Stonnington City Council in inner Melbourne is rating every aspect of its performance with the help of an innovative computer program. Council believes this is the first time the Norton and Kaplin Balanced Scorecard program has been applied to Local Government. The system allows Council to input 400 key performance indicators (KPIs) over 25 service areas and rate them according to priority.
It delivers concise monthly, quarterly or annual scorecards that are colour coded and rate the performance of individual units and Council as a whole for customer satisfaction and value for money. The system has been a useful diagnostic tool, following an organisational review in 2000-2001 that saw Council change from vertically aligned divisions to a matrix organisation based on skills groups.
Chief Executive Officer, Hadley Sides, believes the program’s application has enormous potential for other Councils looking for an objective way to rate and improve service delivery across the board.
“The Balanced Score Card (BSC) system is a succinct and objective diagnostic tool that shows key causes for performance variation month to month,” he said. “It allows corrective action to be taken quickly and the program is capable of conducting ‘what if’ scenarios in the event a Council wishes to contemplate changes to service delivery in a key area.”
Hadley Sides said the computer program formed a central plank in Stonnington’s ‘culture of continuous improvement’. He said BSC scores were made available to all staff via Council’s Intranet and were released to residents.
Options for other interested Councils include cost sharing for common data collection, data sharing for benchmarking and knowledge sharing for professional development.
The BSC system in Stonnington – now a year old – followed a review process involving staff and resident surveys. Results for March 2003 show Council improved its service delivery in all areas. This was after Council had used the system to identify inadequate project management of a changeover in garbage bin sizes.
“The important thing is not apportioning blame but to use the BSC to identify the issues so that corrective action can be taken,” Hadley Sides said. “This led us to modify how we handle large scale resident contact initiatives.”
Features of the BSC model include the following.
- The electronic BSC model (currently on both Excel and Access) was designed for Local Government and allows Councils to rate four key measures of cost, service quality, responsiveness and effectiveness.
- Scope for an unlimited number of KPIs within each of these four key measures.
- Automatic scoring of current service levels against the adopted minimum and maximum benchmarks for each KPI.
- Automatic comparison of each KPI against defined (and adjustable) Best Value service standards and a colour coded system as well as graphic charting of KPI scores over time.
For further information contact Hadley Sides, email hsides@stonnington.vic.gov.au or telephone (03) 8290 1101.
