City Service Delivery

The City prepares an annual budget with the large part of the budget reflected in the specific services the City provides to its residents and customers; as well as identifying those revenues and expenditures that are corporate in nature.   

Essentially, investments are made in services such as Animal Control; Road and Sidewalk Maintenance; Winter Maintenance; Transit Service; Parks and Open Space Maintenance; Parking Management; and Recreation.

Each service has a specific person - a service owner - who is responsible for ensuring the efficient, effective and economical delivery of the service.

Each year, Council, staff and the community can see exactly how much money has been invested into each service and how much of that service has been delivered. This service-based budgeting and reporting helps with the difficult decisions around increasing or decreasing service levels and how much to invest in each service.

The use of performance measures based on customers' needs and wants help city staff measure specific results for each service area.  The Results-Based Accountability tool (developed by Mark Friedman at the U.S.-based Fiscal Policy Studies Institute) is used to help governments measurably improve the well-being of their citizens.

The specific measures address the questions: "How much did we do?," "How well did we do it?" and "Is anyone better off?"  These questions get to the root of the amount of the services provided, how efficiently they have been delivered, and the effectiveness and value of each service.

Continuous improvement and innovation a key drivers for change.  City staff want to make the processes used to deliver services better for their customer by taking advantage of technology and new ideas.  

Overall, the goal is to ensure citizens are getting good value for their municipal tax dollars.

Committee of the Whole

May 28, 2013 - City of Burlington Service Management and the Service Portfolio
Report: CM-07-13
Presentation: Bringing Great Things to Life in Burlington

Dec. 5, 2013
Presentation and discussion: Bringing Great Things to Life in Burlington - Dialogue with Council Service Management

Articles

City Changes How it Plans for, Delivers and Monitors City Services (City Talk, Spring 2014)

Creating Value - Creating value through service-based budgeting and accountability (Community Report 2014)

Results Based Accountability

• Mark Friedman

Business Process Management

• BPM Institute
• i4Process

The City of Burlington is increasingly being asked to make tough choices among competing priorities and to deliver good service for good value. By refocusing on services, investing in services and ensuring their continuous improvement, the city can make important decisions in a timely, informed manner.

Clarity of roles and responsibilities is an important component of governance. City Council is responsible for making strategic decisions regarding the commissioning and decommissioning of services and increasing or decreasing levels of service.

Senior Management and the Service Owners are responsible for all of the operations required to deliver the services and for reporting on the performance of those services.

Corporate management is a set of systems for leading, administering and directing an organization.

In the City of Burlington, our corporate management systems include corporate planning, service management and people management to support the city's achievement of its strategic and operational objectives.

Corporate planning involves setting the direction for the organization to ensure the service operations and initiatives, people management and daily business of the organization provide support for operational objectives and the directives of the city's strategic plan.

Service management is a framework that includes:

• A consistent and fair approach to performance measurement and continuous improvement
• Corporate accountability
• Alignment of operations to achieve the city's strategic directions, corporate priorities and objectives
• Informed decision-making by City Council and the city's Senior Management Team and service owners.

The city is using a number of tools to support Burlington's service management. They are:

• Results-Based Accountability
• Business Process Management
• Service-Based Budgeting
• Enterprise Risk Management
• Employee Performance Evaluation

A service portfolio is a listing of public and internal services delivered by the city that include:

• public services delivered directly to the residents and community (also known as the service catalogue)
• internal services delivered to the service owners responsible for public services (also known as shared services)
• a dynamic mechanism to capture the service and profile (such as service name, service description and service owner).

Results-Based Accountability™ ("RBA") is a disciplined way of thinking and taking action used by communities to improve the lives of children, families and the community as a whole. RBA is also used by agencies to improve the performance of their programs. Essentially, RBA is a method of building, documenting and reporting performance measures that answer the three questions: How much did we do? How well did we do it? Is anybody better off?

Results-Based Accountability™ is based on concepts and materials developed by Mark Friedman, author of Trying Hard is Not Good Enough (Trafford 2005) and founder and director of the Fiscal Policy Studies Institute.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a methodology used for continuous improvement and represents the ongoing effort to improve city services and/or processes.

A service-based budget provides information about the financial and human resources needed to deliver a service at current service levels.

Enterprise risk management is a continuous, proactive and systematic process to understand, manage and communicate risks from an organization-wide perspective.

Risk management is an essential component of good management and decision-making.

Decisions are informed ones when:

• There is a systematic approach to risk management
• Risk management is considered as part of long-term strategic and business planning as well as in the day-to-day management of activities
• Risk is considered in developing and putting in place policies, programs, plans and future directions of the City of Burlington.

There must be clear alignment of what people do every day with the strategic and service priorities of the organization. Using performance evaluations allows employees to link their own expected performance and targets with the goals of the service, corporation and the city's strategic plan.