By Pepper Parr
November 9th, 2023
BURLINGTON, ON
Risk Assessment: Part 3 of a 6 part series
Designing and Evolving our Organization (DEOO) is perhaps what City Manager Tim Commisso will be remembered for most. He along with Executive Directive Sheila Jones put this together and convinced Council to fund it. It is human resources management at its best when done well. Do they get it right? Not all the time but they were very right when they introduced the approach.
Since 2019, the City has taken a corporate-wide strategic approach to refine its functional design and organizational structure through Designing and Evolving our Organization
(DEOO).
The body language was better than the words City Manager Tim Commisso used on this occasion.
As Council is aware, the City of Burlington has reached its tipping point where the ability to provide effective and quality services at current staffing levels is not sustainable.
DEOO has allowed the City of Burlington to continue to evolve to meet the changing environment to address the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in a strategic and comprehensive manner and most importantly prepare for the future.
Management is working across and throughout the organization to stabilize and enhance our competency, capability and capacity through resource needs — from people, process and technology — to be a customer-centered organization and to effectively deliver on our commitments.
Annually, DEOO includes the following process:
Assessing current state of resources based on risks and service needs
Updating the plan including resource rationalization and process improvement
Presenting the plan for review and approval in principle
Recommending Council consideration and approval of updated DEOO Plan and related budget implications
Sheila Jones brought in significant changes when she was the City Auditor – she continued the bringing in changes as an Executive Director working with City Manager Tim Commisso on the DEOO file.
By following these steps, DEOO has become a part of our natural process of aligning our resources to the achievement of strategic objectives and effective and efficient service delivery while managing risk. Through this process, resource needs are identified and prioritized, giving consideration to rationalization where it makes sense and process improvements. These decisions are reflected in an annually updated DEOO plan and incorporated into the budget.
Included within the 2024 Financial Needs and Multi-Year Forecast, additional staffing requests are reflected in the recommended Key Investments under the category of Sustaining City Services and are supported by business cases.
It was Jones who introduced Staff to the concept of the requirement to make a business case when asking for additional funding.
While serving as the City Auditor she did a survey on just how many people held a City credit card. There were fewer when she completed that assignment
Perhaps that’s what some, who don’t know the truth, will remember for such!!!!! Those, however, who have been tryig to engage with staff incuding Mr. Commisso and having their mail diverted to the Clerk’s office believe differently. A city manager who knows the city clerk is acting outside engagement charter, procedural by-laws (recent reading of Petition took Herculean effort to get put on the Council Agenda where it belonged) and their corporate policies on accountability etc. see Mr. Commisso’s response to city clerk and other senior staff complaints that have lead to tremedous risk for taxpayers, their number one memory of what he achieved to protect staff not the public as he should.
We have given him every chance to put things right by meeting with us and the head of legal who was not in command for most of the issues that Mr. Commisso needs to address before he leaves. Mr. Commisso refuses. Yet we know this is not true of all taxpayers he acknowledges issues and meets with them. The Marsdens, however, get an answeer from the City Clerk, who the complaints are about “there is no appetite for a meeting” that we had requested in an email addressed to Mr. Commisso..
We were very happy when Mr. Commisso was appointed to replace Ridge. But that happiness changed to a deep sadness that he allows himself to be manipulated in this way that seriously affects the risk to taxpayers he has”served” and been well paid for the service for a lot of years. .