The City of Coral Springs: A Journey Toward Excellence, Accelerated by ActiveStrategy Enterprise (p.2)

Applying the Criteria at Coral Springs
Early on in the journey, “Coral Springs saw only ‘trees’. No one could have described the ‘forest’ or how the criteria areas support each other. But criteria by sub-criteria, processes were developed, and little by little, staff came to understand how it all comes together,” explained Christine Heflin-Ewing, who served as the Internal Consultant on Performance Excellence at the City of Coral Springs during their journey.

To bring the criteria together and make the model work for the city, leaders blended several of the Baldrige principles into their own business model, which drove a new focus on listening to customers and feedback loops, a much stronger process for strategic planning, and a much more rigorous approach to performance measurement.

All three of these new focus areas were aided by the development of cascaded Scorecards, which deployed the strategic plan, helped maintain focus, and enabled the city to use information and data more effectively.

The city selected ActiveStrategy Enterprise software to automate their Scorecard framework. ActiveStrategy software helped city management monitor performance in areas that were most critical to achieving their strategy, compare their current performance to best-in-class levels, identify gaps, use data to identify the root causes of the gaps, institute improvement programs, and then monitor corrective action to ensure sustained results. With KIO (Key Intended Outcome) and Departmental scorecards automated in the software and reviewed regularly by more than 25 leaders, ActiveStrategy Enterprise software helped identify how performance in core processes affected strategic measures, tracked associated improvement efforts, and facilitated ongoing regular business reviews, primarily using the Briefing Book views.

“Because the City of Coral Springs is data-driven and results-oriented, it is important for us to post our results for all employees to see,” City Manager Mike Levinson said. “It is even more important to examine our results compared to other cities that we benchmark against. This has proven to be a strong motivational tool for our organization. If we find that our competition is performing better, we strive to improve our processes and close the gap. If we find that our organization is performing better, we are motivated to broaden the margin and our competitive advantage.”