Improving City Performance in San Jose

City leaders in San Jose are addressing head-on five of the most difficult issues facing local governments today: homelessness, affordable housing, economic development, community safety, and clean streets. 

To make the most of their efforts, city leaders wanted accurate and reliable ways of measuring and tracking progress. They also wanted the dashboards to serve as a strategic engine for achieving meaningful progress.

As one senior leader put it, the City was doing a great deal of work but lacked clarity about which efforts had the strongest potential for improving outcomes.

Before an upcoming performance review with the Mayor and City Council, the City Manager’s Office recognized the need for a redesigned approach. It needed a cohesive, citywide performance system that aligned cross-departmental work, built in learning routines, and focused on delivering better results for residents.

With just sixty days before presenting to the Mayor and City Council, the City set out to transform its dashboards from activity reporting tools into drivers of measurable impact. 

The goals were clear:

• Move from descriptive reporting to strategic decision-making
  
  
• Establish logic models that connect goals, problems, and interventions
  
  
• Create long-term and intermediate targets centered on resident outcomes
  
  
• Build dashboards that communicate strategy and learning insights
  
  
• Lay the groundwork for an ongoing continuous improvement culture
  
  

San Jose selected Dr. Shannon Arvizu, principal at Civic Wisdom Labs and Senior Fellow in the Agile Government Initiative at U.C. Berkeley, to lead an initiative to rewire the City’s strategic operating system and build a foundation for long-term performance management.

The Approach

We partnered closely with City of San Jose teams to create a performance system designed for action, reflection, and results. Deliverables included:

• Landscape Analysis: A review of top dashboard practices in leading U.S. cities to surface design models that support strategic clarity and real-time learning.

• Logic Model Design: Collaboratively built strategy maps for each of the five focus areas to show how long-term goals connect to short-term interventions and operational work.

• Outcome and Target Setting: Guided the City to define resident-centered outcomes along with SMART medium-term targets supported by clear indicators of progress.

• Strategic Operating Framework: Developed a new organizational model for monitoring progress and surfacing challenges that builds the collective intelligence of city teams to deliver "the right things, in the right way, and at the right speed" for the people they serve.

San Jose now has more than redesigned dashboards. It has a performance system that enables teams to learn in public, adapt quickly, and stay aligned on what matters most.

A system built for continuous improvement

• Strategy Tools: Dashboards that tell a clear story, linking civic challenges to project work and long-term goals.
  
• Learning Engines: Structures that support monthly and quarterly retrospectives, helping teams identify what is working and where to adjust.
  
• Alignment Drivers: Shared tools that connect daily efforts across departments to a unified citywide agenda.
  
• Living Systems: Dashboards that evolve through real-time reflection and iteration rather than remaining static snapshots.
  
  

Why It's Working

• Outcome-driven design keeps the focus on resident impacts.
• Cross-functional collaboration encourages departments to align efforts and share ownership.
• Embedded reflection routines creates a sustainable cadence for learning and course correction.
• Human-centered methods make the system intuitive and usable for teams on the ground.
  
  

Long-term impact

With more than thirty strategic project teams now using the new system, the City is better equipped to surface insights, adapt in real time, and make faster, smarter decisions. 

Phase Two is underway, strengthening the City’s continuous improvement culture through training on retrospective facilitation and data storytelling. The City is creating the conditions for experimentation, allowing teams to test ideas, learn from small failures, and accelerate what succeeds. Civic Wisdom Labs continues to serve as a thought partner as the City embeds learning and adaptation into how it governs.

Client Testimonial

“Before working with Dr. Arvizu, we had a collection of measures and static scorecards that loosely described the work the City was doing, but didn’t clearly connect activities to outcomes. More importantly, they didn’t help us learn from our work in a structured way to inform policy decisions or investments.

Working with Dr. Arvizu has been refreshing. She helped us take a step back to reflect on what’s working, where we want to go, and how to learn from other cities on the same path. Together, we developed logic models that show the relationships between our long-term goals, the problems we’re trying to solve, and the short-term interventions we believe will move the needle.

These logic models are now being translated into dynamic new dashboards that make our strategies visible, support cross-department learning, and keep us focused on what truly drives community outcomes.

This approach is helping San Jose tackle our most complex civic challenges by aligning resources, measuring impact, and evolving into a government that learns and adapts.”

Sarah Zarate
Director, Administration, Policy, and Intergovernmental Relations, City of San Jose