Miami-Dade County: Becoming a Results-Oriented Government with ActiveStrategy Enterprise (p.3)

Balanced Scorecard-Based Business Reviews
Once initial training efforts were well underway, the county institutionalized the use of its performance management system with Balanced Scorecard-based business reviews – meaningful performance discussions that allow participants to examine underlying problems and indicators of future success.

A countywide mandate for regular business reviews ensured that departments were using this new performance framework along with the enabling software effectively. Business reviews were now being conducted by clicking through the actual ASE software, which allowed teams to spot performance gaps in key strategic areas, then click to reveal underlying causes, and easily check up on progress of improvement efforts – all during a single meeting. These proved to be much more productive than previous county business reviews, during which discussions tended to be more superficial, since access to deeper information was not at hand.

To gain an even greater benefit from these ASE-enabled meetings, the county devised a two-tiered business review structure: tier one consists of monthly reviews at the department level, conducted by the department director; tier two is the bi-monthly business review conducted by the Assistant County Managers in the County Manager's Office, which generally focuses on a single strategic area (e.g. Public Safety, Recreation and Culture, Transportation, etc). Data validity, measure relevance, and alignment are the main topics of discussion, along with initiatives to correct underperforming measures.

Thanks to these strategic business review meetings, which are facilitated by ASE software, the county has been able to conduct deeper and more beneficial reviews of performance, allowing key managers to focus not only on how they have been performing to date, but much more importantly on where performance levels need to be and how they will get there.

Mr. Burgess remarked, “ActiveStrategy Enterprise software enables business review meetings to be conducted in a format where all the information is easy to share for consideration and feedback.”