02/03/2003

It's critical that you read the first item and it's attachment.

Performance Reporting Project - In the December 17, 2002 Weekly Staff Update I noted that our first Bingham visiting professor was Dr. Janet Kelly. One of her projects is to recommend improvements in the performance indicators for MTAS based on our mission and goals. Before you read Janet's recommendations please note:

We are doing this project because the indicators we have used in the past are no longer sufficient. We know cities like our services - we prove that every two years with our customer satisfaction survey. That's not enough; we need to know what we are accomplishing for the cities that like us.

President Shumaker is asking all UT departments to report their contributions to a master scorecard. The only area that directly concerns us is economic impact and that contribution is only from about 6% of our projects. We do many more projects than those we currently show with economic impacts. Here's a URL for the complete scorecard (
http://scorecard.tennessee.edu/) if you want to do some research on your own.

Each recent state budget cycle has been more demanding than the last. We need a better way to present ourselves and the impact of the state investment in our services.

I'm asking Mike and Sharon to work with Janet to set up a series of meeting involving groups of consultants to work with Janet on new measures. It's important enough so if you need to postpone a meeting with a city in order to make your meeting with Janet, then that's what you need to do.

Here is a summary of the process Janet has developed. Please review it carefully. Let me know if you have any questions.

MTAS PerfReport.doc

Snow Stories - I've bought and will soon deliver a snow scraper to everyone who submitted a snow story. It was a five-way tie.

Bingham Endowment Survey - We are getting ready to do another Bingham project and I've mailed this survey to all the cities who contributed funds.

Bingham survey Jan2003.doc