City manager puts his cards on the table: council doesn't say all that much publicly.

By Pepper Parr

October 14, 2015

BURLINGTON, ON

City manager James Ridge today told city council what he is going to do for the big bucks they pay him.

City manager strutted his stuff when he revealed his Work Plan – he didn’t get a standing ovation.

In the work plan he put before council he used the typical bureaucratic gobble degook to say what he has up his sleeve.

The full picture is in the details – and there is some decent stuff in there.

KEY OBJECTIVES OF THE WORK PLAN:

1. Develop and sustain outcome-focused, highly integrated planning processes, all in support of service excellence and city-building
2. Create the tools and ongoing supports to allow Council to govern strategically
3. Continue to provide responsible, innovative, community-engaged public administration with rigorous performance management, and a five year goal of being recognized as one of Canada’s best managed cities
4. Building on the existing high quality workplace, set a five year goal of formally being recognized as one of top 100 employers in Canada
5. Build and sustain effective trust relationships with key government, community, and private sector partners

Ridge explained that the document he gave Council was substantially incomplete. When the City’s new Strategic Plan is complete and approved, numerous additional strategic initiatives (possible 50 or more) will be added in the “Strategic Initiatives” section that is currently blank.

A second version of this plan will be provided to Council and staff in the weeks following approval of the Strategic Plan

Ridge wrote:

• Although there are obvious departmental leads for the various initiatives listed in the plan, at this point only SMT (Senior Management Team) is identified. Initial analysis by SMT identified the fact that many, if not most, of the initiatives would benefit from cross-departmental approaches.
In a follow-on process SMT will as a group consider who will lead the initiatives, with strong consideration being given to joint leads and cross-departmental teams.

• The work plan will also be provided in a timeline version to assist with longer term Council planning.

Ridge would like to see Burlington as one of the Best 100 companies to work for and be an exporter of municipal talent.

• The work plan will ultimately be formatted so that activities can be sorted and viewed by type (performance measurement, capital projects, partnerships)

• On completion, the plan (and progress against it) will be publicly available through the City’s website.

There is much more to the presentation of the Work Plan and how Council reacted to it. I wasn’t all good.

Stay tuned