More specific governance elements

GOVERNANCE, being a journey, cannot be limited to motherhood statements. It must get people to pursue specific goals and objectives, and to deliver actual results and measurable outcomes.

The “vision statement” is at the level of a motherhood statement. It has to be translated into more specific goals that are chosen carefully on the basis of their being “priority” due to their strategic importance in eventually getting the vision realized.

But where are these specific goals or strategic objectives or strategic priorities to be taken from? The balanced scorecard framework has this answer: take them from all the major aspects or facets of the operations of the enterprise. In this case, they have to be taken from all the major facets that a city, like Mandaue, operates by. These include:

• The people in City Hall. What are their skills and orientation? What are they used to doing? What are they capable of doing? Can they be transformed? What needs to be done to make them vital assets for the transformation of the city?

• The core processes in City Hall. What are the front-line services? How well are they rendered? Is the public satisfied with the current manner in which they are being served by the city’s “public servants”? What improvements can be introduced any time soon? In what concrete way can such improvements be felt by the public?

• The key constituencies that City Hall must serve. What are their priority needs? In what way can the city help address those needs? What about the quality with which city services are rendered? Are the risk factors to the city and its residents taken into due account in the city’s current plan of actions?

• The financial constraints under which the city operates: how may those constraints be eased? Can the city generate additional revenues through existing channels that already empower it to do so? Are the city’s assets properly used such that they generate returns and net income for the city? Where is the city losing, and what realistic possibility is there to convert those losses into gains?

• The socio-economic impact: regarding the city’s plan of action, what positive impact does it have on the actual life of city residents? How do we make our city more livable, and more attractive for manufacturing and related investments? What must the city do to give a boost and provide meaningful assistance to small and medium-scale manufacturing enterprises?

These and similar questions would demand answers. Through a participatory workshop involving key stakeholders of the city, Mandaue agreed on a few strategic priorities that the city must pursue, if it is to realize its “vision statement” by the end-date of 2020. These set of priorities were all laid out carefully to show how closely inter-related and mutually supportive they are. Once laid out in this fashion, they constituted the City of Mandaue’s Strategy Map: this is the road map the city can follow as it journeys towards its destination, the realization of its “vision” by 2020.

Each of the strategic priorities in the City Strategy Map would contain even more specific items such as: what must be done (or the initiatives that must be undertaken); what measure can be used to assess real progress in pursuing a priority; and what target of accomplishment for each given year should be set such that by 2020 the “vision” will actually be realized. These specific items for each strategic priority are put together under the City’s Performance Scorecard. This is the scorecard by which the performance of the City Mayor will be assessed. Mayor Cortes ended up taking full responsibility for delivering performance using the City Performance Scorecard: That is what City Mayors are judged by under a governance framework.