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HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 07/20/1999 t COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES July 20, 1999 COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Leona Orr, Sandy Amodt, Tom Brotherton, Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Judy Woods, Rico Yingling STAFF PRESENT: Linda Birdsall, Jim Harris, Brent McFall, Dena Laurent, John Hodgson, Jed Aldridge, Sue Viseth, Tom Brubaker,Norm Angelo, Don Wickstrom PUBLIC PRESENT: John Baker, Joan Stolt, Steve Kato, Doug Easter, Anna Ximines, I. David Daniels Diversity Advisory Board Update Dave Daniels, Diversity Board Member—This is actually our first opportunity as a board to, in a formal open public type setting,tell you some of the things we're doing. Before I talk a little bit about that there are a number of our board members that are present in the audience: Anna Ximines, Doug Easter, Joan Stolt. And we do have two other members that aren't here. One's in China, and another who's not present tonight as well but you have kind of an overlay. What we tried to do over these past few months is kind of lay a foundation to try to help with the city on its work with diversity in general and lay a foundation for years to come. As a society it took us 200 years to get to where we are and we aren't going to change it overnight. But any • steps that we can make in a positive direction, we feel have value. So what we've tried to do is develop a mission statement for the board itself. One of the driving forces behind the task force itself as far as making it function, came in to work with us to develop a work plan, a mission statement, guidance principles and those types of things. So again, although we're brand new, we haven't been just spinning our wheels. We think we've laid a really good foundation for where we're going as a board. There is the mission statement, guiding principles, some governments agreements that we have come up with as far as how we're going to run our meetings and those types of things, and we're ready to go out and start getting somQ feedback from the community itself. What we've done to date is planning, taking our points of perspective and putting information on the table, trying to lay this foundation. But we feel the foundation is laid now and we want to get or give an opportunity for the community to have something to say about this whole issue. And so we've planned in the month of September"Unity in the Community, A Community Conversation". And what that is is an opportunity for folks to come together and have a conversation about this issue we call diversity. What does that mean to them? What do they see as some of the issues in the City of Kent? Some things they'd like to see done. Some things that they see are working quite well that they want to see more efforts. Just those types of things, because we feel that we represent or we are there to represent the community but we're only seven folks and there are a lot of other people out there and a lot of other very interesting and challenging ideas and we need to get that input before we march off and try to slay this dragon that we call diversity. So we thought it was a good opportunity to kind of bring some of those perspectives in so we're developing a list of folks we're going to invite. . We're gonna try to keep it fairly small this year. Although if we set the dragnet out,we probably will get hundreds of folks showing up, but we thought for the first year to try to keep it as a small manageable group. We're going to try to involve of course the Diversity Task Force and some folks in the religious organization community because we're not just looking for churches we're looking for synagogues and mosques and all different types of religious organizations throughout the community, and perhaps some city employees, and some folks involved with the school distric's diversity efforts. So those are some of the groups that we've identified as targets and we'll solidify that here in the next couple of weeks and send out some invitations. You'll probably even be invited as a matter of fact. So that's kind of where we're going so far and again the whole point of that is to get this feedback and to look at the information and input from the folks who actually receive services from the city. Now we can start laying the next floor on that foundation that we built. We may find that there are some folks out there who've never had this opportunity or maybe they didn't think they had the opportunity but we want folks to know that Kent really does care and that this is an opportunity for them to come and be heard, to share, and to have some dialogue with us. So that's basically where we are so far. Councilmember Rico Yingling—I know one of the items on the agenda was diversity training and I know that that's going really well and there's really good reviews on that. I just wondered about the if there's anything else to be said for the other things that were on the list of recommendations for the Board. • Employee Services Director Sue Viseth—Maybe I can speak to that a little. Certainly training was one of the areas that the Mayor's Multicultural Task Force identified in recreation. We have three more sessions to go and we want all 700 plus employees in the City of to receive the one full day of training. Managers and supervisors and department directors will receive two full days of training—one day specifically dedicated to managing and supervising diverse work force. Other recommendations were around recruitment, outreach efforts. Jed as you know is our new Employment Manager and has been tasked with monitoring that. Putting together reports that we'll be able to share with you is one of the things in your ordinance that established the board. You asked to have a report annually. October is the board's annual meeting and so we, as staff, will be providing the board with kind of a staff annual report -progress we're making in terms of the organization of our outreach efforts for recruitment. And then the board also will add to that their efforts in community conversation and the work plan that they'll develop for the year 2000 and beyond. Also the consulting firm that we've contracted with for the training started by interviewing many employees throughout the city in varying diverse groups and they've identified some potential policy areas that we need to look at and they're going to be giving some feedback at the end of the training session to help us identify for the year 2000 and beyond, additional training and maybe some policies that we need to look at modifying. Performance Measures Proiect. Director of Operations Brent McFall—Well I'm just gonna do a quick introduction and turn things over to John Baker. But just by way of reminder to the council, one of the things that you had identified for us in your target issue process a couple of years ago,was increasing utilization performance measures, and as we talked about before, we've been collecting a lot of raw data for a long time and so what we intended to have was a lot of real good volume and kinds of information. But that's all it told us, really,was how much it was something we did. It didn't put it into any kind of information that was really useful to us as a management tool to say okay, so what does that mean? And so I think with a little bit of kick in the pants from the council to get us moving on this, we have moved ahead on the whole issue of performance measure to try and get us to a point of having performance measures that we can utilize that are more meaningful for council policy level, more meaning for us as managers at the management level, and will help us continue to improve the organization on an ongoing basis. We did this year's budgets and funds to contract for some assistance in developing our performance measure program and we were fortunate to select Management Partners,who really, I think, are one of the foremost firms in the country working with municipalities on the issue of performance measure, and so they have came in and worked with our staff. They've done training and worked with us on developing some sort of the first cut of performance measures and that are designed to work with us. That's sort of the highest management level. And there's such little things below that level that support this that are performance measurement oriented as well. • With that, I think I'm gonna turn it over to John Baker who is the President of Management Partners and he's with us this evening to give you a presentation on what we've developed and where we're going with it from here. And then I'm sure that John is happy to answer questions. Ann is one of our project managers and she's here and she will be happy to have a dialogue with you about this. Let me turn over to John Baker. John Baker—Thank you Madame Chair and members of the council. My name is John Baker and I am not going to repeat the entire report that was sent out to you last week but what I want to do is kind of give an overview and maybe in some cases a little bit of philosophy so that it put performance measurement in context of what you do when you operate a city that is as diverse as Kent. Listening to the previous conversation and diversity, there's not only diversity in the work force but there's diversity in the number of services and, as a former city manager, I always used to think that people in the private sector would say why don't you run this more like a business? And what performance measurement is is really somewhat doing that. But when you look at what a city is, I don't think there's one resident that really said when you started looking at it, would say run it like a business because businesses usually talk about bottom line and often in government that's not what people want. They want service. And they'll only talk about the bottom line when they don't get the service, so we're in a different business and you've got a police business, a fire business, a park business, a public works business, and administration. So you've got a number of businesses that you're trying to run and be the board supervisors or the board of directors for that business and so it becomes a lot more difficult in terms of operating that in the context of being in the fishbowl and operating service itself. • I want to make sure I give you a little bit of an overview in terms of how we go about looking at performance measures, how your city has gone about looking at those measures. So first of all, your goals that you stated when you went out with the proposal were to train managers in the concepts of performance measurements. Often people are reduced to looking at what really are workload measures. How many of widgets did we create, and that's really not measuring how well the widget was developed or how much it cost us, so we had to go through and do a training. You wanted to track ongoing performance with emphasis on outcomes. In other words, enough training people and tracking performance to look at the service and say were we achieving what those outcomes were when we set up the service in the first place, which some of them go back maybe 100 years. Incorporate customer satisfaction. As a firm we are real big believers in this. When you're in a service organization, you go and ask people how are we doing? And so customer satisfaction, be it external when you ask the people that get the service, or internal for your support departments when they provide services to the other departments, you want to know how well does the customer view the service? What kind customer satisfaction do you get? You want to develop communication mechanism for stakeholders. That means some method of reporting. I want to put performance measurement in context of everything that the city has to do. I mean as you can see by the chart,performance measurement is really only one piece of a real complex matrix of things that you've got to put together in terms of operating the organization. You've got state laws. You've got city charters. You've got codes. You've got administrative manuals that all dictate to your staff how they should do things. Then you put together, in many cases, strategic plans. What's our goal? What do we want to achieve as a city and then as an . organization within the city moving towards those goals? You have an organizational structure in and of itself that dictates a lot of how you're gonna operate. You've got your financial management system, which is in your budget, your CRP, your capital improvement programs, your reports coming into your financial management system, your tools. Personnel Management—1 can't overemphasize this. You have labor contracts. Often they dictate how you're going to do things. For example, in talking with your Police Department when we were going through this, you have a Police Department that runs a 410. I just got through doing some negotiations with a city in California where they have a 312. City council tried to get it back because of the implications of that 312 program on their ability to do police and services, and the police officers, if there was one thing they were not going to give up of anything they were doing, it was the 312 program. So those things can become a very big impact in terms of how you're trying to provide a service. And you have work programs and work plans, but performance measurement only relates to the programmatic aspect of what you're doing. Something that you can measure repetitively. Projects are separate things, and I'll come back to them. Then you had just your regular communications that you want so these are just kind of a real thumbnail of things that are out there that when you're operating a city, and the administration is operating and telling the people, and having them do things, these are all the things that go into impacting how the city will do business, and performance measurement is just one piece of that total management system that you've got to have in order to make the city run properly. . Our approach to when we did this—we wanted to make sure that we developed common expectations. So we brought it and talked with the department heads first and said, okay, this is where we're going. Gave some development of what it is to do performance measurement and the kinds of things that we want to make sure that they knew, that we focused the measures on what's important. A lot of times you'll measure the things that are easy to measure. But it's not real important in terms of what the community, the council, the management wants to know. You got to make sure that what you measure is what's important. You want to develop a strong base in the department for how to do performance measurement. We preached over and over there's got to be a sensitivity to data collection. If you measure a lot of things, you're going to be doing nothing but collecting data and not providing the service that is necessary that you want. So, you've got to make sure that you've got a system that will allow you to collect the data. If you do cycle time, in other words,when does something start,when does it stop, and you do it by tick marks and stopwatch, you can see that if you have a very energetic program with lots of tick marks and lots of stopwatches (and then averaging), it's going to be horrendous in terms of getting to the result of terms of your program. So you want to be very careful. You want to foster continuous improvement. In other words, by measuring, you get a statistic that you can then say okay, how can we improve on that statistic, whatever it might be? Whether it's a customer satisfaction or a dollar figure or a number of staff people it takes to do something, you want to always foster something that will move along and continue to improve. Provide an impetus to managers that they will improve. And we wanted to make sure people knew the difference between projects and programs. We came in and did three days of staff training that went across the city in terms of developing concepts of performance measurement and then we talked about the difference between projects and programs. We developed a format for them to collect the data, which is different than the format that you've got in the book, which is the reporting format but has some major similarities. We wanted to develop then a program definition with them. So what we did was we trained them on the concepts and then we came back and worked with them in terms of starting to say okay, let's define what your programs really are, because there's a tendency to mix people. A program has to be something that you've got a group of people working on that you can then measure what that group of people is doing, and come out with a conclusion as to the outcome, whether it be a satisfaction measure, a quality measure, or a cost measure. So we worked through with departments program definitions. Then we went about working with the individual departments to develop measures and we said three things. Ok,what's important to the policy makers, the mayor and city council,what's important to the community,what's important to the managers that are running the program. Lets not measure stuff that's not important. What's your capacity to collect the date and I've already made a comment about that, that we just keep hammering that home. If you can't collect the data in a fairly efficient way, then we should go about trying to find another way of measuring something to get at the program that you think is important. Don't try to collect too much, too early. Our experience and it's especially true, we've worked with the ICMA (International City Managers Association) in developing measures on a nationwide basis for now • 125 cities, and what we've found is if we started and went too far into a program and had too • many measures going that the agencies out there tended to turn off. Too much work. Too much work load that they were getting, so we want to make sure that your agency didn't try to do too much too early which would have the possibility of people here turning off or getting bad data out of the ones that you are measuring. So we want to be very careful we don't do too much, too early, and then as we went through thinking about what comparisons we might make in other agencies using our experience,primarily from the ICMA project with the other cities that we've been dealing with in terms of developing measures. All right, now the difference between projects and programs. Projects are what policy makers and top level managers tend to focus on. You're building a new city hall. It's very important to you what's going on. What's the progress? Are you on time? Are you on budget? Are you building it right? Is it going to fall down in the earthquake, whatever those things might be and so those are the things that people tend to focus on. They're the major"to do" elements. If you were to look at a work plan of most managers, you would find that most of them are things that are project oriented. That they've got to complete. They have a beginning time, they have an ending time. They have a dollar budget, they have a quality expectation, and they should be measured in that way. But they're not a program that has repetitiveness. So they need to be separated out and managed separately. Are they meeting the milestones? Are they on schedule? Are they within the project budget? Programs on the other hand are the basic services, they're the patrol officers that are out there day to day, they're the fire fighters that respond to a medical emergency and fires. They're the people who go out and fill out the potholes and pave the streets and redo the sidewalks and mow • the lawns in the parks and take care of the greens at the golf course - every day. Day in and day out they are doing those things and we start looking at them saying okay,what are the things that we measure about those that are important to the community, the mayor and council, and the managers. They are, generally speaking, a group of people working together to accomplish some kind of a goal. They're repetitive actions that provide for a comparison from one year to the next. They provide ultimately for a comparison from one agency to another in terms of kind of services to be provided—the length the project exists to improve the efficiency of a city program. And then the program performance measures ultimately are reflected by the success of the project. You want a more effective city staff and you don't want to have them in 13 buildings around town. You build a city hall, you put them together. They should be more efficient in terms of interactions and of the passing of paperwork and stuff. But the building of the city hall began. It's a project. It's not something that you're gonna measure next year so you measure it in a different way. Reporting—it should assist policy makers in making future program decisions and goal setting. It should develop a sense of continuous improvement with the manager of a program always looking and saying okay, based on what I did last year, if I do this, I can measure next year and see if I've improved on my cost,on my cycle time, whatever it might be. It shouldn't be used to micro manage departmental functions. The measures that we put into the report that we are showing you this evening are measures that we felt, when we went through the departments, were important that the council and the community know about. But the idea isn't that then you start micro managing because then we would have several managers. The idea is that you've got . to measure a departmental manager,not necessarily the department head but a manager of that • program who should be the one that's held accountable for that program and doing the continuous improvement. They should be ones that are micro managing their own functions. And a reporting program should communicate work activities. In the book we have provided a format. I did not put it in the same format on the screen because it didn't come out looking as good as it should, so I'm just going to go through there. So we've given you a reporting format which will say okay, first is the purpose which is to state the goal or the objective of the program that is being measured. Two—then we put in effectiveness, which is the quality of the service-cycle time, customer satisfaction. Those are the things that in my experience are the most important things to the community. I've given an example to people in the past when I've been doing this training: when I was a manager, we were taking over from the county a building next door to our city hall which was an old city jail which we were going to tear out, and it was a beautiful old, old building which we were going to make into city offices. And I got an estimate from the Public Works Director and I won't tell you the exact dollar amount but he gave me a dollar figure, and he said this is the dollar figure we think it will take to fix this building. By the time we got to actually opening the doors, the price had doubled and I'm here like this, tearing my hair,thinking, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, and he came in and he said, John if you do it right, they won't ask you how much it cost. Because that's what they expect—it to be done right. And he was right. Now, I wouldn't say that he should do that every time and have buildings cost double what he thought they would, but the point being is that's what people tend to look at and say it's the quality of the service. And then they'll start looking at what it costs. But they want quality first. • Efficiency is the next thing which says how well did you use the resources. You've got the quality now, what was the efficiency in terms of how well you used the resources. If you've got a high rating in police response,what's it costing us to do that response and is there a way we can cut that cost and keep the quality. That's the idea of efficiency. Workload in there, it really doesn't measure. It tells you the number of activities. For example,the crime rate per thousand or number of fires per thousand population or the number of potholes we fixed. It just gives you a number. It's a widget thing. Or it could be the request from the citizens, received complaints about the police department—it's just a number. But it really doesn't tell you anything about quality or efficiency in terms of what your program's about. But there are a number of things that council members and community are still interested in—how many new houses did we build this last year? And so you want to know the number of building permits that were taken out, residential, industrial, commercial, and all those things. So our recommendation is that there is some key measure or key workload counts that should be put in. But remember, it doesn't tell you how well your staff did in dealing with those houses. It doesn't tell me whether they did good inspections or that people thought that they were on time or anything about that. When you get the measurement, it should be looked at as a what and then if there is a diversion or a sudden spike in terns of dissatisfaction, or a sudden down in terms of numbers of things that have been completed, then you say why, and a good manager will have already provided that because at the bottom of our form, it says comments and you start telling people what happened with the report so you say our satisfaction level went from this to this over the year's period but • you know here was the factor that was in there. You have to decide as the policy making body whether that is sufficient or not. The program is the responsibility of the program manager who is then responsible to a department head and that's where you start saying there's an accountability. If things change with the spikes, it's the manager that's responsible to see that the staff below them are performing the way they're expected to. The last item that we put on the form is that piece that I talked about, which projects? because a lot of the things that you're gonna want to know about in that relate to a program and you may do these by program and you may do them department. That's up to you to decide how that's done. If you did them by program, it may give you too disjointed a process, but the idea is to put in those one time activities and give a report to the council and to the community also in terms of what's happening with those few projects within a department or within a program. So if the Public Works Department is doing a major street reconstruction or if they're building new bridges or building a new city hall or whatever it might be that that would be reported on as a part of the reporting process so that you end up putting the programs and projects together when you report them out. Because frankly I don't think the community is going to differentiate between them, so there's got to be something that tells them what's happening with those items, because they tend to focus also on things that are the projects. Then on the form, we talk about prior year and current year, and this is just the means of comparing one year to the next. In your first year in the forms that you've got, there's going to be a varying amount of information depending on the program, and what I'm trying to say is that there are some departments that collect a lot of information now that they're going to be able to report on in a year's time over a year's time. Some people are starting brand new with data • collection and they're going to find some refinements will be needed so that you won't see in some cases information that's compared to last year and other cases you're going to see just the base year information going in because they haven't collected it before. They haven't done surveys on certain things before. So they're not going to be able to report to you with any accuracy, and you're only going to see one year of figures. It will not be until the second year that you start seeing comparisons and in some cases you're going to probably see some of that change as they do the refinements and say what's more important is that we do this, and then they're going to come back and say we need to change this measure a little bit this way in order to get a more accurate picture, or we couldn't really collect the data. We had to do the tick marks and when we got to 500,000 tick marks, we said you know that's really too much, we had too many people doing tick marks and not doing the work. Benchmarking is the process of comparing like services with other agencies for the purposes of achieving a better product. We try to emphasize that it shouldn't be a comparison to say who's better than whom because the likelihood is that no other city is doing things just like you are. I don't care which service it is. I mean you do jails. And lots of people don't do jails and there may be some things that you don't get perfect comparisons. But the idea of benchmarking is to find as close a thing as you can and then do a comparison from one year to the next and say okay, why was Bellevue able to do the following level of costwise, qualitywise, whatever it might be, and we got this. The idea is that the manager of that program will have a name of somebody they can call and say what are you doing, we're doing the following. This is the what. Then you go to the why. And you may find out well,but the council doesn't want to do that. They want us to do the following kinds of things. So, as a result, you know the comparison tells you there's a difference, but you're not going to borrow from Bellevue because the circumstances were such that you didn't want to. You may say that's the best idea that's ever hit and we should borrow it from Bellevue. So the idea is to use the measurements and get like measurements across so that when you're using them, you're comparing apples and apples as much as possible. I happened to be working in a city in California a couple of years ago when Bellevue was one of the cities surveyed and they told me, because they knew we were doing performance measurement for ICMA, that they were real worried about it because of the types of questions being asked and they were unclear as to how their data was going to be used and what kind of measurements would come out of it. And low and behold, some of them that came back because they got copies of the survey back, there were interpretations made and that kind of stuff so you really want to get something that is good across the board that everybody's doing. ICMA has worked very hard to get to common definitions. But I'll tell you, some of their services are that deep because they were being very careful not to get to far into it and get to the point where people would not provide the data. The areas where you get the best data is Public Works because of the maintenance management system that public works people have developed. Twenty years ago I did it in Oakland. Police and Fire. Those are the people that have done the best measurement over the years. You got the federal people, the FBI, and your state agencies relating to fire and such that have had people collect data with regard to numbers of fires, type of structures, all that kind of stuff. Public works people have done a lot of stuff on pavement, on water, and that kind of stuff, so that you'll find better information there than you will in some of the other areas in the process that's in the ICMA stuff. Rico Yingling remarked that one of the things that's important to us on the Council is that when we create policy or ordinances or anything that is a high level policy type of item, that it be eventually implemented and pursued and made law or become an action item within the staff within the city. I didn't see any measures of that. I mean that process of creating policy and then having it become an actionable behavior by the city or ordinance or law or that type of thing. Is there a process there? It'd be good to see performance measures in that regard. The meeting was adjourned.