The City of Coral Springs: A Journey Toward Excellence, Accelerated by ActiveStrategy Enterprise

The City of Coral Springs was one of the first local governments to embrace the Baldrige performance excellence model. The city's successful application of these methodologies has made it one of the most admired public sector organizations in the world, boasting enviable results across all types of indicators, as well as the nation's highest award for organizational excellence – the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. ActiveStrategy Enterprise software supports the Baldrige principles, which are put into practice daily at this unique organization.

Background
The City of Coral Springs is a planned community of about 130,000 residents in South Florida. In FY 2007 the city's budget was $134 million and it employed roughly 800 FTEs. Coral Springs is a very young city – not typical of Florida; the city's median age is 35 and about one third of its residents are under the age of 18. Even less typical is the journey the city embarked upon in 1994. At the time, the city found itself managing politically sensitive crises, versus charting and achieving its own plans. There were also two major issues looming on the horizon: explosive growth followed by build-out and no growth, and a community intolerant of tax increases. The City Manager began looking for ways to jolt the city out of the "government-as-usual" mode so it would be better prepared to excel in what looked to be some challenging years ahead.

The city's first exposure to the Baldrige criteria came through their state-level program, called Florida Sterling. The model fit in well with some of the other cultural changes the organization was making: flattening the organization’s structure, instituting pay-for-performance, and creating a community "visioning" effort to design a bright future for the city.

The Baldrige/Sterling Model
Baldrige, as well as nearly all state-level performance excellence programs, share a common set of seven main criteria areas that are interrelated: 1) Leadership; 2) Strategic Planning; 3) Customer Focus; 4) Measurement and Analysis; 5) Workforce Focus; 6) Process Management; and 7) Results. The systems in the first six categories work together to achieve the seventh category: measurable overall results for the organization. It is a systematic and holistic approach that needs to be well documented and repeatable. Systems should be modified and "continuously improved" until they produce results that are measurable over both short- and long-term time frames.