02/18/2008

During the course of my review of apr's, it struck me that some folks were not aware of the changes in project reporting, especially as it pertained to economic impact. In an effort to refresh everyone's memory, I have replicated an email that Bob sent out on 3/01/07. Please review the entire email and pay particular attention to economic impact. I realize we are not implementing a bonus or recognition plan this year, but you must remember, when we do implement a recognition plan we have to make our agency benchmark or there will be no recognition dollars. I also need to stress, this is not an attempt to get you to modify your approach to projects, but rather to get you to "identify and report" your economic impact.

Please review the replication below and let me or your supervisor know if you have any questions.

Mike

Replication from 3/01/07

For years we have collected information about our projects and reported it annually to IPS. IPS then used the numbers for occasional reports to the University system. This is changing. The University is making a conscious effort to report our "Outreach" impact system wide. Our numbers will be reported along with the Agriculture Institute, UT faculty, and the rest of the University.

Since this will cover the entire University, we have added a lot of new categories and reporting items. You probably won’t appreciate this, but we have managed to make many of the entries automatically. We are using the subject heading you enter to make about a dozen other entries. In other cases, we have entered a default value that you will change in rare circumstances.

All of this will help us better report within IPS and the University system. We’re hoping for a smooth transition, but if you have any questions, please let me or Lisa know. Here are some definitions and explanations that should help - but they won't make much sense until you look at Project Reporting Monday morning after the changes.

Projects & Activities – We have always reported on two types of projects (projects and activities). This is left over from our old (circa 1987) long forms and short forms. Our definition has been 4 hours and under is an activity; over 4 hours is a project. To simplify and standardize among the IPS agencies, we have raised the number of hours for a project to 8. It is not absolutely critical that you get this right when you first enter a project. We will use the total number of hours you have entered by the end of your project to decide which category to use to report the work.

Touches – The University is going to start counting the number of people we work with. You will see this after you enter the time for a project. It is set to default to 1 touch for each activity (short form) and it defaults to 0 for each time entry in a project. A touch is every time a person receives information from a staff member. One call to one customer counts as 1. Six calls on the same project to one customer counts as 6. One presentation to a governing body of 7 counts as 7 (but if there were 20 people in the audience it counts as 27). Direct contact is needed to count. Mailing a publication, sending a blast fax, sending an email to all cities, or being on a radio show doesn't count. When you are working on the project in your office, but don’t call the city, the correct entry is 0. If you are teaching a class that is part of the MTAS training program (MAP, MMA, EOA, TAMCAR, AOC, for example) you do not need to enter the touches – we already count the number of touches as the number of students in our C2K software.

Type of project - On the long form, we have a new category just after the project summary for type of project. IPS likes us to collect descriptive and anecdotal information about projects. They don't use all the descriptions, just the more interesting ones and they generally use only one or two per year per county. We have added the "type of project" for you to label the way you want the description to be used. You can mark it for "publicity", "regular", or "sensitive". Publicity are the ones we really want to brag about; regular are, well, regular; and sensitive are the ones that you think might embarrass the city if we publicized them. Over the year I may ask you for more information on some of the projects, but this will give me a good start on the ones to consider. We thought this would work better than asking for longer and more explicit descriptions on all your projects.

Economic Impact – University wide we are only going to count economic impact if the project is implemented. Please continue to enter the amount of anticipated economic impact when you complete the project. We will only report the amount as part of our totals when the project is marked "□ Adopted/Implemented". Every October we will prepare a report for each consultant with the list of projects where you have reported economic impact but the project has not yet been implemented.

We have included a way to enter economic impact on both long and short forms. Many of the short forms will be 0, but you can enter here if you need to.

Types of economic impact – In the past we have only reported two types of economic impact: revenue enhancement and cost avoidance. Here’s the new list with explanations:

Investments in plant or equipment – This is new. Use it if the project includes a new fire station, new wastewater plant, new fire trucks, new police cars, or other capital investment.

Value of increased income or decreased cost – Use this category for BOTH cost avoidance and revenue enhancement. Cost avoidance can be used if you recommend a city NOT spend money on investments in plant or equipment.

Value of new jobs – Use an approximation of the annual salaries for all recommended new positions.

One-Time or Continuing – Please mark the type for the economic impact. A new building is one time. New revenue or new positions are often continuing. The reason we are collecting this is that the University has not decided whether to report the one-year, two-year, or three-year economic impact. This way if you have marked it continuing we will program the math based on the number of years we need to count.

Questions – We have several questions toward the bottom of the form. Did the project involve students or other UT departments? We’ve set the default for NO and you only have to do anything (other than pass this by) in the rare event the answer is yes.