Kent County, MI

Kent County increases transparency by linking performance with strategy

Less than an hour’s drive from Lake Michigan, Kent County is home to more than 675,000 residents. The County serves the second largest metro area in the state and boasts a thriving downtown area, parks, rivers, and an increasingly diverse community.

Kent County is also known for its rich history in performance management. So when it became clear that the County’s homegrown database was holding the team back from greater data transparency and closer strategic alignment, they turned to Envisio.

A history of performance excellence

The Kent County team has been building a comprehensive performance management program over the last 20 years. A longstanding goal of the County Administrator’s Office has been to promote transparency and public trust by openly sharing data that demonstrates progress towards long-term goals.

To support this, the County has a dedicated Strategy & Performance Management team, as well as a cross-functional Performance Measurement Review Team (PMRT). The PMRT comprises departmental directors from across the organization who are responsible for peer-to-peer coaching and sharing of performance management best practices.

MayBeth VanTill, Strategy and Performance Management Manager explains:

“We’re trying to elevate, not just performance management, but excellence at all different levels throughout the county.”

In short, Kent County has fostered an enviable culture of organizational performance excellence and public transparency over the years. But as the culture has grown, the tools used to measure, manage and report performance have not always kept pace.

When MaryBeth and her team started trying to align their existing performance measures with the County’s 2019-2023 Strategic Plan, it became clear they needed a performance management tool that matched the sophistication and ambition of their performance program.

Lack of strategic alignment clouds transparency

The County’s Performance Management Program began in 1997 and has evolved to become an integral part of County operations. It began as a conscious effort to respond to Kent County’s mission at the time “to be an effective and efficient steward in delivering quality services for our diverse community.”

In 1997, it was primarily about counting things. There was not yet a standard for reporting, or even the collection of measures. At that time, the team was capturing performance metrics in Word and Excel documents. The program remained largely unchanged until March of 2008, when the Board of Commissioners approved an Administrative Policy on Performance Measurements and Results that required county departments to establish performance measures and report them annually to the Legislative and Human Resources Committee. The addition of this policy was a pivotal shift for the program. It is also something that continues to make Kent County’s performance management program unique.

County Administration made the decision to evolve from simply ‘counting things’ to aligning and engaging employees, improving how the process is described, and doing a better job assisting departments in telling their stories and supporting their journey towards performance excellence.

Fast forward a few years and this had turned into a homegrown database created by the IT team. It was a big improvement, but with the launch of the County’s first Strategic Plan in 2019, MaryBeth and her team recognized that they had outgrown their existing performance tools.

“We knew how to count things. We knew how to measure things,” explained MaryBeth.

“What we lacked was alignment with the strategic plan. We weren’t tracking enough project-level data and we couldn’t create a one-to-one relationship between performance measures and each element of the plan.”

The lack of alignment with strategic priorities was causing internal reporting challenges for the team, and limiting their ability to communicate results with residents.

MaryBeth continued: “We would end up running a report on the metrics from our database and then having to create another, separate cover sheet that we would manually fill out with significant accomplishments, project-based work and our futuristic goals. It was very ad-hoc and manual. We knew we needed a way to capture more information and to not only be able to report that data internally but present it to the public.”

The Kent County team had reached an impasse. They needed to either rewrite the current, homegrown program or consider a new product for performance management.

MaryBeth turned to the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and National Association of Counties (NACo) for help. Her research led her to Envisio.

Envisio helps tie performance to the strategic plan

The Kent County team evaluated a number of performance management solutions before choosing Envisio.

‘Envisio really met the sweet spot for us,” said MaryBeth. “Seeing how other counties were using Envisio to communicate with residents on how they’re progressing against strategic priorities was a huge draw. Envisio had everything we needed but wasn’t going to cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Once the County’s new strategic plan was laid out clearly in Envisio, MaryBeth was able to conduct a gap analysis to see which priorities and goals didn’t have any performance measures associated with them. This gave the team a list of areas to target for building out new metrics.

“People would ask, “Why are we doing this particular initiative? Or why are you asking me about that?”, recalled MaryBeth. “Now, I can reply, “Our strategic plan says that this is a priority for us, and yet we have no metrics that talk about this.” Our team can then go into those departments and help them build the right metrics and link it all back to individual plan elements.”

The Kent County team is now well underway with operationalizing their strategic plan and tying performance to strategic goals.

“We have a much stronger tie with our strategic plan now. Envisio keeps the plan present and in front of people. The reminders that come out of the software prompt departmental leaders to regularly check in on projects and we have a single source of truth of what’s happening across the county.”

Relieving the pain of Board reporting

One of the biggest areas of improvement for the County since implementing Envisio has been reducing the pain and time involved in creating annual reports for the Board.

“Before we selected Envisio, I started calling department directors and asking them how we could improve the Board reporting process,” explained MaryBeth. “It had always been this dreaded once a year rollercoaster of “Oh, shoot, I’ve got to get in all my performance measures and metrics and I have to hurry up and present to the Board.” And then, “Whew, I don’t have to think about it for another year.” So I was asking people what would be helpful in that process. The primary response was “Make it less painful.””

There are also several times throughout the year where MaryBeth and her team have to tease out significant accomplishments from the work being done by different departments. Before Envisio, this process was manual, and responses were patchy depending on the workload of each department director at the time.

“Well, now we go to Envisio. We have this repository of data that we can just go to whenever we want and we don’t have to keep asking directors to send us the information.”

Many departments are now experimenting with more frequent reporting to the Board. Envisio has made it possible to report on what is happening within a department right up to the day of the presentation, rather than just presenting on the results from the last full year.

MaryBeth admits that they have not yet found the “magic” reporting cadence that works county-wide but Envisio provides the flexibility to allow individual departmental leaders to experiment and report in the most appropriate way for their teams:

“Now everyone is trained up and has some experience with Envisio, many teams are excited and are asking, “Okay, what else can we do?””.

Public transparency is the biggest win

In MaryBeth’s mind, the single biggest win in using Envisio has been the transparency that the Kent County team has been able to create for their residents. Using an interactive, public Envisio dashboard, they are able to demonstrate to the community how the county is measuring success against the strategic plan. Up until this point, the only publicly available performance data was buried in individual PDF reports on each department’s webpage.

MaryBeth explains: “Our external performance dashboard has been a tremendous tool to communicate with our residents about the work that the county is doing to make Kent County a place where people want to live, work and play. We engaged in public feedback when we created the strategic plan, and now we can say, “You know what, we heard you, we developed a strategic plan, and now here’s how we’re measuring success against that.” It’s been one of the best ways to tell our story because residents don’t always know what county government does, where it stops, and where city government starts.”

MaryBeth also points to how Envisio has been helping them to break down internal silos which, in turn, is helping to create more transparency for staff, leaders and residents.

“One of the big goals for our County Administrator is to break down silos and to show how we all contribute to the mission, vision, values, and strategic plan of the county. With Envisio, we have increased the awareness and collaboration across departments. Because of this, we are able to work on changing some of our language and the way we articulate our services so that other departments and residents can understand it. So it’s really helping us to communicate in a way that our residents can understand.”

So what’s next for Kent County and Envisio?

More collaboration across departments, continued refinement of language, and more data—including resident satisfaction data—aligned with strategic outcomes, according to MaryBeth.