Mission, management, and service delivery: integrating strategic planning and budgeting in Milwaukee.

• Author: Kinney, Anne Spray
• Position: Wisconsin

An issue-management planning and budgetary model focuses on outcome-oriented objectives for measuring results important to the community.

Citizens care about efficiently provides services, lower property taxes, safe neighborhoods, employment opportunities, clean air, attractive transportation alternatives, and a broad range of recreation opportunities. They care about results; they care about outcomes. Citizens care less about inputs, about how hard we in government try. They care less about how we're organized, about which city department is responsible for what.

- Milwaukee Mayor John O. Norquist, May 11, 1992

Few local government officials or managers would disagree that citizens care more about results, or outcomes, than they do about the methods and resources, or inputs, used to achieve these results. Yet traditional governmental budgeting concentrates on changes in inputs from year to year. Attention placed on reducing spending to fit available revenues often obscures concerns about the impact of next year's spending on long-term community viability.

Strategic planning can provide a long-term context for annual budget decisions. However, although strategic planning has become popular in government in recent years, it is frequently difficult to see the connection between what a strategic plan says and what next year's budget does. To be useful, a plan must go beyond broad statements of vision and mission. It must contain more than pictures of happy children, willing workers and appealing green spaces. Good planning should answer two main questions: "What are the big problems?" and "What are we going to do about them?" If a plan is to influence results, its proposed strategies and actions must be the basis for programs and activities funded in the budget.

In 1993, Milwaukee implemented "System 94: Mission, Management, and Service Delivery," an integrated strategic planning and budgeting system. Through this initiative, strategic planning and budgeting became components of a single system of issue identification, objective setting, strategy development and resource allocation. The city's 1994 budget was the first developed in accordance with the new system.

System 94 Objectives

Objectives of Milwaukee's integrated planning and budgeting effort were established and communicated throughout the organization at the beginning of the process. The four major aims of System 94 were summarized as follows.

1) Focus more attention on strategies and longer time horizons, and less on tactics and the short term. Annually approved budgets are the norm for local governments, and the resultant focus on serial, annual spending decisions tends to crowd out strategic considerations unless the process formally includes a long-term component.

2) Shift the emphasis from departmental issues and needs to those of the city's residents. If an effort is not undertaken to base long-term strategies and spending decisions on broad community-wide needs, the more day-to-day internal issues and needs of the organization will predominate.

3) Give departmental managers more flexibility in devising strategies to reach their objectives. In a recent article on research needs in public management, Robert Behn calls for breaking "the micromanagement cycle of distrust, rules, poor performance, more distrust, more rules, more. . . ."(1) Milwaukee's system assumes that setting a relatively small number of objectives and holding managers accountable for achieving them produces better results than requiring departments to provide large amounts of information on processes and inputs to central staff agencies and policymakers.

4) Shift the emphasis from inputs to outcomes. Line items, personnel, pieces [TABULAR DATA FOR EXHIBIT 2 OMITTED] of equipment, supplies and services are all inputs. Without agreed-upon strategies and desired outcomes, the budget process can become an exercise in counting inputs. A strategic approach asks not "How many inputs?" but "How does this configuration of inputs achieve outcomes - or results - important to the community?"

Elements of the System

The components of the planning/budgeting system and how the process flows from one component to the next are shown in Exhibit 1. Milwaukee's planning and budgeting calendar is shown in Exhibit 2.

Citywide Strategic Plan. Based on an issue-management model,(2) Milwaukee's planning and budgeting process begins with...