Making Metrics Matter for Local Governments

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Alex Tremblay
March 6, 2026

We are obsessed with performance metrics. So many things we consume are marketed to meet a standard: more megapixels on our phone cameras, faster broadband in our squad cars, more efficient SNAP application processing. But while we are surrounded by these important measures, the measures themselves do not provide any notion of how the product achieved the results it is advertising. It is in that province that a state or local government can find ways to maximize its successes and avoid its failures.

I am reminded of two performance management adages from British economist Charles Goodhart and American sociologist Donald Campbell.

Goodhart’s Law: “When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.”

Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

The Hennepin County Experience

Hennepin County is Minnesota’s most populous county, home to 1.27 million residents, the city of Minneapolis and four of the 10 largest cities in the state. The county government employs approximately 10,000 staff in a commissioner-administrator form of management. Like all counties in Minnesota, Hennepin maintains responsibility for the administration of social service benefits like SNAP, child support and housing support (this is also true for nine other states).

Many of these programs come with federal performance benchmarks that adapt to the county’s performance over time (see: child support paternity establishment orders as an example). The challenge is that these metrics are often difficult to achieve in a way that works with staff and residents, making them targets and inviting the opportunity for process improvement to meet a metric rather than meet the needs of the people we serve.

The county is obligated to work with these external performance metrics. However, because those metrics have become targets, it makes more sense to focus on underlying processes and use internal performance improvement to drive results toward the external measure.

Hennepin County Human Services has undertaken significant efforts to do just that — to improve internal processes and allow metrics to improve organically. One such effort is staffing optimization, a project undertaken to better understand how staff spend their time at work.

During the process, each staff member is asked to complete a short daily journal of their time broken into core work (for example, interacting with residents or filing documentation) and non-core work (tasks that are necessary but do not advance their daily work in a meaningful way, such as staff meetings or completing unrequired documentation).

The idea of staffing optimization is not new and was born out of time and motion studies commonly used in hospitals and health care facilities, on a more limited and succinct scale. Importantly, because staff document their own time, we are able to get more insight into what they find valuable rather than allowing our data team to decide which tasks are valuable, which is a common pitfall with staffing studies.

Once staff complete their journals, we convert the results into a raw percentage of core work per department per day. There is no target to reach, no metric to track and no outcome to measure. Instead, we use the data to identify where we can focus efforts to reduce administrative burden on staff and improve the experience for residents and their families.

What We Have Found So Far

With nearly 80 percent of staff complete (nine of 10 service areas), we have found that about 30 percent of staff time is spent away from core tasks. Much of that time is spent in meetings that staff members feel do not directly advance their work. We have also identified redundant or overengineered processes that could be simplified throughout the organization thanks to staff efforts to document their time.

The future of this effort is in the process of eliminating redundancies, reducing administrative burden and allowing staff to focus on residents first and foremost. With time, effort and energy toward continuous quality improvement (CQI)-driven change management, we will get there and, by extension, our performance indicators will follow.

Hennepin County is not unique in its efforts at process improvement and is beholden to the same level of performance improvement metrics as any other county responsible for the administration of benefits. We believe performance improves not through targets and goals but through participation in a continuous quality improvement process at all levels of the organization. As W. Edwards Deming said in Out of the Crisis: “The transformation is everyone’s job.”

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 Author: Alex Trembley (He / Him) is a Data Analytics and CQI Strategy manager for Hennepin County Human Services. He holds a bachelor’s degree in quality management systems from the University of Wisconsin – Stout and an MPA from the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. Prior to his time in government, Alex worked in healthcare quality management for 15 years. This article was written under the auspices of Barrett and Greene, Inc.

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