A Model Program for Sustained Performance Enhancements: How the City of San Diego Public Utilities Department Keeps its Performance Culture Alive?

The City of San Diego Public Utilities Department (PUD) stands out in having created, and sustained, a goal funneling, creation, monitoring, and renewal process which touches just about every employee in the organization and has direct linkages to many of the proposed Attributes, contained in the Primer: The ten Attributes of Effectively Managed Utilities (“The Ten Attributes”).As an outgrowth of the PUD's Bid-to-Goal (B2G) Program, which was conceived and implemented initially by one of its wastewater divisions over 10 years ago, this program penetrates deeper into the organization for team-based goals and incentives than any other program we reviewed as part of benchmarking with some nationally prominent peer utilities. In order to ensure that the City's B2G Program is valuable and the Goals are meaningful, relevant and challenging, the City Council Audit Committee asked for the assessment of the Program by a third party reviewer, starting with Goals proposed for FY 2011. Brown and Caldwell was hired to provide this review.