Top U.S. County Reinvents Government Planning and PerformanceTop U.S. County Reinvents Government Planning and Performance

Not many U.S. counties can match Maricopa County, Arizona, on sheer scale. It covers 9,224 square miles (larger than several Eastern states), and it boasts 3.8 million residents, making it the fourth-most-populous county in the U.S. The county also encompasses eight out of the state's ten most-populous cities, including Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Glendale, Scottsdale and Tempe.

The fourth-most-populous county in the U.S., Maricopa County is larger than seven Eastern states.
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Miricopa County government also hopes to top the charts in one other respect: the scale of a performance management initiative aimed at linking expenditures to results, thereby improving transparency and accountability to citizens. Built over the last nine months, the system is currently in use by more than 400 power users, but it will be rolled out to more than 14,000 other county employees this summer. Ultimately, the county hopes to extend access to all residents so they can see exactly what they're getting for every tax dollar collected and spent.

A NEW WAY TO GOVERN

The roots of Maricopa County's strategic planning efforts date back eight years to the embrace of a model called "Managing for Results" (MFR). Adopted by a number of states and cities, MFR dates back to the early 1990s and was given a significant boost when federal agencies implemented the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. According to the Government Accounting Standards Board, which is the official source of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for state and local governments, the act required federal agencies "to develop comprehensive strategic plans and then to evaluate whether the agency in question is actually making progress toward the goals and objectives set forth in the strategic plan."

That sounds a lot like performance management, and indeed "MFR is akin to a Kaplan/Norton-style Balanced Scorecard for government," says Stephen Wetzel, Maricopa County's CIO. "Over the last seven to ten years, MFR has taken hold in the public sector because it puts the emphasis on results. It helps us see how what we do today achieves desired outcomes and aligns with strategic priorities set by our Governing Board."

Maricopa's MFR approach (see diagram at right) involves six linked steps:

Maricopa County's Managing For Results approach
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Planning for Results. Develop strategic goals and operational plans that are aligned to the county’s strategic priorities and goals. These goals and plans are incorporated into departmental and individual employee performance plans.

Measuring for Results. Develop demand, output, efficiency, and result measures as well as key result measures such as service quality, and employee and customer satisfaction. These measures detail how effectively and efficiently departments are working toward desired results and how well departments are performing.

Budgeting for Results. Provide financial and performance information to drive informed business decisions, achieve results, and ensure that the budget is guided by Governing Board policy and priorities, and by customer needs.

Delivering Results. Based on available resources established in the budget, develop and implement departmental plans to deliver services, and collect valid performance measures.

Analyzing and Reporting Results. Review performance data to ensure that program requirements are met, that service delivery is operating effectively, and that budget revenues and expenditures are in line with departmental plans. Report results to celebrate achievements, share best practices and ensure accountability to taxpayers.

Evaluating and Improving Results. Evaluate overall effectiveness and efficiency of programs and services. Departments compare organizational and individual performance against goals, objectives and performance targets and then determine the need for improvement and/or program or policy changes.

PUTTING THE TECHNOLOGY IN PLACE

MFR is a technology-agnostic approach, but that's exactly where Maricopa's initial efforts failed in 2000. "We tried implementing it around a home-grown approach using a proprietary spread sheet system and we had some real problems," says Wetzel. "First of all, things weren't integrated; we had no single source of truth, so people had to build shadow systems and subsystems to integrate the performance data and planning data with the budgeting and financial information."

When Wetzel was appointed CIO 18 months ago, he took MFR out of a multi-year holding pattern and looked at a number of potential software vendors to supply supporting technology. Microsoft rose to the top of county's short list in part because it already relied on Microsoft SQL Server, Reporting Services, .Net and Microsoft Office to the tune of more than 10,000 seats. Wetzel also learned about Microsoft's 2006 ProClarity acquisition and its plans for the PerformancePoint Server (a performance management platform released last year). "We look at the BI stack as a ubiquitous offering, and we want to push it out to 14,000-plus consumers," says Wetzel. "We chose Microsoft because we want every employee to be able to look at their performance measurements and see how what they do aligns with the priorities set by the Board of Supervisors."

Once the technology selection was made, it took nine months to build out the MFR components using Microsoft's BI stack and the PerformancePoint Server. More than 300 employees were initially trained as contributors, reviewers and approvers, and a phased, countywide rollout now underway will require minimal training, says Wetzel. "The longest class we offer is four hours long and some are as short as two hours," he says. "Training is not overly complicated because of the investment we already have in Excel and other Microsoft products." Topping the list of "other" products is Microsoft SharePoint, which serves as the framework for the county's intranet and as a wrapper for BI capabilities and the Managing for Results Information System (MfRIS).

GETTING A GRIP ON PERFORMANCE

With MfRIS now in place, roughly 200 contributors use the Planning for Results module to review and revise mission statements and strategic and departmental priorities and goals. At the Budgeting for Results stage more than 300 employees help prepare the county's $2 billion-plus annual budget, referencing the priorities and goals set in the Planning stage. Ongoing budget reviews involve forward-looking forecasts and historical variance reporting throughout the year.

"The Budgeting stage is the key to helping us understand how our investment priorities and allocation of funds are performing relative to citizen expectations," says Wetzel. "You have to translate financial data into performance-enhanced financial data, and this is where we've been able to combine performance metrics and financial metrics."

Built on the combination of the PerformancePoint Server and Enterprise Reporter, Budgeting For Results includes a "Position Management" component the county created to tracks personnel salaries and benefits, which represent some 70 percent of county costs.

Performance metrics are gathered during the "Delivering" phase, using Integration Services connectors to source systems as well as direct entry of data through Microsoft InfoPath forms hosted on SharePoint.

Reporting is handled largely through scorecards and dashboards, but the county has its own definitions of these tools. "Scorecards to us are more operational and tactical, and they allow us to control behavior," Wetzel explains. "Dashboards are higher level and more strategic, and we use them as a monitoring tool."

The county is currently developing team and personal scorecards to be rolled out this summer, but the higher-level dashboards are already in place, displaying both current performance data and finance data so managers, employees and (beginning next summer) citizens can see what each tax dollar is buying.

The stakes of Maricopa's performance initiative are actually higher than just good government, says Wetzel. "We're competing with many counties and cities for wealth-building industries, so we look at this as vital not only to achieving transparency and accountability," he explains. "We view this as a strategic tool to enhance Maricopa County from an economic development standpoint."