The City Manager's Executive Report provides information to the Mayor, City Council, city management, and the public on the City's programs and activities. Public awareness of city performance is an integral part of governmental progress. The goal of this information is to be comprehensive, timely, and useful for the following:

• Evaluating the progress of City programs and activities
• Determining the effectiveness of resource allocation
• Identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the organization

The Executive Report also helps to provide checkpoints for planning, forecasting, and budgeting.

This report focuses on major City of Phoenix departments that are organized into three categories: Organizational Indicators, External Indicators, and Internal Indicators. These categories are presented in a way that provides various views of the City's performance. These categories and other data may be found in the Table of Contents.

In identifying performance measures to include in the City Manager's Executive Report, focus groups of Phoenix residents were asked, "What is most important to you about the services we deliver?" The residents' answers to this question helped City department directors identify performance measures to best convey the information that Phoenix residents considered important.

The performance measures found in the City Manager's Executive Report address the four priorities identified by the resident focus groups:

• Satisfaction with service quality
• Cost
• Response time
• Mission accomplishment

In addition to serving public involvement to identify the critical areas of concern with performance measures, the City is also focused on resident feedback about how quality of life has been impacted by city involvement. For this the City contracted the Behavior Research Center to provide a scientific Community Attitude Survey. This report represents citizen perceptions of the outcome of the City's organizations. The Community Attitude Survey can be found at phoenix.gov/CITYGOV/attsurv.html.

The City Manager's Executive Report is a tool for evaluating the success of City programs and activities. For most of the performance measures, data is provided for at least two years allowing for a comparison of performance over time. Occasionally, reporting methods may change from one year to the next. When this happens, comparison between years may not be meaningful. Such instances are noted in the report and additional information is provided.

For some of the measures in the Organizational Indicators section, information is provided on how the City of Phoenix compares to other cities. For comparison purposes, the City of Phoenix typically uses 10 standard cities:

Different cities report information in different ways and on different schedules, so some measures do not include comparison data for all ten standard cities. The data used was obtained from the International City/County Management Association website (ICMA.org), and is known for complete and accurate information.

The information in the Organizational Indicators section of the City Manager's Executive Report is updated each year to coincide with the beginning of the City of Phoenix's fiscal year in July. The departmental pages found in the External Indicators and the Internal Indicators sections are updated monthly. The most up-to-date version of the City Manager's Executive Report can be found on the web at phoenix.gov/MGRREPT.

The initial report underwent an analysis by the City Auditor Department to ensure that the information provided was supported. From that point the data is routinely evaluated on a 20% per year rotational basis, meaning that every year 20% of the data is looked at so that in five years the entire document has been reviewed. Additionally, each year the City Auditor Department considers requests from departments for additions or changes to their respective sections. Requests are first reviewed for their contribution to the overall purpose of the City Manager's Executive Report. For a new measure to be added to the report, the reliability of the data contained in it must be verified. This involves reviewing the methods used for recording and reporting information to ensure their accuracy. The City Auditor Department also reviews each of the measures in the City Manager's Executive Report regularly to ensure a degree of reliability.