How Effective Are Your Community Services?

This book highlights the practical steps necessary to select measures of service quality and use them efficiently. It enables you to assess whether you¿re doing the right things and how well you¿re doing them. How Effective Are Your Community Services? features seven areas of local government: ¿ Solid waste services ¿ Crime control ¿ Fire protection Parks and recreations services ¿ Library services ¿ Transportation services ¿ Call management (handling citizen complaints and requests that come in by phone, e-mail, or Internet) In each of these areas, the authors provide very specific measures and detailed procedures for using the measures¿so that you and your staff derive the most benefit out of performance measurement. Consider these immediate payoffs: ¿ Service improvement ¿ Clear priorities ¿ Accurate budgeting ¿ Effective problem solving ¿ Continuous organizational learning ¿ Successful contracting ¿ Better relations with citizens and the business community Overcoming the Challenges to Practical Performance Measurement Performance measurement can be difficult. This book shows you how to work with limited resources, diffuse staff resistance, and close information gaps. It gives you reliable measures that have already been tested and describes measurement procedures, costs and barriers, and solutions.