MY AUDIT – In his excellent short book, Extreme Government Makeover, on increasing government efficiency, Ken Miller uses the analogy of a complex plumbing system to describe government processes. Think of the building permit approval process as a series of pipes. Each approval step is a valve where a decision must be made, and once a decision is made, the approval flows down a different pipe to the next decision point. How long it takes to approve the permit depends on the capacity of the pipeline and how long the application is waiting at the valve awaiting a decision. In some cities Miller has worked with, up to 75 percent of the application wait time is spent with the permit sitting on someone else’s desk awaiting review. If the process can be sped up by reducing the approval wait time, the capacity of the pipeline will increase and the entire system will become more efficient.
Miller points out that you cannot improve the entire process by changing just one part of the system. Any process is only as fast as its slowest section. True process improvement requires a holistic approach, examining each step to see how it can be made more efficient from start to finish. When looking at the whole process, improving efficiency can become more complex. One advantage, however, is that a complex process can be broken down into its sub-segments, and each segment can be improved by those people who are most familiar with it. The segmented approach is the hallmark of efficiency improvement programs like Denver’s Peak Performance initiative. A group of employees examine their part of a process and recommend changes. A project coordinator combines the recommendations of each group into an overall process improvement package.
Subject to numerous regulations and legal requirements, government programs are process based. Effective procedures can ensure that everyone is treated equally, create transparency and make processes more efficient. However, Miller warns us: Sometimes the process itself can become the goal. Getting planning permission is less about making sure a renovation has been properly completed and more about making sure the application is correct and all official stamps have been collected.
In all public and private organizations, process is often confused with goal, and homelessness programs are no exception. As LA County Supervisor Lyndsey Horvath has mentioned more than once, a typical LAHSA service agreement can go through up to 140 steps before being approved. Not only is 140 steps an excessive number of steps, those steps have no tangible benefit to the results. LAHSA’s lax contract management and tangled web of more than 1,000 service contracts are notorious for failing to provide the homeless with needed services and have done little to reduce homelessness.
I reviewed three LAHSA service contracts; Each is at least 250 pages long and crammed with process-oriented requirements. The terms cover everything from reporting to welcoming clients to how nonprofits treat their own employees. What the contracts lack are measurable and meaningful results. Every contract has a small “Key Performance Indicators” section, but what’s measured aren’t results. These are workload factors such as the number of shelter beds filled or the number of clients housed (but not how long they stay housed). Neither contract includes actual outcome measures, such as the long-term outcomes of a person’s placement or how long it takes to get someone off the street into a shelter and find a place to stay.
One of the reasons it is so difficult to measure outcomes is the fragmentation of LAHSA’s service models. One provider may conduct street operations and then turn the customer over to another shelter provider, who in turn transfers people to various other providers as needed. Another organization provides the accommodation and does not report to the original provider how long the person was accommodated. This is one of the reasons LAHSA and City seem to be having so much trouble telling us how many unique individuals are achieving long-term placement; Many people go through the system and are counted again by the various authorities. The city of New York, with a much larger population, has about half of the homeless service contracts and a fraction of LA’s homeless population.
A given provider can follow all the processes and meet all the requirements of a given contract. Compliance is not the issue. The root problem is that all of these providers follow a process based on the failed No Barrier Housing First model. LAHSA’s fragmented service model and obsession with expensive construction projects means those in need rarely get the services and support they need. The providers follow a process that leads to false results.
A corollary of process improvement is that the process you improve must have value. There is no point in improving an ineffective process. Using the plumbing analogy, there’s no point in improving water flow by simply dumping water down the drain. Much of the rhetoric about “improving” homeless programs is actually about increasing the flow of funds to existing programs, most of which are demonstrably ineffective. Mayor Bass’s Inside Safe initiative offers no new solutions; Rather, it relies on expanding existing programs such as housing people in hotel rooms. Given that many shelters and transitional facilities are poorly managed, Inside Safe does little more than add to an already failed model.
And that brings us to the last “P” in the title of the article: politics. I think most of our political leaders know they are supporting a failed system. Most elected officials have been successful in other professions before entering politics, so they know failure when they see it. But they are under enormous pressure to stay the course. Billions of dollars have been spent on existing programs and they are reluctant to admit that the investment was wasted. Loud advocates and other advocacy groups are calling for more resources, labeling alternatives as “hatred of the homeless” or cruel. Everyone from our state government to HUD insists that No Barrier Housing First is the only solution to homelessness, even though there is little empirical support for that position. But state and federal governments will not issue checks to local governments that do not comply with Housing First. It is in their nature that politicians go where the money goes.
But any political official who prefers expediency to the common good denies his claim to moral leadership. There’s no shame in choosing the wrong course if you’re willing to admit your mistake and change direction. Unfortunately, most of our leaders continue to choose to support failed models, even those who insist there needs to be “accountability” with homeless agencies. You cannot claim to hold an organization accountable if you know what the organization is doing is ineffective.
Political leaders need to shift their focus from supportive processes to challenging outcomes. Only then will the crisis on our streets subside.
(Tim Campbell is a Westchester resident who spent a career in public service and ran a community performance testing program. He focuses on outcomes rather than process. Tim is a regular contributor to CityWatchLA.com.)
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https://www.citywatchla.com/la-election-2022/27123-homelessness-plumbing-process-and-politics
