Method Factory

October 2009 
Inside this issue:


Robust, Home-Grown Software Promotes Strategic Management

This case study, excerpted from What Works: How Local Governments Have Made the Leap from Measurement to Management,  outlines how Sarasota County, Florida, has aligned measures, technology, and management practices to create a well-rounded performance management system.

GovMax is a Web-based application developed by Sarasota County that integrates strategic planning, business planning, performance management, and budgeting to help public sector agencies maximize performance, investments, and results. The only integrated system of its type designed specifically for government organizations, GovMax provides greater staff and technology efficiency, better accountability for the value of services delivered, and a more effective means of communicating outcomes to citizens.

Because managing organizational performance is in part everyone’s responsibility, it is expected that people at all levels of the organization, from senior leaders to frontline staff, understand how the information in GovMax relates to them.

County staff are currently in the midst of updating the internally developed training program to meet the specific needs of different user groups. Power-user trainings have been developed for fiscal, strategic planning, and key administrative staff. Executive and managerial staff training focuses mostly on report generation and information summarization. Light-user training focuses on the concepts of strategy alignment and on where in the system users can go to find information that relates to goals and performance expectations relevant to them.

Spirit of Collaboration
Sarasota County extended the use of GovMax to other local government and nonprofit agencies by offering the application and supporting technology through low-cost sharing agreements. For a small annual fee, other agencies can access a state-of-the-art system with no up-front costs; this means no software or hardware to purchase and no need for additional database administrators to manage the system.

Currently 17 partner organizations use the GovMax system. The cost-sharing arrangement among users has allowed the county to recoup some of the development and maintenance costs associated with the system. Another benefit for the county is the establishment of a diverse community of GovMax users. Community members exchange ideas about the software, its uses, and performance measurement generally. Topics discussed include approaches to strategic management, obstacles to implementing and sustaining a performance measurement system, and tips for performance measurement success.

Direct Support of the Strategic Planning Process
GovMax supports the strategic planning process by directly linking all budget items to one or more of the organization’s strategic goals. The system

• Provides a tool to facilitate the execution of the strategy map
• Shows how key management processes affect the organization’s balanced scorecard
• Aligns capital and operational expenses with relevant deliverables (in support of the organization’s strategic goals)
• Encourages a performance-oriented culture by linking contributions at the employee level with organization- and community-level objectives.

Outcome-Based Budgeting
GovMax provides a service-based view of the budget as well as the more traditional department view. It allows for

• Alignment of people and business processes with the organization goals and objectives
• Links among expenditures, performance measures, and strategic actions
• Accountability at the employee level, enabling staff to take the right actions
• Coordination across organizational groups to help drive strategy execution.

Management Efficiencies of GovMax
Sarasota County also has found that GovMax has boosted management efficiency by offering

• Compliance with higher information security mandates
• A 10-year horizon for both capital and operating budgets
• Fully integrated operating and capital modules that apply capital operation and maintenance impact automatically to the operating budget
• Fund transfer and balancing capability
• Budget splits at the employee level
• Quicker budget preparation capability, saving staff time and other resources
• An organization-wide application that eliminates the need to retrain employees on department-specific applications as they transfer within the organization
• A consistent reporting tool across the organization, from executive strategy to individual performance
• A comprehensive reporting capabilit y that offers hundreds of different management reports that can be tailored independently by the casual user
• Document printing directly from the system.