The Common Council met 07/20/2022. One of the items the Council received a presentation on was about departmental statistics and key performance indicators.
Mayor Woodford started out by reminding the Council that back in July of 2021, that they had allocated $50,000 of the excess general fund balance to pay for a data analyst fellow. The idea was that this person would try to better leverage the city’s data to help with decision-making, to improve the transparency of the way the city presented data, and to make the data more usable and useful.
They hired Johanna Kopecky who had been working in the Finance Department for the last eight months. He handed the presentation over to her.
She went over the dashboard project she had been working on and the goals associated with that project, showed some example dashboards, demonstrated the different kind of charts that would be available, and compared the previous way the Performance Measures had been presented to the way it was presented on the new dashboards she had created.
The project involved making dashboards for each of the city departments that presented their performance measures in a visual way. The goal was to replace the previous format of the performance measures that were listed in the supplemental information section of previous city budgets with these dashboards. They were hoping to select information that was more relevant and that highlighted key performance indicators that actually indicated what a department was doing and working toward. They wanted to make the information more informative and easier to read and understand. They also hoped that with this better information, the departments would be able to make more insightful decisions, ask more insightful questions, and come to more insightful conclusions. Overall, they wanted it to be in a more user-friendly format that was easier to read and understand and was more accessible both to staff members and the public.
She started out by showing an example dashboard she had created which presented the data of her working on the dashboard project. It contained the meetings she attended, emails she sent and received, which departments her interactions were with, and when the interactions occurred.
She highlighted the stacked bar chart in the upper right-hand corner which gave the benefits of a normal bar chart but also separated the data into different categories.
She also noted that the pie chart at the bottom was good at showing percentages or pieces of a whole.
She went on to say that the online, interactive version of the dashboard would have a slider that allowed the user to adjust what timeframe they were looking at.
There was also the ability to use comments to point to significant points in the data that was presented. As an example, some significant meetings of hers were her Police Ride-along and her Fire Ride-along. Comments could also be utilized to explain significant increases or decreases in the data. As an example, the dashboard she had created for herself noted that there were considerably fewer meetings in February than in January because she was working on three other projects at the time.
She showed the Performance Measures for the Finance Department as seen in the supplemental information of the 2022 budget. Next to it, she showed the dashboard version of the department’s current Key Performance Indicators. She said the old way of presenting the information was very tabular and spreadsheet-like. It was not intuitive, and it was difficult to see trends. It also wasn’t necessarily accessible to people who were not sure how to read raw numbers. The dashboard format on the other hand, easily demonstrated any trends that were going on.
An example of the benefit of visualization was in the “Annual Receipts Processed”. The Finance Department tracked the percentage of receipts that they process and how many of them are automated (i.e., done completely online) as compared to those processed in-person and by mail. On the dashboard, it was presented as a stacked bar graph that showed both the total number of receipts processed as well as the proportion that were automated and in-person/by mail.
Additionally, they had revamped some of the information they presented. Previously, the Finance Department had been tracking the average number of journal entries they completed monthly, but they decided that was not indicative of what the Finance Department does or works toward so it was removed as a Key Performance Indicator.
She moved onto the dashboard for the Human Resources Department. She drew attention to the middle graph regarding “Staff Retention by Years of Service”. This chart allowed them to look at the trend over time of employee’s length of service over a number of different time-frames. She noted that recent studies indicated that the average person stays at a job for 4.1 years, so the fact that Appleton had such a high number of employees who had been employed by the city for over 10 years was a good measure to track for both the Human Resources Department and the city as a whole.
She moved on to the dashboard for the Community and Economic Development Department. She pointed out that in the upper left-hand corner, they showed the city’s equalized value growth. This was not necessarily a performance measure because it was not something that the Community and Economic Development Department could control, however, it was a community statistic that was relevant to the department and knowing what it was helped them make better decisions in their management. For that reason, the Community and Economic Development Department decided to include it on their dashboard and track/observe it over time along with their performance indicators.
She also drew attention to the department budget summary at the bottom left-hand corner of the dashboard. Each dashboard had that department budget summary as a stacked bar chart.
The last dashboard she showed was for the Department of Public Works. She pointed out the chart in the middle that showed the Miles of On-Street Bike Lanes on which DPW had set a target they were aiming for with their miles of bike lanes. With the visual format they could see over the years how they were moving closer to that target.
She talked about the Tons of Salt Used Annually. There was a lot of fluctuation in that data, so instead of adding a specific target, they instead included a trendline which was a good way to show which way usage was going when the data fluctuated so much. The trendline looked at the high and low parts and tried to find the common area between them. In this case, it showed the city’s salt usage decreasing over time.
This dashboard also included data from other municipalities and entities. In addition to tracking the percentage of City of Appleton lights converted to LEDs, they decided to also track the number of WE Energies street lights to see what those were doing. [This was something that had come up in the Climate Change Task Force report. One of their recommendations had been to convert all lights to LEDs, and they had not been aware that Appleton had already done that and the lights that remained were WE Energies lights.] They also tracked the number of crashed per mile of street in Appleton and compared it to crashes in Eau Claire and Madison. [I’m a little curious why Madison was chosen as opposed to a place like Green Bay which is probably closer to Appleton’s population.]
After going through the screenshots of the dashboards for each of the departments, she did a demonstration of what the dashboards would look like once they were up and running online. They were very interactive. When cursor hovered over any data point, a bubble would pop up with extra information. It also would have a slider that allowed viewers to look at specific timeframes.
She finished up her presentation by saying she was happy to answer questions and she welcomed their feedback. She wanted to receive all feedback by August 20th so that she could make any changes before they moved forward with integrating them with the 2023 budget.
Once everything was established then they would move forward with the online version and make them accessible to the public.
The Council members did not have any questions at the time of the presentation.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=980227&GUID=5450AEC9-FD56-4034-8EB4-6AD726AB0B0C
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