At the direction of the County Administrator, OFMB is leading an agency-wide redesign of the county performance measurement program. The redesign initiative, named "Harnessing Organizational Performance" or HOP for short, is a 3-phased, multi-year project spearheaded by OFMB's Management & Program Analysis Section, with the assistance of the Budget Division, working cooperatively with departmental staffs throughout the county government.
The HOP program has been painstakingly developed over many months to achieve ease of understanding, consistency for replication across departmental lines, thoroughness, state of the science thinking concerning performance measurement, and the application of targeted business perspectives to the work of the county.
HOP is not a crash program with a "hurry-up" timetable; there's a reason they call that sort of thing a "crash" program. Rather, it is a deliberate and methodical approach to helping departments update their individual performance programs to reflect their own priorities and critical missions. Designed to be implemented in three logical, attainable steps, HOP is a dynamic tool that departmental staff throughout the county will be trained on. Click on the links below to learn more about the 3 phases of the HOP program.
Phase I is a diagnostic phase. Its major purpose is to evaluate the current state of each county department's performance elements: mission statement, goals and objectives, performance indicators and benchmark measures. Phase I is all about understanding where the organization is today, and equipping departments with the tools and insights necessary to re-define their own performance elements in ways that are operationally relevant.
Phase II is a building phase. Its major purpose is to build on the Phase I evaluation results by defining new performance elements to take the place of existing elements which were identified as having deficiencies. By equipping departments in Phase I with the skills and understanding to re-design their own performance elements, the HOP team plays a supportive role as departments create their own new performance measures, consistent with the approach defined by HOP.
Phase III is the full implementation phase. Its major purpose is to finalize all remaining institutional logistics issues, including the form of reporting, frequency of reporting, incentives for performance achievement, groundrules for updating performance measures to keep them current and relevant, methods of validating performance data, and others. By the time Phase III is reached, departments will have had some amount of time to become accustomed to their new performance measures created in Phase II, and should be ready for full implementation of the new program.
