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
No comments:
Post a Comment