ROLE 3: Define or Measure Performance:
Practice 3a. Help choose measures or targets: Provide advice on determining performance measures or performance expectations.
Palo Alto, California, City Auditor [Profile]
The City Auditor’s Office became involved in selecting performance measures for public accountability purposes, in order to prepare the City's first Service Efforts and Accomplishments (SEA) Report (for 2001-02, see Practice 5b. Report performance), issued in 2003. At that time, the audit staff spent considerable time with departments sorting through available data, and selected measures and data for the SEA Report from several sources, including measures from the City’s adopted budget documents, community indicators in the City’s Comprehensive Plan, indicators from the City’s Sustainability Task Force, performance measures from other jurisdictions, and benchmarking information from the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and other professional organizations.
For the first two SEA reports, relatively few performance measures were drawn from the budget as the City Auditor did not find many of these measures relevant. Since then, the City has incorporated new “benchmarking measures” in the operating budget document to replace the former “impact measures.” City management drew many of these measures from the Auditor’s SEA report. As a result, the city’s operating budget now cross-references to the SEA report, and vice versa. So, while the Auditor’s emphasis has been selecting measures for public reporting, the result has been to influence how measures are used by others in a major city policy document, the budget.
Reports:
City of Palo Alto Service Efforts and Accomplishments Reports (2001-02 through most recent report) |
