Saturday, June 27, 2015

Marin [County] grand jury criticizes Civic Center management


Top county officials must tighten a management program that continues to misfire at the Civic Center, generating paperwork that does little to measure efficiency, the county’s civil grand jury concluded.
One key problem: “The grand jury found that department goals do not align with community priorities” that are supposed to drive administrative strategy, the jury concluded.
County Administrator Matthew Hymel was out of the office and not immediately available to comment, but assistant administrators Dan Eilerman and Angela Nicholson said they welcomed the report. “We agree that it is an important program and are planning to update it as part of the implementation of our five-year business plan and our next two-year budget,” the two reported in a statement. “Although we don’t agree with all their findings, we think they have made some good suggestions.”
The county’s “managing for results” process is aimed at systematically ensuring government policies promote goals including a safe, healthy and sustainable community that is focused on environmental preservation and public participation.
But this year’s jury, taking another look at a program that the 2011 jury said needed improvement, said the county administrative strategy still needs work.
VIEWED AS BURDEN
The program’s intention has great merit, the jury noted in “Managing for results: A fine tool in need of sharpening,” because executed correctly it can communicate an organization’s direction, monitor progress toward goals, help invest resources strategically and provide accountability for results.
At the Civic Center, however, most managers the jury talked to are “dismissive of the program, describing it as an administrative burden,” and a resulting report on results posted on the county website “offers little meaningful information to taxpayers,” the jury said.
The panel recommended the county appoint a single executive to be responsible for the program, develop new goals, solicit public opinion, train personnel and provide a website display that provides meaningful information.
The best practices management program should allow employees to “establish goals that measure progress toward achievement of their strategic priorities and thereby use these results to improve performance,” but Marin’s program fails to walk its talk, the jury said. The panel blamed its failure on the county’s “silo” departmental structure, lack of management commitment, lack of resident and business advice and its continuing insistence on superficial goals.
NO AUDIT
As for “silo” government, “the jury found little evidence of using (cross-department) teams to solve problems or investigate improvement.” The jury asserted managers and county supervisors are either not involved or not committed to the program, with some executives viewing it as a waste of time.
Further, ”As it currently exists, managing for results measures routine activities but does not measure effectiveness,” no audit is conducted and training is optional, the jury reported. Local residents, as the consumers of government services, have not been surveyed in six years to provide information critical to the process.
The jury, saying departments have goals that “do not align with community priorities,” noted that objectives include few appropriate metrics: “The safe community goal includes, as an indicator of safety, ‘child support with support orders,’ but has no measurement of crime or accident rates. The healthy community goal references ‘families receiving food stamps,’ but does not reference critical health parameters such as incidence of cancer, cardiopulmonary disease or life expectancy.”
“In addition to the absence of goals that reflect community priorities, many Marin County government departments set goals that are easy to accomplish and measure but achieve little in real progress and list many of the same goals year after year,” the jury noted. “Intended to measure outcomes, these goals instead measure activity or planned events.” County leadership “has apparently condoned this weakness and therefore lost the opportunity to lead an effective approach to continuous improvement,” the panel concluded. After reviewing 98 “effectiveness measures” in a 2014-15 managing for results annual report, “the grand jury found virtually no measures that represent key outcomes for education, transportation, housing, crime, accidents or health care results desired at the community level.”
EXECUTIVE NEEDED
The panel said goals and expected results must be revised to create “relevant outcomes that can be measured.” It observed that rather than challenge departments with strategic improvement oriented metrics, “the county allowed use of many activity measures that do not measure anything meaningful.”
It urged the Board of Supervisors to appoint an executive to overhaul the program.
The report follows a 2011 jury report on the program that said the county had made little effort to keep abreast of industry “best practices” and cited a lack of data analysis, system audits and department head accountability, as well as an inefficient management structure. The panel said one key was getting county supervisors more engaged “by holding all department leaders more accountable for the results achieved in their areas of responsibility.”
At the time, County Administrator Hymel said he welcomed the advice, calling it thoughtful and adding the county is “committed to making evidence-based decisions that focus on the best outcomes for our residents.”
June 26, 2015
Marin Independent Journal
By Nels Johnson

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