Located between Sydney and Canberra in New South Wales, Goulburn Mulwaree Council is using a web based tool to simplify the reporting process for management and executive staff.
Implemented in 2007, the trend reporter, known as the ‘Continuous Improvement Report’, enables Council to quickly assimilate information about key activities and outcomes and see where trends are heading.
Council recognised that it was necessary to turn complex and specialised processes into simple concepts, able to be used and monitored by executive staff in a quick overview snapshot.
Previously, much of the information being provided to management required further analysis and investigation before it gave a true picture of the situation. Different business units were also unable to produce standards reports to convey outcomes for the various areas of their operations that management could readily assimilate.
Like all councils, Goulburn Mulwaree uses a wide range of software systems. However, it was unable to find a readily available technology that could report from all the different systems to give a complete picture of Council’s key information needs. This resulted in inability to manage and monitor information, which sometimes led to poor decision making and bad judgement.
Through consultation with the General Manager and Executive, Council’s Information Services Manager, Stephen Bool, developed the innovative new ‘trend reporter’ in house to overcome these problems. Accordingly, Council can now view all its key data sets in graph format over a rolling six month period.
“The Continuous Improvement Report assists management and executive staff to instantly analyse information relating to all business units on a single desktop screen,” Stephen Bool said. “It is not restricted to one piece of software or technology, rather it gathers all forms of data, regardless of where the information is stored, and represents it in the same statistical format.
“The data is compiled on a weekly basis and is available on managers’ desktops each Monday.”
User defined reports and available data sets can be compiled for information such as:
- governance, including
complaints and compliments - OH&S, including accidents
and near misses - budgets, including salaries,
income and expenditure - customer request
management - records management.
In each of the graphs, managers can drill down to specific areas to see the actual figures that have been used to make up the graph.
“The Continuous Improvement Report is a major innovation in Local Government reporting – presenting data simply, and in turn providing a management tool that not only presents critical data overviews, but also paints a trend picture that enables longer term modelling and improvement strategies to be developed,” Stephen Bool said.
“It has been tested and proved to be very effective and efficient and has become a major management tool across the organisation.
“The ‘Standard Reports’ feature in particular has become an important tool at Executive meetings and is used on a weekly basis to monitor and evaluate performance, trends and other issues that need consideration.
“This has also allowed the Executive staff to commend business units that are continually meeting their goals and budgets, which is an important positive affirmation of good performance. Conversely, it also identifies those areas needing attention.”
For further information contact Stephen Bool, phone (02) 4823 4444.
