Red light, green light

Tom Nosack is Vancouver’s performance analyst — the guy who keeps track of just how the bureaucracy is performing.

You can see his recently updated snapshot of city performance here. Nosack ranks the city’s six “strategic commitments” as green, yellow or red. (Green = good. Red = bad.)

Here’s the email from Nosack to the city manager:

As you click on each of them, you will see that we have two strategic commitments that are “red” and the rest are “green”; they changed much more than I thought even yesterday, although in retrospect, they are reflecting reality quite accurately.

As expected: “Financial Health” stayed “Red” because most community indicators related to finance did not improve significantly in 2010.

Most surprising positive news: “Transportation” moved from “Red” to “Green” as indicators show significant improvements in road safety & pavement condition and perhaps people accepting lower service levels in the near term.

Most negative news: “A Safe & Prepared Community” moved from “Green” to “Red” because violent crime climbed for the second year in a row and Fire/EMS response times dropped off for the second year in a row – and because of changes in CRESA’s software & notification procedures the change in Fire response time appears far worse than it actually is (although it is not good).

I will be discussing the “story” told by our Strategic Indicators with Council on May 16th, as I use the Strategic Indicators to set the stage for the series of 45 minute Performance Snapshot Workshops that follow. The order will be Public Works, Law, Fire then Police. Police have further scheduled their presentation to be followed by a “State of the Department” hour long follow-on workshop.