The 3 Essentials of Improving Service Performance

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

By Andrew Kleine
August 25, 2025

In recent columns I have given you lists of five, seven or 10 ideas for driving government efficiency, making cities highly effective and making good trouble with your budget. I fear I have fallen victim to complexity bias, a cognitive phenomenon in which we tend to give more credence to complex solutions than simple ones.

One of the most important principles of writing is the rule of three, which posits that a trio of things, such as ideas or characters, combines both brevity and rhythm in a way that is especially satisfying and memorable for the human brain. Think life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; stop, drop and roll; or snap, crackle and pop. See what I did there?

In order to overcome complexity bias and embed this column in your psyche, I will put forth three ways to improve service performance: make it visible, talk about it, innovate.

Make it visible

In his book Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough, Mark Friedman writes that there are three basic questions we need to be able to answer about any government service (fancy that): How much did we do? How well did we do it? Is anyone better off? The answers will be in the form of performance data, which should be in the line of sight of the people who deliver the service and those who receive it.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the public avidly checked dashboards showing case counts, hospitalizations and vaccination rates. As a longtime purveyor of online performance data that few paid attention to, I quietly cheered this sudden geekdom. And I wondered, could we possibly get people to care this much, or even a third this much, about building permit processing times, road condition indexes and missed trash pickups?

Maybe not, but I have experienced, seen and heard about many examples of how highly visible data motivated and in some cases shamed organizations to perform better. I’ll give you three (yes, three) quick examples:

1. George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda established performance standards for several government functions, including finance, and rated them red, yellow or green based on a set of criteria. As a federal CFO at the time, I was alarmed that my organization was rated red on seven of nine standards. I was determined to “get to green,” and we did it.

2. Baltimore’s fleet gainsharing program required that vehicle availability standards be maintained as a condition for employees receiving a share of productivity savings. Availability was measured daily, and monitors were installed around the garage to give real-time status updates. Fleet technicians credit their gainsharing checks in part to knowing where they stood on performance.

3. A former colleague told me a story about taking over an underperforming city job training program. As one of his first acts, he posted rankings of the 12 grantee organizations based on their success (or lack thereof) in placing clients in jobs. Those at the bottom quickly boosted their placement scores.

Talk about it

Governments can congratulate themselves all they want about how much data they have made available online and how many key performance indicators (KPIs) they’re tracking. When it comes to improving service performance and community outcomes, what matters is how data is turned into action.

Baltimore’s CitiStat set the standard for talking about data not just regularly but relentlessly. In my decade as the city’s budget director, I attended hundreds of CitiStat meetings and have used what I learned in my role as chief administrative officer of Montgomery County, Maryland, and as a consultant. How about I share three lessons?

1. Discussions about performance data should be collaborative, not confrontational. They should be focused on learning more than “accountability.” Forgoing Baltimore’s courtroom-style CitiStat room in favor of a circular table is not enough. In Montgomery County, I asked department heads to sit next to me, not across from me, so that we were looking at data together.

2. Keep it simple. Instead of a death march through 20 charts and graphs, a stat meeting should focus on two to three critical issues. In Oakland County, Michigan, our “OakStat” meetings provided ample time to solve problems and agree on specific steps that would be taken before the next meeting.

3. Don’t lose sight of outcomes. I always thought that departments could win at CitiStat while losing at getting results that really matter for residents. It’s great to fill potholes faster and paint more crosswalks, but are the streets getting smoother and safer?

My favorite example of talking about data is the King County, Washington, “roundings” program. When I visited King County’s offices in around 2010 – or 10 B.C. (Before COVID) – I saw whiteboards everywhere filled with data. From the vantage point of today’s remote work world, I suppose those whiteboards might as well be cave drawings. What’s important is that people were huddling around data at the team, division and department levels to look at trends and figure out how to meet performance targets.

Innovate
Sometimes talk is not enough to solve a problem. Bureaucratic inertia, groupthink and plain old lack of imagination can stymie the ideas and changes needed to “turn the curve” of progress in the right direction. If you find yourself stuck, try these three strategies to spark innovation:

1. Widen the circle. The people on the front lines of government services know them best, yet aren’t always asked for their opinions. Engaging these employees can help get to the root causes of problems, identify what’s working well and not so well, and make services more efficient and customer friendly. As an added bonus, it can boost morale. If it’s a community outcome you’re trying to improve, bring together community partners to help. Government can’t get big things done alone. Another player to bring to the table is artificial intelligence, which makes it easier than ever to find leading practices and benchmarks.

2. Dangle a carrot. Incentives can drive creative thinking. An innovation fund provides seed money to implement good ideas and it can recycle the savings or revenues that result into more good ideas. Imagine Shark Tank for Government! Gainsharing gives employees a cut of the savings generated by their productivity, resourcefulness and ingenuity.

3. Accelerate thinking. Montgomery County’s Innovation Accelerators are people from across departments trained to find ways to make the work of government less burdensome and more impactful from their desk on out to the whole county. I still smile thinking back to the “science fairs” put on by each Innovator cohort, where they shared information about the projects they were working on. The public service pride was palpable.

The need for governments to demonstrate value has never been more urgent. I hope you can use the ideas in this column to redouble — or better yet “retriple” — your performance improvement efforts.

Author: Andrew Kleine is Managing Director, Government & Public Sector at EY-Parthenon, Ernst & Young LLP. He is the author of City on the Line: How Baltimore Transformed Its Budget to Beat the Great Recession and Deliver Outcomes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and has served as a county administrator and city budget director. His email is [email protected] and his handle on X is @awkleine.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.

(No Ratings Yet)
Loading...