Contemporary forms of government are marked by the rise of indicators, measures, and new metrics to compare, certify, codify and evaluate performance. In many countries, performance measurement has become one of the symbols of the digital transformation of governments. In the U.S., performance management started with the CompStat program in New York City in the 1990s that helped the police department to track crime data to reduce it. This attempt was picked by the Mayor of Baltimore, who expanded the concept to cover other city management challenges in 2000. This program was called CitiStat. Meanwhile, other municipalities, state and county governments, and school districts started to create their Stat programs.
Today, performance management has become an essential part of certain governing organizations. Performance management teams—composed of one to several specialists and data analysts—can be found in budget offices, strategy units, and offices of innovation and accountability. They help various parts of the organization, such as city departments, leverage data to improve internal processes and strategize long and short-term objectives sustainably. Consulting with the organization's leaders, such as senior staff and department heads, and employees, the performance management team establishes metrics that will be used to measure and track performance. The consultation takes place through interviews to understand standard operational procedures, pain points, data practice, and goals. Analyzing this information, the teams communicate performance insights through data visualizations and dashboards and establish a city-wide, cross-departmental performance management program. A performance management team responsibilities can be briefed into the following tasks:
Articulation of organization's vision and mission
Articulation of organizational and intra-organizational goals through consultation with leaders and employees
Identification of Key Performance Indicators (KPI)—aka performance metrics
Establishing a reporting system and dissemination of results
Identification of success, deficiencies, and areas for improvement in internal processes
These tasks are conducted to establish a system for:
Data-driven analysis of organization's performance
Rapid deployment of resources
Relentless follow-up and assessment
Setting a path forward in Syracuse
Mayor's Walsh Performance management initiative started in 2018 at Syracuse, with a commitment to transparently managing city performance through the cascading Objective and Key Result (OKR) framework. An objective is a top priority goal that the city wants to achieve. A Key Result (KR) defines how a department can attain that objective through a specific measurable action within a set time frame. The office of Accountability, Performance, and Innovation (API) designed cascading OKRs to allow the entire organization to create alignment and work together to achieve shared goals.
Syracuse's mission to turn into a growing inclusive city has four pillars.
At Syracuse, the Mayor set four Objectives based on the vision of turning Syracuse into a growing city that embraces diversity and creates an opportunity for all. The Key Results followed these Objectives that each Senior Staff defined for the Department Heads in their portfolio. During 2018 and 2019, the OKR framework slowly grew to help the organization be strategically focused and cognizant of its operations' details through the KPI dashboard. The dashboard was designed to provide an easy grasp of daily operations for the Mayor, the Senior Staff, and Syracuse constituents. That version of the dashboard incorporated an objective, the related Key Results, the progress over a set timeframe (a week), and a metric to measure the progress. Like so many other long-term plans that local governments had to drop to take care of COVID-19 urgencies, Syracuse performance management was paused during 2020.
The OKR framework, in its initial iteration, made an important impact on the organization by showing how a data-driven approach to goal-setting and progress-tracking can bring visibility into the internal city operations for the middle-level and high-level leaders and can be further used as a basis for alignment of strategies. As a result of this raised awareness throughout the organization, the administration's will to pursue the program became stronger. Departments decided to use data available to them more rigorously to evaluate and improve their operations. In addition, the OKR format for performance management became familiar to stakeholders.
Performance Management Timeline
A turn in our path
Getting back on track after 2020's disruption by COVID-19, the performance management program found a renewed interest. Inheriting some tools and methods from the previous effort whose strengths and shortcomings had become evident by 2021, we set our goal to strike the right balance between capitalizing on previous efforts and finding new ways to overcome the roadblocks. We posed three questions to guide our strategy:
What can be learned?
How can our past attempts inform our new approach?
How do other cities measure their performance?
What can be changed?
What improvement areas can be addressed as the most impactful areas following the 80/20 rule?
How do we ensure our stakeholder's buy-in and collaboration?
How can we make and manage the change?
What is our organizational and technical capacity to establish performance management?
What are the available internal (within the API office) and external (city-wide) resources?
How can we mobilize them?
Syracuse performance management strategy 2.0 is formed around the benefits and potentials of the OKR framework and the KPI system but instead of making them the centerpiece of the strategy, we made them a part of the broader effort. The strategy was divided into four parallel groups of activities rather than one overarching strategy as such: 1) The OKR framework as a collaborative goal-setting tool for Senior Staff to align limited city resources (time, money, energy, people), to focus and commit to priorities, and to stretch to achieve more with less on a quarterly basis. We changed the entire purpose of the OKR tool and made it a particular tool for Senior Staff to provide visibility into the priorities of their portfolios; 2) KPI dashboard as an operation-focused tool to track progress for accountability on a weekly and monthly basis. This tool does not comprehensively track all city activities, but instead provides senior leadership with insight into high-priority, operational activities on a more frequent basis; 3) ARPA dashboard to communicate the strategies and initiatives of the project to the public and decision-makers; 4) Department Dashboard to bring transparency to more details of daily operations.
Syracuse Performance Management Strategy
Our first strategy was to focus on people as much as metrics and results. Many performance management systems primarily focus on the data dimension of the practice, while a successful strategy needs to embrace both. Performance management is effective when it is accepted as a means for both leaders and employees to gain insight into processes and collectively improve them rather than review performance and unproductively question delivery. Therefore, we respected sensitivities around the program and changed the perception of OKRs to a collaborative goal-setting protocol.
Second, we de-emphasized the cascading and nested relation of Objectives and Key Results that were meant to make a comprehensive system to track all city activities. Instead, we prioritized the KRs that seemed the most important to the leaders in order to deliver what mattered the most. These KRs were the initial building blocks to achieving a quick win.
Third, we adopted an iterative and innovative approach both in developing our strategy and revising the tools. The approach was iterative in the sense that it was made clear from the beginning that the process built-in integrated feedback loops for Department Heads and staff to identify improvements at each quarterly cycle. It was innovative because while we learned a lot from other cities, mentors, and existing methods, we built our own tools based on our needs and tailored our approach for the organization's specific context.
Fourth, we addressed and aligned stakeholders' expectations around the roles and responsibilities of the API performance management team and stakeholders as an essential step to avoid confusion in the long run. We were aware of our design choices as to whom the tools are developed for and how efficiently they can be used. The emphasis was made on the format and workstreams that reduced API's manual or recurring interactions.
These changes have engendered a significant growth in acceptance and success of the performance management platform across the organization. By now, the OKR framework is driving our strategy discussion sessions and facilitating DH meetings. Similarly, even in its beta version, the KPI dashboard provides visibility to internal operations for the Mayor.
However, the path towards perfecting Syracuse's performance management strategy is far from smooth as we face certain obstacles advancing the system. The main obstacle is the lack of baseline data against which we can measure performance. Data is siloed within various, often incompatible and old, software and systems that make the extraction of relevant data complicated and sometimes even impossible. Making sense of data by interviewing staff and learning about data entry methods is a time-consuming process. More often than not, sample data is not reliable and cannot be used to generate insights. Sometimes, we have good data but not good metrics and vice versa which causes comparison problems and hardship in measuring outcomes—as opposed to outputs. Taking Zoning Special Permit as an example, sometimes city processes are far too complex to develop a simple metric that provides visibility into performance. We have learned to work with imperfect data while being highly mindful of biases and limitations in this situation.
Lessons from Syracuse performance management efforts
Syracuse's journey to establish rigorous and comprehensive performance management has now a solid foundation. Yet, our path into performance analytics to generate actionable insight from data is still embryonic. Moving forward, we will focus the efforts on automating the OKR framework updates, advancing the strategic plan, including the strategy tools and both internal- and public-facing dashboards, advancing the data-driven culture across the organization, and improving our access to quality data. In summary, our trajectory shows that:
People are as important as data in managing performance
Don't let the tool or metric get in the way of the organization's needs
Before taking big steps, the organization must see the value of a data-driven approach through quick wins
Think strategically but act pragmatically. Building blocks should be carefully constructed
Before strategizing a performance management program, assess the organizational readiness and technical capacity (again, both people and data)
Think about who and how should educate, inform, and motivate stakeholders to endure their buy-in and collaboration
Make metrics specific, measurable, actionable, and time-bounded
Take the time to standardize metrics and measurements across the organization to make them consistent
Be mindful of people's resistance to the establishment of a new system. Building trust through partnership and stakeholder engagement is crucial
Have a strong will and support behind your efforts
It is important to initiate and advance a culture of continuous feedback, improvement, and collaboration
We have learned that to manage the change process, the performance management team should remain self-reflective, learn from its own and others' success and failure, and relentlessly incorporate feedback into the system in an agile manner, and that's what makes performance management exciting and rewarding.