Benchmark Your Tweets

There’s an interesting tool set up to track government messages being distributed by Twitter at http://www.govlive.com/. You can use it to get a glimpse into what other governments are doing with Twitter and get ideas for new ways to leverage it for your agency.

It tracks over 5,000 governments (I had to ask for ours to be included) and gives viewers the option to vote whether each entry is “helpful” or “unimportant.” That feature doesn’t seem to be used much at this point, but could become a way of seeing what reactions to a particular post are as it catches on.

As I look at the feed today, there are event announcements, emergency preparedness reminders, and news about pending Council decisions. There are even a couple of responses to constituents mixed in.

The Basics of Process Management

Another useful tool in any manager’s kit is process management—the art of setting up, measuring, and evaluating the processes you use to deliver products and services. In government communications we have dozens of processes, from preparing news releases to publishing magazines to running town hall meetings, each of which can benefit from reflecting on how we perform those tasks.

Each process we use involves people and other resources, and by understanding how things are actually happening, you can design your work to be as efficient and effective as possible.

There are about a dozen steps to review and improve the processes that you manager. They are:

• Identify the products and services you deliver (each has its own process)
• Prioritize them so you can work on the most resource-intensive first
• Identify the process owner, who will be accountable for achieving the process goals
• Document the process, using flow charts to show every step
• Identify the customers (or audience)
• Determine what the customer’s requirements are for the end product
• Identify performance indicators
• Develop targets for those indicators through research (such as benchmarking)
• Make changes to the process to decrease hand-offs or other resource impacts
• Develop process tracking to document indicators and results
• Implement the process and monitor results
• Periodically analyze results and make changes to improve the process

By taking the time to go through this for each process, you can reduce the inefficiencies that gradually accrete around the functions you provide. It gives you the opportunity to ask why you’re doing some things as well when you take a hard look at who the audience is and what their needs are for that product. It also overcomes “we’ve always done it that way” thinking by taking a hard look at the cost of doing it that way.

The key here is to focus on the end results you hope to achieve and design a process that delivers those results.