over the past 12 years, we’ve seen repeated examples of the remarkable power that comes from aligning your systems around results for customers. Instead of having to battle your management systems, when those systems align around results for customers, the multiplier effect is very real and the impact is substantial.
We know, and our customers show every day, the power of putting these three Key Principles to work. In these times of restricted resources, continuing erosion in faith in government, and economic uncertainty, we know these Principles are more important than ever to making government work:
If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.
If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.
Customers experience better results and government is much more ‘on purpose’ when government focuses on results in everything you do – planning, budgeting, performance measurement, reporting, employee performance and collaboration.
From Marv, our CEO and Founder –
I recently shared the First Principle that drives everything we do as a company: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.
The Second Principle came into focus for me when, as the Administrator of Economic Assistance – that is, of welfare programs – for the State of Iowa, we took on reforming and fixing that complex, controversial system:
Principle Two: If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.
When we started working on Welfare Reform in Iowa we initially thought that the “right” result we were after was helping people out of the welfare system. Following that as our goal, we developed policies and practices that would have achieved the goal in fairly short order.
But we knew something was wrong – we didn’t like the picture we were painting. All kinds of ideas were considered, some reasonable, some bordering on perverse – like sending welfare receiving families to other states. The conversation became about one result, and one result only – lowering costs of public assistance.
But just getting families off of welfare had little to do with the original reasons for public welfare in the first place: to keep families from spiraling into poverty.
I can remember the conversation like it was yesterday. The Welfare Reform Council we had put together was considering the direction this result was leading us and they didn’t like it much. Tom Glen, the Labor representative on the Council, said it first:
“We’re focused on the wrong result. Its not about getting people out of the welfare system – it’s about getting people out of poverty.”
The other members of the Council agreed, and the entire initiative shifted. From that point forward, the policies and practices we developed were focused – not on getting families off of welfare – but on “giving people a ladder out of poverty and a way to reconnect with their communities.”
And because we were focused on the right result, our strategies shifted to support that result. We developed asset development policies. We changed our economic development policies. We created a state-wide system of workforce development centers focused on making it easier for low income families to reconnect with the workforce. We developed social contracts between the State and recipient families that set out what each would do by when to become self-sufficient. We provided extended child care and medical coverage to provide a bridge from welfare to earned income. And the list went on from there.
Iowa’s Welfare Reform initiative was a major success, and this approach was copied by other states and the federal government. It continues today to help families avoid or leave poverty and be full participants in the mainstream of Iowa’s economy and society. And, because we got focused on the right result, welfare recipient heads of household continued to fuel the broader economic and workforce goals held by subsequent Governors.
And because we focused on the right results, our customers experienced the right results.
One of the great privileges of the work we do is to help dedicated public servants become extremely clear about the right results for their customers. With that clarity, time and talent can be focused on delivering the best results for their customers. Whether it was Maricopa County, AZ, saving more than $25 million in one year on indigent health care costs, or Animal Care Services in Long Beach, CA, moving from crisis to triumph, again and again we have seen this truth:
If government focuses on the right result, the right results will happen for the customers of government services.
I had lunch with an old friend recently where we discussed all of the large and significant forces dragging at the work of government at all levels these days. I was a little surprised when my friend looked at me and asked, “Given all of that, are you sure you still want governments as customers?”
My answer: Absolutely! In fact, we know that the work we do is now more important that ever. There are three key ideas at the heart of what we do in Managing For Results – three core beliefs that drive everything we do in our organization – that make what we do more relevant and essential than it has ever been. I’ll talk about all three of those principles in upcoming blog posts, but here’s the first:
Principle One: If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.
It’s not an idea wedded to any particular political perspective. It’s not an idea popular with some who would believe government can’t make a difference. But we know it to be absolutely true – and to be what customers expect government to do for them.
During my 20 years in state government in Iowa, one of my jobs was as first the Manager, then the Director, of Iowa’s successful Refugee Resettlement efforts. This initiative, begun under Governor Robert Ray in 1979 and continued under Governor Terry Branstad, resettled more than 10,000 refugees, mostly from Southeast Asia, over 10 years.
Sometime around year six the U.S. State Department declared Iowa’s Refugee Program the most successful in the nation. Lofty praise does not come easily or often from Foggy Bottom, and in this case it came for one reason: more so than in any other state, Iowa was exceptionally successful in helping refugee families become economically self-sufficient. At one point, the program boasted that more than 90% of the refugee families resettled in Iowa had become economically self-sufficient in the first six months from their arrival on our shores.
This achievement didn’t just happen. We got those results through a relentless focus on the results we wanted to achieve—that the refugee families would develop Economic Self-Sufficiency, Social Self-Reliance, and Family Strength.
Every briefing of the Governor, every report, every staff meeting, every performance measure, every hire we made, every investment in technology, every new program implemented was focused on one or more of these key results.
And it worked.
Both Governors had a larger view – both humanitarian and economic. The humanitarian efforts were inspired and amazing by any standard. At one point we counted more than 15,000 identified volunteers involved in helping refugees achieve one of those three key results.
On a larger economic canvas, Iowa was also fighting for economic stability by diversifying our economy and expanding our workforce to grow the economy. Refugees helped spawn new industries and became the workforce for many others. Today, Iowans with roots in Southeast Asian countries, cultures and work ethics continue to contribute their brains and brawn to help drive the Iowa economy.
We’ve had the privilege time and again over the past 12 years to work with dedicated public servants across the country, and at every level of government, to help provide them with the tools and system they needed to influence results. We’ve seen their own relentless focus change things for the better – making their communities safer, healthier, and better places to live, and making their governments more efficient and effective in a variety of ways. So we know, with certainty:
If government relentlessly focuses on results, it can and will make a difference in the lives of its customers.
We were pleased to be able to use our April webinar to feature a compelling story of an organization that is using a focus on results for customers to accomplish an amazing turnaround. John Keisler is the Manager of Animal Care Services for the City of Long Beach, CA, and, with his Chief of Operations Michelle Quigley, they shared their success and the valuable lessons they have put to work to make it happen.
We asked Kate Blunt, one of our Senior Consultants, to share her expertise on the importance of citizen surveys – and the keys to making them successful. Kate spent more than 20 years as a Senior Executive with the federal government, most recently as the Director of Strategic Planning at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. While there she established on
e of the best customer feedback programs in the federal government using the results to initiate innovative customer service delivery improvements including measuring and improving internal service. Kate is credited as the architect and leader of a corporate-wide culture change at PBGC resulting in some of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the federal government.
State and local governments across the country are struggling to balance budgets in the face of an economic slowdown and maintain service levels. They are facing a number of difficult decisions about how to allocate scarce resources across an array of public programs and services: what programs to improve; what to de-emphasize; how will citizens react?
Citizens can best identify which areas of government are functioning well and which areas need improvement. They can also be instrumental in identifying how best to improve quality and efficiency. They will give you clues about where you should invest scarce resources to do the most good. In these difficult times, citizen satisfaction measurement programs can be valuable tools for government agencies to better Manage for Results.
The concept of citizen-centered performance measurement is not new to the public sector. Since 1994, federal agencies have collected and used citizen satisfaction information to improve the delivery of services including everything from the issuing of benefit checks and providing park services to collecting taxes. Last year, Cobalt Community Research in partnership with the CFI Group conducted a national citizens’ survey measuring satisfaction with state and local governments. You can review the results of the Cobalt Citizen Satisfaction Study by clicking here; scroll down to “The Cobalt Citizen Satisfaction Survey.” You may be required to register with the site to download the report.
A number of state and local governments collect and publish data on resident needs and opinions about service delivery. The benefits of doing so include raising citizens’ trust and engagement, enhancing the credibility of the government entity, and having the ability to measure and track how actions taken impact citizens. Well-framed citizen surveys also provide the opportunity to determine where cost cuts, given the current economic climate, will cause the least pain.
The biggest challenges for most existing programs are expense, demand on limited staff time, measurement quality and getting actionable data.
Getting your money’s worth out of a citizen satisfaction survey
Collect actionable data. Before fielding any survey, know in advance how you will use the survey data. If you are not going to use the data, do not ask the question. What’s the goal? In these difficult times it is not enough to use survey results as public relations tools. Use the information from citizens to identify your most important services and to focus improvement efforts. Determining the most effective allocation of resources for performance improvement that delivers maximum return on investment is fundamental to any citizen satisfaction measurement program.
Focus. Go for deeper coverage of a few critical elements rather than shallow coverage of many. You will get more bang for the buck if you do.
Survey often, do it cheap, make it easy. Survey citizens at least annually. Contract with a reliable vendor with a good reputation. Study vendor methodology to know what’s best for you and understand how their approach will support budgetary decisions. Realize that prices may vary based on the scope of the study, and that you can get the most basic surveys now for $5000. Keep the survey short and sweet. You want a good response rate.
Put together an internal survey team. The team should include operations staff that have something vested in the results. Use the team to help guide development of the survey, to analyze the survey results and to recommend action based on the survey data.
Use satisfaction scores to measure the success of your entity. Focus staff on citizen expectations vs. internal policies and processes. What citizen satisfaction outcomes do you want? How well are you doing compared with similar public and private entities?
Be transparent. Publish the survey results along with the actions you plan on taking to improve citizen satisfaction.
All too often public officials are left with great one-time insights into citizens’ opinions but no clear guidance on how to translate the information into an effective action plan, and no reliable mechanism to regularly measure progress and benchmark against other similar public entities. Don’t let that happen to you.
Some very big news about changes at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) – the Board of Trustees has ratified a Strategic Plan that included six Priorities and ten Strategic Results all focused on “improving the conditions of Native Hawaiians”.
Created in the 1978 Constitutional Congress, OHA is using its Strategic Plan to fully focus all of its resources on measurable results for Native Hawaiians. As part of the planning process, OHA re-defined its roles as Advocate, Researcher and Asset Manager. This means, according to Clyde Namu’o, OHA Administrator, “We are fully focused on systemic change to improve the conditions of all Native Hawaiians.” Secondly, OHA is completely restructuring itself to fully manifest these three roles and achieve measurable results for all members of the Native Hawaiian community. Hey MFR Surfers – this is world class!
Much is at stake! Native Hawaiians experience much higher rates of chronic diseases, lower success rates in education and lower family incomes than the population of Hawaii as a whole. Some of the numbers around chronic diseases are among the worst in the world.
Through an eight month process, which included a statistically valid survey of nearly 3,000 Native Hawaiians, OHA has developed a Strategic Plan that is the foundation of a full MFR system, which includes integrating planning, budgeting, reporting, employee and contractor performance, decision making, and an integrated research and advocacy service delivery system. Based on new clarity about results and the three primary roles, OHA is now “Re-Organizing for Results.” And they are going top-to-bottom.
Talk about courage! Over the next few weeks, OHA is changing their structure from a topic-based organization, e.g. health, to a functionally organized agency with four Lines of Business: Resource Management, Community Relations, Research, and Advocacy. The new position of COO has been filled by former senior special assistant Stanton Enomoto. Subsequently, LOB and Program managers will be hired in October and November, as well as a Chief Knowledge Officer. This mission-driven organization is reshaping itself around its Strategic Plan and becoming results oriented more quickly than any we have worked with in 11 years and 49 jurisdictions! Note that their courage comes from an urgent sense of mission to achieve results for their own Native Hawaiian community.
The focus on systemic change through advocacy, built on research to develop the best information available, is giving OHA a renewed sense of purpose and direction. On September 23, Haunani Apoliona, OHA Board Chair, and Mr. Namu’o held a press conference announcing the Strategic Plan and the organizational changes. You may find their Strategic Plan on the OHA web site at http://www.oha.org/stratplan/; there is also an hour-long video featuring OHA leaders as well as our very own Marv Weidner you can watch there. You can catch a replay of the press conference at http://www.oha.org/ccn/2009/09/23/.
To see some of the great press coverage of OHA’s Strategic Plan announcement check the editorial published in the Star Bulletin (click here to see it). We would all like to have some of that in our morning paper! Fantastic press.
Folks here at Weidner are proud to be OHA’s consultant for Strategic Planning and MFR organizational and systems alignment. More great stories to come from the land of Aloha!
Goals are common; they are everywhere organizations do strategic planning. Indeed, you may even be asking why Goals are worth a blog entry. (Trust us – read on.)
Goals are an assumed, essential part of strategic planning, and strategic planning is an expected part of a well-managed government organization. In fact, they are so commonplace that government organizations often become unconscious both about the form they take and about the impact they can have on your organization and your customers.
Over 11 years, 45 jurisdictions, hundreds of individual departments and thousands of program teams, Weidner has been in the ring for many a 12 round “title bout” as our customers fight for meaningful Goals. In the very early days in our work with some very well-managed local governments like Austin, we developed what were pretty stock-in-trade strategic planning Goals. Unfortunately for our customers, our own understanding had not evolved at that point past the strategic planning norm that Goals were either:
A) general statements of intention that don’t lead to anything but a good feeling about the status quo, or
B) lists of tasks and strategies which departments surely knew they would and could accomplish.
So in the early days of Managing for Results, the Goals we helped our customers developed held little chance of actually influencing the future – which is, of course, why anyone does strategic planning in the first place.
Then in 2000-2001, Marty (Weidner) applied our own methodology to our own methodology. She started writing Goals as Results – specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused and time limited (yes, SMART Goals, for those of you who know the acronym). These Goals are different, and more powerful. They look like:
** By 200X, 67% of children in foster care in Franklin County will be place in permanent homes within 12 months
** By 20XX, residents of Maricopa County will experience 300+ ‘breathable’ days per year
** By 2007, auto theft rate will be reduced by 20% to 7.8 annually
** By 2008, the part 1 violent crime rate will be reduced by 20% to 3.2 annually.
Charles Curry, the former Budget Officer for the City of Austin and a Weidner lead for Budgeting For Results since his ‘retirement’ in 2001, has taught us what happens when Goals are not written as results. Give an organization a task and it will focus internally to successfully execute the task. Give an organization a strategy and it will execute the strategy. However, give an organization a result to achieve for customers and watch how the experience, wisdom and energy of the organization is released to make sure the customer experiences that result. Many different tasks and strategies may be brought to bear so the customer gets to experience the desired result. The focus is not on getting through the “to do” list – but on ensuring the best results for your customers.
It really does matter how you write Goals. Ask yourself: are our Goals perpetuating the status quo, or are they exciting the organization to higher performance, innovation and creativity – and most importantly, improved customer experience? It really does depend on how they are written.
The clearer you can be about the results you are after, the easier it is for your customer to understand and support your efforts. Likewise, the clearer you can be about the results you seek, the easier it is for everyone – departments and individual employees alike – to align to those results.
We recently watched how this works in Gunnison County, Colorado. Each year, following specific criteria, County Manager Matthew Birnie develops and proposes a Capital Investment Plan (CIP) set of priorities and budget. In the Strategic Plan the Board of County Commissioners developed in 2008, they set forth very clear and specific infrastructure Strategic Results:
Then, in preparation for his 2009 CIP proposed priorities and budget, Birnie modified the criteria to provide additional scoring if a project aligned with the Board’s Strategic Plan. So among many CIP priorities, those aligned to the Board’s Strategic Plan receive the highest score and the highest priority. There is no ambiguity for Marlene Crosby and her Public Works Department – they know their priorities and the expectations are clear. It is a very successful example of how clarity around results produces better results for the community and an aligned organization.
