State chief performance office outlines training, communities and new performance-measure dashboard

Justin Kenny, the state’s chief performance officer, and Katie Bockle, state director of performance improvement, told the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 30 that their two‑person office supports performance management across state agencies by offering training, one‑on‑one consultation and online communities of practice.

Kenny summarized the office’s mission as enabling “state government to better solve problems, manage operations, and improve results.” He said the office provides a 35-course continuous improvement curriculum, a new technology training track launching next week (starting with Microsoft Excel, then SharePoint, Power Automate and Power BI), and three Microsoft Teams-based communities of practice for continuous improvement, technology and government-specific topics.

The office also publishes an annual programmatic performance-measure budget report that combines two statutory strands: Act 186 (2014) population-accountability reporting and budget form performance-measure requirements. Kenny demonstrated the report’s interactive dashboard, which the office redesigned after feedback from the Joint Fiscal Office to add context and better navigation.

Kenny said visitors to the dashboard can view performance measures by program or appropriation, see polarity (whether higher or lower values indicate better performance), recent values, targets and a year‑over‑year percentage change with a simple red/green visual indicator. He noted that judiciary and most Agency of Human Services measures are published in separate systems and are linked from the dashboard.

Kenny and Bockle described usage and reach: the continuous improvement network includes about 1,500 members; the tech hub has just over 3,000 members; and in the office’s largest training year to date, 620 unique voluntary participants took courses. Kenny estimated Vermont state workforce size at roughly 8,000–9,000 employees (excluding K–12 educators). The consolidated report currently lists 220 programs and 677 measures (excluding judiciary and Agency of Human Services data).

On limitations and next steps, Kenny said the state lacks a centralized performance‑management system: “Everybody’s doing it differently,” he told the committee, noting that collections arrive in Excel, SharePoint or Power BI and he currently consolidates them into a dashboard. He said the office plans to encourage a culture of performance management by embedding model lines of program-level measurement, offering targeted practicums and building more automated data collection processes.

Committee members asked whether the work is time-consuming and whether the state should emulate other states. Kenny said Washington state provides a good model but noted differences in scale and staffing. He added that better automation and consistent data management would reduce the manual work needed to compile the report and improve ongoing monitoring.

Kenny said the office is responsible for collecting and consolidating measures, while the programs (the “grantees, programs and agencies”) remain owners of their measures and should be the contact for substantive questions about trends. The dashboard includes agency contacts for follow-up questions.

The office asked the committee to consider statutory and budget language changes to promote more widespread use of the outcomes and to allow legislators and staff to more easily find and use population- and program-level indicators. Kenny referenced H.67 as a bill that could support expansion of the annual population‑level outcomes report.