Mayor's Blog
With 5 months under my belt as Mayor I have grown
my appreciation for the many employees of the City.
No matter what our individual role is we strive to
execute effectively as a team. I’ve witnessed
collaboration across multiple departments to achieve
an end goal without the prodding I would’ve
assumed was needed. Our team continues to bring
value to our citizens even when challenged with
financing the many projects underway and digesting
the volume of ideas that have been shared by the
public for future consideration. The best way to
accomplish more with the same or less resources
available is to improve our productivity and eliminate
waste.
I wrote prior about embracing technology and that is
one approach and critical to productivity
improvement. There is also an opportunity to
improve productivity by eliminating complexity.
When there are multiple steps along a path to
complete a task we need to challenge the process
map and determine if there are some steps that
could be eliminated entirely or at least simplified.
We can’t snap our fingers and make a process
better. It requires taking the time to gather the facts,
document process flow, and collect the time it takes
for each task completion. When we do this we can
identify the opportunities for improvement. Dealing
with facts will take the emotion out, overcome our
pre-existing paradigms, and lead to higher
productivity which then helps us overcome some of
our financial challenges. We can all evaluate the
work we do and look for ways to simplify or
eliminate it.
There is much to do but not enough manpower to be
aggressively moving us forward as a community. We
need to free our time to address our current and future
needs. Being proactive about how we spend our time is
a much healthier state than being reactive.
Mayor Dean Vonderheide
