TO: COMMUNITY AND
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
COMMITTEE
FROM: Chris Burton
SUBJECT: See Below DATE: September 10, 2024
Approved Date:
9/13/24
SUBJECT: Development Services Process Improvement and Dashboard SemiAnnual Status Report
RECOMMENDATION
Accept a semi-annual status report on the Development Services process improvements and dashboard.
BACKGROUND
On January 19, 2022, former Mayor Sam Liccardo issued a memorandum to the Joint Meeting of the Rules and Open Government Committee and Committee of the Whole recommending an addition to the Community and Economic Development (CED) Committee Work Plan to include a status update of metrics and dashboard that provides insights to the bottlenecks in the development process along with recommendations for improvements.1 The item was scheduled to return to the CED Committee twice a year.
The initial updates were presented to the CED Committee on February 28, 2022,2 with four additional presentations to the Committee since.
The original measures, as part of the Development Services Dashboard update on February 28, 2022, were replaced by the introduction of the Planning, Building and Code Enforcement (PBCE) Customer Service Charter (CSC) at the February 27, 2023, 3 CED Committee meeting. That presentation outlined the CSC's background and purpose, including definitions of the various dashboard components. 1 https://sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=10411233&GUID=9287ED48-03F8-413A-89BCC4F39E557088 2 https://sanjose.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5451961&GUID=563F2022-DA0F-4D99-88BA7A6576BD98F7 3 https://sanjose.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6056516&GUID=9C6EC6FF-173D-4DC9-BBE0- 7086441D6256
COMMITTEE AGENDA: 9/23/24
ITEM: d(1)
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
On November 1, 2023, the Rules and Open Government Committee approved a memorandum from Councilmembers Jimenez and Davis4 providing direction to PBCE to implement recommendations from the Transition Committee on Planning and Permitting. The Department previously completed three items from the memorandum and presented the outcome to the CED Committee in March 2024.
ANALYSIS
The CSC was envisioned from the main Department strategy document, the PBCE Management Framework. The Management Framework is built around four key areas:
(1) Informed Management Decisions, (2) Telling Our Story, (3) Workforce, and (4) Budget. Each of these areas is critical for improving the management and operations of the Department, which will produce excellent customer outcomes. A critical component to all these core areas is customer service that aligns the front-line customer-facing activities with high-level outcomes for PBCE customers.
Dashboard Metric Update
Over the past six months, a few notable dashboard measure trends. The Planning Division has shown notable improvements in several areas, including the on-time performance of 45-day letters, which have inspired the team to increase its on-time target from 80% to 90%. Overall, the 30/45-day letter performance is stabilizing after the team renewed its focus on meeting targets. Simultaneously, the number of projects per planner has increased dramatically even after accounting for some long-term staff leave, causing a counter to this progress due to the overall workload increase. Finally, average review cycles continue to improve, which should lead to faster project approvals. The reduction in review cycles is partially a cause of a large influx of more simple projects (e.g., wireless towers) and the decrease in staff turnover and accompanying increase in staff tenure. At this moment of the development cycle, the Planning Division focuses on two key areas: preserving institutional knowledge and developing methods to measure project workload. These initiatives aim to maintain high performance levels and better manage resources as the total number of projects continues to increase.
The most notable change in the Building Division’s performance has been the absence of the “summer surge” for inspections, which typically drives up the days to next inspection. This indicates a slower-than-normal construction market in 2024. This slowdown can be seen across the entire Building permit process, including the demand for intake and issuance. The newest update to the intake and issuance dashboards is the addition of the number of permit applications submitted for processing and the number of permits ready for issuance. This new measure gives the team insight into the 4 https://sanjose.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=12397041&GUID=4E2A3535-5F88-4773-B6B3- 1E5CA87A8D23
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
current queue to ensure sufficient staffing is available to keep wait times at a minimum.
The new measure of the number of days customers must wait for application intake processing has shown a dramatic improvement compared to the previous application appointment system, where the customer could wait as long as 30 days for an intake appointment. Figure 1 below compares the new dashboard (on the left) with the old days to the next appointment (on the right) and shows this improvement in the customer experience.
Figure 1 – Comparison of Dashboards for Application Intake PBCE Customer Service Charter Index
To simplify the Department’s overall performance, a new consolidated measure has been created called the Customer Service Charter Index; see Figure 2 below. The index averages all measures as they relate to their goal or standard. An index score above one indicates overachieving the Department’s goals on average, while an index below one indicates the Department is falling short of its goals. The purpose of the goal is to simplify the approximately 40 dashboards with over 60 unique measures to summarize overall how well the Department and the individual division/work groups are performing. The intended audience of this new dashboard is for internal Department managers, as the analysis of the dashboard results is very complex. Thus far, the introduction of this new summarized measure has helped managers quickly evaluate their team’s performance, measure goals, and analyze the type of measures that are included in the CSC.
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
Figure 2 – Customer Service Charter Index
CSC Dashboard Updates
Since the Department’s last presentation to the CED Committee on March 25, 2024, 5 there have been three notable updates to the organization and display of the dashboards. First, based on feedback from the CED Committee, the Department has continued consolidating the dashboards that tell a similar story or complement each other. There are two notable places where this consolidation has recently occurred: (1) Code Enforcement Initial Inspection Response Time shown in Figure 3 below and (2) Planning’s 30/45 day letter.
Figure 3 – Code Enforcement Initial Inspection Response Time 5 https://sanjose.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6564457&GUID=DF6D7C76-0C5A-4F6B-9EFF2CCDB3CB0F6C
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
The second major change is the introduction of a “timeline slicer” that allows the public user to change the time horizon depicted on the dashboard chart. Since many of the measures have existed for over two years, the amount of data can become overwhelming. The timeline slicer allows the user to see a more narrow view of the measure that can tell a more comprehensible, modern story. An example of the timeline slicer is shown in Figure 4 below for the number of Overdue Projects for Building Plan Review. The slicer has narrowed the chart to only show the last year’s trend, excluding 2022, when the number of overdue projects was above 400. Only when showing this more narrow timeframe can the audience see the recent downward trend of overdue projects.
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
Figure 4 – Example of “Timeline Slicer” for Building Plan Review The third major update on how the CSC dashboards are organized is the creation of a new customer-centric dashboard, shown in Figure 5 below. The inspiration for this dashboard was based on the CED Committee’s feedback from March 2024 to make the information more relevant and digestible by customers. The initial customer-centric dashboard identifies the key three measures of the more than 20 for the Building Division that aim to answer the typical customer question of “how long will it take the City to process my building permit application?” The dashboard is located on the main Building Permit Service Webpage to bring the information directly to the customers instead of having them navigate the CSC’s various dashboards. The customer-centric dashboard shows the days a customer can expect to wait for three key points in the permit process: (1) how long after an applicant submits their initial application until the application is processed, (2) how many days they must wait for comments on their initial plan set, and (3) days until they can get an inspection. The dashboard also depicts the measures in green or red depending on whether they are above (red) or below (green) the goal number of days.
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
Figure 5 – New Customer-Centric Dashboard
“Development Services” Rules Committee Memorandum - November 1, 2023 Staff last reported on items completed from the November 1, 2023, “Development Services” Rules Committee memorandum at the March 25, 2024, CED Committee meeting. Since then, the Department has completed four more items from the memorandum. First, the Department evaluated the existing pathways for feedback from the development community (item 6a). The result of this analysis resulted in the relaunching of the customer feedback form to help customers escalate issues they are encountering while also providing an avenue for process improvement suggestions.
This also led to the creation of a new dashboard (item 4 from the memorandum) summarizing the results of the customer feedback. The Department also continued to solicit input from the development community (item 3) by hosting a customer journey exercise with the Developer and Construction Roundtable on June 27, 2024. The outcome of this exercise was identifying the 16 key themes/sub-themes (Table 1) that have created a roadmap for future collaboration between the Department and the Roundtable. The Department hosted a deep dive into three themes (collaboration/problem-solving, responsiveness, and interactive communication) at the following Roundtable meeting on July 25, 2024.
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
Table 1 – Outcomes of Developer Roundtable Customer Journey Exercise Themes Subthemes Themes Subthemes
Communication Responsiveness Internal
Coordination
Department Review and
Coordination
Process Changes Other Dept Reviews
Public Information Comments
Interactive
Communication
Process
Application Materials /
Requirements
Collaboration Problem-Solving Process
Empowerment Technology
Timeline Roundtable Collaboration
Questions and Point of
Contact
Customer Experience
Finally, the Planning Division completed the evaluation of the citation of regulations in comment letters (item 6c), which helped identify and implement several improvements to the planning 45-day comment letters. First, the Division would provide hyperlinks to the specific regulation referenced in their note. Second, when the comment referenced a required ordinance, it would mention that it was a requirement and list the specific standard required by the ordinance. Third, when the comment related to the guideline, the Planning Division clarified by defining what a guideline is and its contrast to a standard, and made their reference to guidelines and standards throughout comments letters clearer.
Development Facilitation
Starting in FY 2023-2024, the Department added two new positions to support the processing of key development projects in the City: (1) Development Facilitation Officer and (2) Housing Navigator. Previously, these two positions were in the Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs and the Housing Department, respectively.
Relocating these two positions within PBCE aims to improve the collaboration between developers and the teams responsible for reviewing permit applications. The scope of services provided by both roles is similar in that they strive to support key projects through all stages of the entitlement and permitting process. This includes preapplication support, site selection, process scoping, issue escalation, status updates, single point of contact, convening stakeholders to problem solve, and post-permit construction follow-up. Since adding these two positions, the Department has been refining the scope of services to provide the most value to customers. The Department is also analyzing the type of projects this service offers to ensure those with the most impact on the City are supported to the finish line.
COMMUNITY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
September 10, 2024
Subject: Development Services Dashboard Update
COORDINATION
The memorandum was coordinated with the City Attorney’s Office. /s/
Chris Burton
Director of Planning, Building
and Code Enforcement
For questions, please contact Alex Powell, Chief of Staff, Planning, Building and Code Enforcement, at (408) 535-1258 or [email protected].