The City Manager Enters the Blogosphere!

Welcome to my blog!  In 2007, as I met and listened to many of you at departmental meetings, I committed to making efforts in 2008 to improve communication with all of you.  Someone at one of those meetings mentioned a blog; well, after discussing what a blog was with my 10 year-old daughter, here goes..........

For all of us, a new year represents a chance to do two things - 1) reflect on and evaluate where we are in our efforts to reach our personal goals, and 2) build on our successes and focus on areas where we can improve.   

Well our organization is no different.  First, let's reflect on and evaluate our organizational performance in the past year.  When I look at the results of our 2007 DirectionFinder Citizen Survey, I can see that we are having a positive impact on our community.  Overall, our citizens are telling us that we are doing a great job delivering excellent city services and helping to make Olathe a premier community in which to live, work, and raise a family.  As an organization, we are among the leaders in the entire metro area in many areas and are THE leader in the metro area in several.  I am very proud of all you and congratulate you all on a job well done in 2007!

The second thing the new year offers us is the opportunity to build on our successes from last year and seize new opportunities to improve.  If we are to do that, you may be asking what will be our focus in 2008 as an organization?  What do I see as the goals we will need to target and emphasize as we continue to pursue our vision of "Setting the Standard for Excellence in Public Service"?

In 2008 we will continue to ask the question, "how can we do things better"?  We will be looking to continue to build an organizational culture that embraces innovation, change, process improvement, and quality customer service.  These efforts will have to be balanced with maintaining our financial sustainability as we deal with an economy that is undergoing some challenges. 

How will we do this? We will do this by:

• Striving to build teamwork and collaboration across all divisions and departments,
• Building out our Balanced Scorecard with measures based on outcomes that better help us determine how we are progressing towards our goals,
• Finding more opportunities to involve all of our employees in developing new and innovative ways of providing our services, and
• Putting methods and tools in place that allow us to quickly apply lessons learned from one improvement to the next.

Reaching these goals will take hard work and commitment and that commitment begins with our leadership.  I will ask each department to create a process improvement or innovation objective and see that it gets accomplished.  I will also challenge us all to find ways to reduce or eliminate redundant work - work that is duplicated across departments.  Finally, I believe we need to seek ways to enhance our collaboration skills, both internally and externally.

These are big challenges, but challenges I know all of you are capable of not only meeting, but exceeding!  We will need to constantly ask ourselves the hard questions.  Are we embracing change?  Are there other ways we can do this job?  Are we planning and being proactive as an organization?  If we ask ourselves those questions and respond to them positively, there is no doubt in my mind Olathe City employees are an amazing team that can rise to the challenge.

I am excited about 2008 and look forward to facing its challenges with all of you.  It is an honor to work and serve with each of you.  Together we can be successful in Setting the Standard for Excellence in Public Service!!