Setting Planning Department Priorities: "Smart Strategies" For Establishing Priorities For Annual Work Programs
		Bruce W. McClendon, FAICP
		Session: April 17, 2000, 8:45 a.m. - 10:00a.m.	Author Info

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes that planners should create a customer-driven culture within their organization. It offers a series of specific "smart strategies" that planners can use to help them develop annual work programs that put the values, needs and priorities of their customers ahead of their own personal interests.

Customer-Driven Annual Work Programs

When I wrote Customer Service in Local Government in 1992, the concept of treating citizens like customers was a novel, emerging idea. Today, almost all-local governments recognize the value and benefit of applying the private sector principles of customer service to the development and delivery of public sector products and services. The evidence of this transformation is visible all across the County. For instance, I was recently conducting a performance audit for Clark County (Vancouver), Washington, where I found that the County had created a Customer Service Division with nine employees who were responsible for permit intake for the Community Development Department.

Local governments have already employed most of the obvious and highly visible aspects of customer service. While the remaining opportunities are somewhat limited and more difficult to implement, the concept of customer-driven annual work programs is the one idea that has the potential to take customer service to the next level. Local governments in general, and planners more specifically, should not be satisfied with their performance until they have learned how to integrate their customers values, needs and priorities into all aspects of their operations. Involving citizens in the preparation of annual work program is an important step in the right direction.

In the watershed book Search of Excellence, Peters and Waterman concluded that excellent companies are not only better on service, quality, reliability, and finding a niche, for they are also better listeners. They also noted that the best companies allow their customers to push them around, and the companies love it. Successful planners know from experience that you cannot plan effectively unless you are able to meaningfully involve the community in the planning and decision making process. On the other hand, while there has been a decline in the percentage of planners that view the public as a burden or nuisance to be endured, there is still a major shortcoming in many planning programs. When it comes to preparing an annual work program, public involvement is rare and almost nonexistent.

It needs to be understood, that the same benefits which come from citizen involvement in the planning process also occur when citizens are involved in establishing priorities for the annual work program. Businesses do not pay attention to their customers just during marketing. In fact, they attempt to involve their customers in every nook and cranny of almost every aspect of the business - from marketing and sales, to research and development, and to manufacturing and service delivery. Local governments must develop a similar commitment to the principles of customer involvement in all functional areas in order to be more effective and to truly meet the needs of their citizens.

Model for Success in the Public Sector

At a Kennedy School of Government seminar recently held in Orlando, Florida, Dr. Mark Moore argued that success in the public sector requires the integration and alignment of the three following factors: operational capability; values, goals and objectives; and legitimacy and support. His view is that unless all three of these factors are satisfied by the public sector organization, failure will be the eventual end result. And while all three factors are important, I have found that the foundation for lasting success depends on our ability to garner legitimacy and support from the constituents and customers we are trying to serve.

Legitimacy and Support for Planning

What is planning? What do planners do? Where do planners really work? The answers to these questions are key to any organization's ability to obtain the needed legitimacy and support from the public in general and its customers in particular. When local governments conduct customer satisfaction surveys, planning and zoning functions usually receive the lowest ratings of all public services. The public does not have a very good idea of what planners really do. Nevertheless, what they do know and understand about planners, they do not necessarily value and appreciate. The bottom line is measured by results, and when people look around their community, they often do not like what they see.

The standard defense that planners use to rationalize their lack of results is to explain that they do not make political decisions and are not really responsible for what is or is not actually approved and implemented. This defense is not working even though it is the truth. If the truth is our defense, then the profession needs a new truth. The new truth or the new paradigm, if you prefer a more sophisticated word, is the concept of customer service. Effective planning is achieved by providing needed, valued, and useful services to our customers. In order to meet the needs of their customers, planners must create a customer-driven culture within their department or agency. Planners must learn how to put the values and needs of their customer ahead of their own personal interests.

Positioning the Planning Profession

David Placek, president of Lexicon Naming, explained that in the private sector, companies are constantly reinventing themselves. These companies or organizations change names when they reposition, acquire new products, develop new technologies or simply want to leave the past behind. For instance, the Prune Council has found that young people think of prunes as an old person's laxative. Their proposed solution is not to bioengineer prunes into some new, exotic fruit, but rather the change the products name to dried plums.

In the January 2000 issue of Planning magazine, the author of an article entitled "Are You Ready for Smart Growth" asked "what is so new about smart growth." They answered by concluding, "in many ways, smart growth looks at great deal like orthodox planning." I would express it as "old wine in a new bottle." If prunes can be reinvented as dried plums, then it is a smart strategy for planning to cloak itself in the image of smart growth.

What Your Brand Name?

In Mastering Change, Ray Quay and I wrote that "the development of a management plan and work program for a planning agency begins with asking and answering such broad questions as: What business are we in? What business do we want to be in? Why do people use or buy our products and services? Who is our competition? What are we doing night? What are we doing wrong?" If you don't start with the right questions, then you'll end up with the wrong answers.

Many planners have never given much thought to the first question about what business they are in, much less any of the others. The real value of asking these questions is to stimulate serious thinking and prod planners to question their whole approach to service delivery.

Before you can develop a truly effective work program, you must first develop a guiding "positioning" or "branding" strategy for your department or agency. Bennis and Nanus in their book Leaders - The Strategies for Taking Charge stated that "positioning involves creating a niche in a complex, changing environment that is unique, important, and appropriate given the resources and capabilities of an organization." I suggest that an important goal for planners should be to create an image in your customers' minds that is unique and appealing with respect to your operations.

Since most of the public does not know what planners really do, then we do not have to waste too much time changing an image. Instead, we can spend time creating a unique and appealing positive image that validates our legitimacy and recognizes the planning profession's intrinsic value to the community.

In the new book, Creating Brand Loyalty, Richard Czerniawski and Michael Maloney suggest that the first responsibility of leadership is to develop a positioning statement that depicts a strategic vision for the way customers should perceive, think, and feel about your products and services. The six elements of brand positioning are: staying current with changing customer needs; defining your target customer groups; establishing a comparative frame of reference; communicating the benefits of your products and services; documenting the benefit claims; and establishing a personality or character reflecting positive personality traits or values. It is the last of the six elements that is at work when planners use the phase "smart growth" in communicating with their customers. It simply makes the point that it's "smart" to plan and, after all, who wants to be dumb.

In 1992, I was hired to be the planning manger for Orange County, Florida. The Planning Division was divided into two sections: Comprehensive Policy Planning and Current Planning. My initial impression of the Division was that it consisted of short-range and long-range regulators. One of my first actions was to reorganize the structure of the Department into the following divisions: economic development; environmental resources; comprehensive planning, neighborhood conservation, transportation planning, and land use administration. Based on what I have been writing about in this paper, you do not have to be a rocket scientist to grasp my motives and intent.

My current title in Orange County is the Director of Growth Management and Environmental Resources. The good news is that almost everyone supports growth management and protecting the environmental resources in Central Florida. The bad news is that my title also makes me accountable for the County's performance in these two important and controversial areas of community concern. Fortunately, I am a strong proponent of accountability and am eager to shoulder the responsibility for delivery smart growth.

Smart Strategies for Establishing Priorities

The following are a series of strategies for helping planners establish customer-driven priorities for their annual work programs.

• Listen to Your Customers. Identify and rank your customers in order of importance -- use surveys and focus groups to establish their needs and priorities, and to develop products and services that meet their standards and expectations. Find out what you are doing, this is valued, and what your customers can do without. Remember, you are not the customer.

• Do not assume your existing work program is sustainable. Critically analyze all products and services and determine what should be eliminated, reduced, modified or expanded from your customers' perspective.

• Weed your garden. Critically examine all of your products and services and be on the look out for outdated vestigial responsibilities.

• Rotate your crops. Conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats). Shift and reallocate resources in response to threats and opportunities based on the internal capacity and capability - the strengths and weakness - of your organization. Manage by doing more with less.

• Customers want results/solutions; not planning studies or reports. Minimize data collection and analysis and emphasize the production of useful knowledge, which can be applied and put to good use by your customers.

• Shorten the time it takes to go from problem identification to solution. Anticipate needs and gear up in advance of the assignment. Be aware of windows of opportunity for action that may close if the process takes too long. Meet the timing needs and expectations of your customers.

• Timing may not be everything, but its close. Be sensitive and take into account the election cycle and your personal evaluation date when you establish production schedules. Be aware and try to manage the timing of your good news and bad news projects.

• Emphasize quality, not quantity. Reliability, not speed, is the essential foundation of customer satisfaction. NASA has learned the hard way that their strategy of "faster, cheaper, and better" was dangerously flawed.

• Produce value, not volume. Filtered and condensed, dependable information is highly prized by most customers. In terms of data and analysis, less can really be more.

• Place a priority emphasis on products and services with high visibility and large markets. Make sure the bulk of your resources are being leveraged so as to maximize public awareness. To paraphrase from the movie Cool Hand Luke, many planning programs suffer from a failure to communicate.

• Produce a steady stream of informative, useful products. One of your goals should be to maintain external visibility and internal excitement. Publications that are useful to your customers are a valuable source of visibility.
• Reduce the resources committed to long-term projects. Win now! Minimize your long-term investments and maximize their visibility. Schedule the release of at least one high profile "flagship" type product during each fiscal year. Stagger your long-term projects to achieve this strategy without reducing the resources available to meet more pressing needs and opportunities.

• Little things can make a big difference. New York City showed that when you fix the broken windows, arrest subway fare-beaters, and eliminate graffiti, criminals perceive that egregious behavior has consequences and the crime rate declines. Apply this principle and development incremental solutions to difficult problems.

• Value the doable. Place an emphasis on products and programs that are politically and financially doable. More consideration should be given to implementation. Big plans inspire, but they are difficult to implement. Also, make sure some of your best planners and involved with implementation.

• Provide extra service to the customers that have demonstrated a willingness and commitment to help themselves. Never do anything for someone that they can easily do for themselves. Do not foster dependency. Empower your customers.

• Smart partners and smart alliances should be emphasized. As noted in the book Partnering Intelligence by Stephen Dent, partnering allows an entity to expand resources without investing in new infrastructure, create greater customer satisfaction through increased availability of services, reduce expenses by using shared facilities, and increase productivity and job security. Politically connected partners also can increase your influence and effectiveness with elected officials.

• Customer-driven innovation is the key to the effective use of technology. Invest resources (personal and financial) in state-of-the-art technology that increases capability, capacity and productivity. Do not become technology driven and lose your customer orientation and focus. Use technology to innovatively meet the needs of your customers.

If government is going to earn the trust and respect of our customers, we need to be perceived as having some of the positive characteristics of the businesses in the "new economy". Planning departments need to help local governments build the technology and competency platforms that will support growth and innovation in new products and services. The planning professions' reputation for innovation and our knowledge of GIS, telecommunications technology, and computers makes us valuable to our colleagues. Planners need to position themselves as innovative adapters of technology and deliver the products and services that are needed and valued by our customers. In Orange County, Florida, we have been able to use this strategy with significant success. If you want to learn more about our innovative technology initiatives, then email me at: mcclendon@eCustomerService.cc.

Author and Copyright Information

Copyright 2000 By Author

Bruce W. McClendon, FAICP
Director of Growth Management and Environmental Resources
Orange County (Orlando), Florida

Bruce McClendon is the Director of Growth Management and Environmental Resources for Orange County (Orlando), Florida. He has a Masters in Regional and City Planning, over 30 years of professional experience, and the author of numerous publications including Customer Service in Local Government published by the American Planning Association.