WDM Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard is a performance management system we use in West Des Moines to translate strategy into tangible objectives and measures. We determine what short-term actions will facilitate the achievement of our long-term objectives, setting goals and regularly measuring our progress toward those goals. We identify our goals and measures from four different perspectives in the City: Serve Customers, Manage Financial Resources, Improve Processes, and Support Employees. This system has been great for us not only because we can track our successes and our improvement needs, but because it integrates senior management with front-line employees and connects our vision to our organizational activities. We are also constantly able to reevaluate our City strategy to provide the best services for you.

To coordinate the citywide scorecard, we created a Strategy Map that identifies the strategic themes of our organization: Planning and Community Development, Collaboration, Sustainability, Resource Management, Community Enrichment, and Community Safety. Better descriptions of these themes can be found in the Balanced Scorecard Brochure, which can be found on the www.wdm-ia.com hompage under Featured Items. These themes are used to guide our resource allocation and programming. We also designed a set of objectives for our operations that works towards our "Customer Focused" themes. The map is useful because it creates a visul representation of our strategies, how they interconnect, and their underlying purposes. A look at the brochure will lay out the activities and processes we measure--with information coming from the Citizen Survey, citizen input and complaints, bond rating agencies, internal databases, and electronic resources, among other places.

I really encourage you to take a look at our brochure. It provides a pretty good overview of our priorities as a City and a fuller picture of the services we provide. Keep in mind as you browse it that each City department has their own departmental scorecard that goes into much greater detail concerning their specific activities, goals, and measurements. The Scorecard is a tool we have used at every level in the City, and it's a great way for us to stay on top of what we do for you.