Agenda 01-17-23; 12-5 - Information Item - SMART Goals FY 2022‐23 Winter Update

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4 Winter Update and Barriers to Outcome Measures This update represents an iteration on that first presentation, with improvements made to address internal and external feedback. For the public audience,the pages were reformatted to provide more detail. This allowed for better labeling of chart axis and legends, as well as more meaningful description of why each goal is important. It also allowed for each goal to be more visibly connected to specific Board Goals and Social Justice Goals.This aspect will become more important after the completion of the Strategic Plan, where the board will identify new goals. The Budget Office is also presenting a stand-alone SMART Goal document separate from the annual budget process.This allows departments and the Budget Office more time to have thoughtful and meaningful discussions about SMART goals and how they impacted the community.The Budget Office also targeted departments in the Human Services and Public Safety functions for further in depth discussion.Analysts worked with those departments to confirm that goals had valid tracking systems,that goal targets matched external standards, and that the goals tracked success in the program. The major objective of the deep dive with Human Services and Public Safety departments was to push departments to tracking outcome measures- how the actions of the program effect the community- rather than output measures- how many actions the program undertook. In many cases, departments in these functions have new goals that better demonstrate how their programs impact the community. However,there are often roadblocks that prevent departments from tracking outcome measures. In these conversations,three roadblocks have been consistently identified: Outcome measures require significant time and energy to track. • This time or energy investment will cause programs to reduce how many clients they can serve in exchange for tracking outcome measures. Many of these programs already have output measures that they are required to track for state and grant reporting purposes. Some departments are investigating creating satisfaction surveys to efficiently track outcomes. Departments can only measure the clients they are already reaching. • Departments such as the Department on Aging and the Library Services Department have goals related to reaching underrepresented members of the community. In both of those cases,the department has the ability to track the community members that are already engaging in their programing. They do not have the same ability to measure the communities that they are not reaching. Looking forward,the Strategic Planning process should provide more opportunities to track the broader community; both through engaged focus groups, and a statistically valid community survey. Outcome measures can reflect variables that are outside of the department's ability to control. • When departments are able to track outcome measures,the success of that goal will reflect not just program's work, but also general environmental factors. For example, the Housing Department tracks outcome measures related to the affordability of housing, and the department's ability to bring members out of homelessness and into housing.Those goals are able to reflect the impact the department has made, but they are also significantly impacted by the housing market, the economy, landlord decisions and zoning regulations.A strong performance management system is designed to empower departments to track these types of outcome measures, especially when environmental factors put success out of reach. Strategic Plan and Future Goals Though not to the extent Covid-19 completely upended the first planned release of SMART Goals in 2020,the upcoming Strategic Planning process will cause a major reset to this version of the performance management system. The board will identify new goals and priorities,the county will go through an 4