Assessing Goals and Communicating Progress with Metrics Sprint

• Sprint start date: Wednesday, March 26, 2025
• Sprint end date: Wednesday, May 7, 2025
• Frequency: Weekly on Wednesdays, 14:00 - 15:30 Eastern Time (USA)
• Duration: 5 sessions over 7 weeks
• Language: The sessions will be run in English with live translation to Spanish and/or Portuguese as required.

Assessing Goals and Communicating Progress with Metrics

Well-crafted goals and measures are essential to managing and improving organizational performance. Solid goals and measures are how you translate your vision to something actionable and measurable: as you may have heard, “what gets measured gets done.” This sprint will help cities identify how to create effective and actionable goals, and pick the right measures from the many data sources and options that are available to them. Communicating progress to stakeholders is another crucial part of measuring progress; the sprint will also help cities make a plan for impactful reporting to their audiences. The sprint will be led by two former local government practitioners who have developed effective goals, measures, and reporting across a broad range of city functions. The sprint will be designed to facilitate engagement between participating cities for peer learning and guidance as they move forward together on this path.

This sprint is designed for 2-3 member teams from cities in North, South, and Central America who want to hone their goals, measures, and reporting. Teams will collaborate on a series of exercises during each session to move them toward a set of metrics and a reporting plan. While it is preferred that multiple staff from a city participate in the sprint, individuals are welcome to register with the knowledge that some exercises may require feedback from other staff.

What will I learn/achieve during this 7-week sprint?

At the end of the Sprint, participants will have:

1. An understanding of how to craft data-oriented strategic goals;
2. A list of measures mapped to strategic goals for their organization;
3. A data dictionary that documents measure definitions, targets, sources, and ownership;
4. The ability to evaluate measures now and in the future against the SMARTIE framework;
5. Practice in applying effective use of data visualization for communication.

Participants will be ready to:

1. Assess progress on strategic goals using established measures;
2. Make a plan to communicate progress on strategic goals using data;
3. Create a report-out to the public on performance measures related to strategic goals.

This course will put you on the path to achieving the following WWC Criteria: