2005 Performance Based Budget - Laserfiche WebLink

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PERFORMANCE BASED BUDGETING AND OUTCOME MEASUREMENT INTRODUCTION The City of South Bend has an established and well-respected commitment to performance Lased budgeting. This process attempts to hold departments and staff accountable for achieving citywide goals and objectives by benchmarking their actual performance and by budgeting accordingly. For the City, as for many other entities using performance based budgeting, articulating long-range goals and objectives -the vision -has not been terribly difficult. What has been difficult, however, has been itemizing and expressing real and meaningful measures of performance. In the performance based budgets prepared by the City prior to 1999 there were no standardized or utilitarian definitions of performance measures utilized by all departments. In the absence of such standards or definitions, departments simply recorded and reported their outputs, their production - certainly a measure of something, but not necessarily a measure of their contributions to the realization of citywide goals and objectives. In order to enhance the performance based budget, the City incorporated outcome measurement in the process which utilizes formats called logic models. Outcome measurement is a unique tool that is client-centered. It produces a clear, defined and standardized set of indicators reflecting the impact or change that each program attempts to effect among their clients or customers. It is a tool that provides a foundation for performance based budgeting. It allows each City program's staff to identify the clients they serve, to describe the changes they wish to make in those clients, and to associate those changes with citywide goals. It allows decision-makers to evaluate programs three-dimensionally: first in terms of the outcomes these programs say they will produce, second in terms of community wide goals and objectives, and finally in terms of cost effectiveness. It is a tool that puts flesh on the performance based budgeting skeleton. (Those wishing to read further about the tool should look at United Way of America's Measuring Program Outcomes: A Practical Approach.) Outcome measurement always begins with a defined mission, a clear and concise presentation of the program`s purpose and intent. In the following pages you will find that each program has written a purpose statement (program purpose) intended to focus the program's activities and services in a manner consistent with the city`s mission statement -- "to become a model city." The program's clients nr consumers have also been identified. Within the context of outcome measurement, clients or consumers are simply those people who directly consume the services provided by a program. When reading this document, it is important to remember that clients or consumers maybe distinct from beneficiaries. Beneficiaries are those larger populations who reap a return from the investment made in programs but who do not necessarily consume the services of those programs. To better illustrate this, consider the following example. As guards in a prison, the staff manages the activities of the incarcerated population -- enforcing schedules, providing recreational opportunities, making certain that prisoners have appropriate access to families and C-1