Working Groups

The June 3rd post on this blog talked about the working groups that were developed at our quaterly management retreat.

Working Groups were formed to:
-pursue changes to our fleet management operation
-evaluate our level of service in a number of areas
-set the criteria for managed competition
-make the city more energy efficient
-review position consolidations and cross training
-implement the sharing of interdepartmental resources
-coordinate the development review process
-find more areas for cost recovery
-centralize the purchasing process

Each Department Manager was assigned to start up a group and every member of mid-management was required to participate in at least one group.

I asked the Department Managers to update me on the progress of the groups yesterday. All of the groups have met at least once with most of the groups meeting more frequently. Meeting attendance has been great and there has been a lot of active participation from the membership. Great ideas are coming out of each group. There's obviously been a lot of pent up desire for management to meet cross-departmentally and come up with more efficient ways to run our operations.

I'm expecting each group to have some of their action items ready to implement over the next two months. We'll be having our next quarterly management meeting in September where all of the action items will be reviewed, potentially modified, approved, and then implemented. Actions that can be done before September will be put in place immediately. I'll use the blog as a means to communicate some of the actions expected to take place right away.

I expect the next two budget years to be at least as challenging as the past two. The Working Groups are a key element to finding ways to do more with less and keep service levels at an acceptable level during these tough economic times.