07/02/1996

Happy New Year!! - Happy fiscal 1997, that is. MikeP has reminded me that many of our deadlines and things we have asked consultants to do (project reporting, professional development plan, and travel reimbursement) come with the same end of the fiscal year rush as do many city budgets. I plead guilty to being late with the request for the professional development plan (and will work with you to get it done; it should take a phone call).

Cancel Staff Meeting - Please cancel the video staff meeting we had scheduled for Friday, July 12. CTV is changing their network controller (or switcher, I think) and had to cancel the entire schedule for two days. We won’t reschedule in July. The next one on the schedule is Friday, October 25, but we may schedule one in August after CTV makes the necessary changes to the network.

Project Reporting - We have a couple of changes we want to make to project reporting beginning with the new fiscal year. I will include both sets of instructions in a "paper" memo so you won’t have to try to print from this.

Change one - The first has to do with recording your hours for professional development and for computer training. We have two project titles for you to use. Please use MTAS - Computer Training to record the hours you spend in computer classes or in teaching yourself some new piece of software or software trick. Please use MTAS - Professional Development to record the hours spent in professional development. This includes time at professional conferences, meetings that include professional development activities, and time spent reading to keep up with your field. Please start using these project titles beginning July 1, and if possible, edit your previous entries to change the project titles or enter hours you haven’t entered yet since January 1, 1996.

Now, I have to admit that Ken has been reminding me to make this change since about last Christmas. I haven’t done it until now for reasons that make no sense in retrospect. That is, I was planning a full blown separate database to keep up with professional development. We have a small one now. We are trying to adhere to the principal that all time should be recorded in the same database. Special note to the attorneys: You will have to use the project reporting database to record your professional development and computer training hours rather than the legal opinions database where you record all of your other hours. It’s the exception that proves the rule, I suppose.

Change two - We are participating in an IPS wide effort to measure the impact of our efforts. You will notice a new section in the Project Reporting ( in green ) called: Capacity Building Improvement . This will take a while to explain.

We want to move toward measuring the impact of what we do rather than measuring the number of times we make phone calls or the number of miles we drive (inputs). We started last year by adding the section about Results Achieved . Now, we’re going another step. We want to measure whether or not (and if so how much) we have improved the capacity of our customers to do their jobs. An IPS committee (MikeT was our representative) has worked on this for the last six months. We will start recording capacity building July 1.

Several points need to be made:

1 - Capacity building will occur in probably no more than 20 to 30% of our projects.

2 - Not all customers are on the same base line, so we are measuring each customer against itself, not anyone else.

3 - We are not interested in individual performance. We are measuring whether or not the city has improved its capacity; not the changes in any one person.

4 - This evaluation is very subjective and based entirely on your judgement. We have a guideline of percentages for you to use included below.

5 - We are interested in the anecdotal information as least as much as the percentage of improvement.

How to use the form - If capacity has been built, that is, if someone or several someones at the city now know more about how to do something than they did at the beginning or your project, then check the box labeled: Was the client’s capacity improved by this work?

Then, using the percentages below, complete a percentage for the customer’s ability before the request and a percentage for the customer’s ability after the request.

You can use any whole percentage you like, but please use the following as a guide:

0% - Completely unfamiliar with functional area and tasks to be performed.

20% - Conversationally capable in the functional area and knowledgeable of the tasks that need to be performed, but consultant must perform tasks.

50% - Completely knowledgeable in the functional area, understands all tasks and their relationship to one another, able to perform tasks with direct assistance from consultant.

90% - Completely knowledgeable in the functional area, understands all tasks and their relationship to one another, able to perform tasks with minimal assistance of consultant.

100% - Completely knowledgeable in the functional area, able to perform all tasks independently.

Finally, include an anecdotal statement about the capacity improvement. Something along the lines of: “They had never done a capital budget before and now they prepare one for me to review before it goes to the Board.”

This may not be as big a change in our project reporting as I think it is. If you have any questions, please call either me or Mike Tallent. I’m going to try to attend the next team meeting (East, Middle, West, Library) to review this and several other items.