What’s old is new.

Back in 2012, we at Barrett and Greene, Inc., participated in the New York City's Mayor's Management Roundtable, an effort spearheaded by Jeff Tryens, who was NYC’s deputy director for performance management the time. The goal was to take the mammoth annual Mayor’s Management Report and make it significantly more useful to users.

One of the principal recommendations that was discussed at the Roundtable was to focus somewhat more on the results of what the city was doing, and less so on the so-called “input” and “output” measures – the fiscal and manpower resources -- of what it was putting into its agencies. 

Sadly, little that we could see came out of that effort, and just last week, the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) came out with a report that sounded sadly familiar. The Mayor’s Management Report, has been expanded under Mayor Eric Adams to include hundreds of new indicators and 20 new goals. This has been described by the Mayor as the city’s “report card,” but wrote the CBC,  “When you comb through the report, it's clear that most of the document still focuses on what the City is doing rather than how well it is performing, a long-standing shortcoming.”

Among the CBC’s other findings, the city report:

• “Does not sufficiently link data on program performance to spending to assess cost-effectiveness”

• “Lacks resident and customer feedback that are critical measures of performance” 

• “Lacks targets for most metrics against which performance can be assessed”

• “Lacks geographic detail” 

The report by Julia Nagle, senior research associate at CBC concludes that “Improving the MMR with a greater focus on outcomes, quality, and efficiency; tighter links to the budget; resident feedback; targets; and geographic detail would increase the report’s value for management and public accountability. It would provide a strong foundation to identify areas to improve services, increase efficiency, and manage and track improvement efforts over time. As the City continues to face multi-billion-dollar budget gaps, finding areas where services can be delivered more efficiently and cost-effectively is especially critical.”

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