Beyond business - the broader applications of Portfolio Management
The following are three powerful examples of how the principles of portfolio management are used by public servants to better our communities. In each, it just sounds like good management or proper operational oversight, and that’s just what it is. Yet, doing so allows leaders to ask the bigger questions and enact change. It allows them to lead.
Sally Yates, during her time as the United States attorney in the Northern District of Georgia
"It's a whole other thing to actually being the one making the decision. But to me, what I liked about it is that it gave me an opportunity to really be able to chart the course of the office. There are really limited resources in any U.S. attorney's office and you can't do everything there and you have to decide how you're going to use those resources to make the district as safe as you can do it. But also, importantly, and to me this is just as important, is to do it in a way that engenders the trust of the people whom you serve. And that included also being involved in prevention efforts on the front end and prisoner re-entry on the back end to ensure that they're successful. So, I loved having a chance to be able to chart that course in an office, in a department that I believed in so strongly."
Anne Milgram, during her time as the Attorney General for the State of New Jersey
"And so I would say ‘Why do you have people on this street corner? Why are you focused on this neighborhood?’ The answer would be, ‘Well, we had a case a few weeks back,’ or ‘This has always been a problem for us.’ And then ultimately, when we pull the information in the data, it was often not true. Or it was anecdotal meaning like, yeah, one officer might have had one situation, making them believe that this was the right place to be. But when you looked at the city as a whole, it was clear like, ‘Oh, that's not your problem.’ I can give you one very basic example of this, that I think is also really true in a lot of American cities today, which is 911 calls. So 911 it's this incredible technological innovation, but it's also taking cops off the street. Because instead of just walking around and being like, assigned to the community, we often send officers on patrol from 911 call to 911 call. And so, when I got to Camden, there were probably, I don't know 12 or 13 911 calls. At the high point someone told me recently was like 20 911 calls per shift per officer. And that means that cop is literally in their car just responding, responding, responding. In a city of 80,000 people there were, you know, again, more than 10,000 911 calls. That's a lot of 911 calls. Per year, every single year. And so the police department couldn't explain to us what was happening. We went in, we pulled the data, and we found our response times were terrible. It was taking us forever to get to the scene of a call, including violence in progress, which is really important. There's nothing more important than someone picks up the phone calls 911 and says, ‘Someone was just shot’ or ‘There's a man with a knife.” Like the police have to be there immediately. There were long delays in response time, there were people calling repeatedly because it was taking the officers so long to get there. And then there were people who are saying, ‘shots fired’ because if you didn't say ‘shots fired,’ if you said ‘my car was stolen,’ no officer would show up for three hours. And so that — all of that distorts the system. When we finally looked back, we learned that the dispatchers were sending the officers that they thought were closest to the scene of the crime, but they weren't ever the right people who were closest. There are countless reasons why that unit might not be the closest unit. And so we put GPS on the cars, we automatically dispatch the closest units. And we went to like less than 4000 911 calls in a year. And our response times to crime dramatically changed."
Anthony Williams, during his time as the independent CFO and, later, the mayor of Washington D.C.
"Now what I really believe was that people were underestimating me and saying there was more chaos than there was. And I actually believe we could. I really want 70-30, that we could actually get this audit done. But because people had underestimated us I really played on that. And so, when we finally had a clean opinion in 1997, and we had a surplus it was a big, big deal. And during the whole time I had been CFO I had gone around the neighborhoods and I talked to all the neighborhoods about the problems that the district was facing. And you know my corny metaphor I used was said we’re a badly driven car on a bad road that's overloaded and underpowered? And I would say you, know we're badly driven because we have to improve our management. We're overloaded because we've promised too many things by government than we have the resources to do. We're underpowered because we don't have all the resources at our disposal that we should because of the federal overlay and the lack of representation. And it's a hard road because it's hard being a city."
"You create a set of things you want to accomplish. A map to get there. You try to hold people to account for that. Not just in getting to goals but also meeting their ethical and legal responsibilities. You know, find out a way to refresh this by talking to people outside, getting new ideas, and creating this positive cycle."
All three quotes are from a podcast called The Oath where notable public servants are interviewed about their experiences, and I’m always struck by how each describe the same set of processes as one of the keys to their success.
