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North Carolina Benchmarking Project
Achievements and Learning
What the project has achieved:
- The project's methodology, consisting of service profiles, performance measures, cost accounting, and explanation of results, provides a comprehensive source of information to compare service delivery and cost between jurisdictions. The project's accounting model is especially effective in capturing the full cost of service delivery.
- The performance data have been used in numerous jurisdictions for service improvement, especially in the areas of residential refuse collection and household recycling.
- The project's success is directly related to consensus of service definitions and measurement statistics, involving numerous local government officials from the participating municipalities.
What we have learned:
- Local governments can produce accurate, reliable, and comparable performance and cost data, which can be used for service improvement.
- Specific service definitions are vital to performance measurement and benchmarking, including explanatory information.
- Data availability and data quality are very important to performance measurement.
- Auditing or verifying the accuracy of performance data is a necessary component of performance measurement and benchmarking.
- Performance measurement and cost accounting are time consuming. However, performance measures provide valuable information in the quest to provide quality services at reasonable cost.