Glossary of Key Terms

Specific actions that your community takes to reach its short- and longer-term strategic objectives. These plans specify the resources committed to and the time horizons for accomplishing plans. See also STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES.

A state of consistency among plans, processes, information, resource decisions, workforce capability and capacity, actions, results, and analyses that support key community-wide goals. See also INTEGRATION.

The examination of facts and data to provide a basis for effective decisions. Analysis often involves determining cause-effect relationships.

The methods your community uses to carry out its processes.

One or more organizations that support the community excellence group, serving as neutral facilitator(s) for the community excellence effort. Its /their primary purpose is to provide a structured environment for stakeholders to convene, develop strategy, and accomplish goals.

Processes and results that represent the best practices and best performance for similar activities or initiatives, inside or outside your community.

Your community’s ability to carry out its shared programs and services through the skills, abilities, and competencies of its people and organizational resources.

Sufficient staffing levels to carry out your community’s shared programs and services.

Organizations or individuals outside your community who cooperate with your community to support a particular activity, event, or initiative or who cooperate intermittently when their short-term goals are aligned with or are the same as yours. See also PARTNERS.

The characteristics, conditions, and beliefs that help distinguish your community from others. Identity might arise from, for example, a shared history, shared stories or events, challenges faced by the community, or other characteristics that make your community unique.

The people who guide your community and its performance improvement effort. They include formal or informal officially or unofficially designated individuals who guide or direct your community or segments within your community.

An integrated approach to community performance management that results in (1) delivery of ever-improving value to residents, other customers, and stakeholders, contributing to ongoing community success; (2) improvement of your community’s overall effectiveness and capabilities; and (3) learning for the community and for people resources.

Your community’s and your community excellence group’s areas of greatest expertise or strength; those strategically important capabilities that are central to fulfilling your community’s mission or that provide an advantage in its environment. A core competency might be seen as a community asset.

A user of your community’s or your community excellence group’s offerings. Customers include the residents of your community as well as others who use offerings, such as tourists, businesses, and people who work but do not live in the community. See also STAKEHOLDERS.

The extent to which your community excellence group applies an approach throughout its programs, services, and processes.

Personal differences among community members that enrich the community environment. These differences address many variables, such as race, religion, color, gender, national origin, language, disability, sexual orientation, age and generation, education, socioeconomic status, geographic origin, and skill characteristics, as well as ideas, thinking, academic disciplines, and perspectives.

The extent of people’s emotional and intellectual commitment to accomplishing your community excellence group’s work, mission, and vision.

How well a process or a measure addresses its intended purpose.

The actions your community excellence group takes to ensure that all its decisions, actions, and stakeholder interactions conform to its moral and professional principles of conduct. These principles should support all applicable laws and regulations and are the foundation for your group’s culture and values.

See COMMUNITY PERFORMANCE EXCELLENCE.

Future conditions or performance levels that your community intends or desires to attain. See also PERFORMANCE PROJECTIONS.

The shared system of management and controls exercised in the stewardship of your community excellence group and its resources.

Ever-higher levels of overall performance, including quality, productivity, innovation rate, and cycle time.

The systems and processes that your community excellence group uses to achieve its mission requirements.

Making meaningful change to improve your community’s health, educational status, economic vitality, quality of life, operational processes, and mode of operation, with the purpose of creating new value for residents, other customers, and stakeholder. The outcome of innovation is a discontinuous or breakthrough change.

The harmonization of plans, processes, information, resource decisions, capability and capacity, actions, results, and analyses to support key community excellence group goals. See also ALIGNMENT.

Opportunities for which the potential gain outweighs the potential harm or loss to your future success if you do not explore them. Taking intelligent risks requires a tolerance for failure and an expectation that innovation is not achieved by initiating only successful endeavors.

Major or most important; critical to achieving your intended outcome.

Your community excellence group’s accumulated intellectual resources; the knowledge possessed by your community excellence group and its people resources in the form of information, ideas, learning, understanding, memory, insights, cognitive and technical skills, and capabilities.

The way leadership is exercised, formally and informally. It includes structures and mechanisms for making decisions; ensuring two-way communication; selecting and developing leaders; and reinforcing values, ethical behavior, directions, and performance expectations.

New knowledge or skills acquired through evaluation, study, experience, and innovation. Learning can occur at the individual, community excellence group, or community level.

Numerical information that places or positions your community’s or your community excellence group’s results, performance, and outcomes on a meaningful measurement scale.

Numerical information that quantifies the input, output, and performance dimensions of processes, programs, projects, services, and the overall community or community excellence group (outcomes).

Your community excellence group’s overall purpose. The mission answers the question, “What is your community attempting to accomplish?”

Key organizations or individuals who are working in concert with your community excellence group to achieve a common goal, improve performance, and accomplish your community excellence group’s mission and vision. Typically, partnerships are formal arrangements. See also COLLABORATORS.

Outputs and their outcomes obtained from programs, services, processes, residents, and other customers that permit you to evaluate and compare your community’s and your community excellence group’s results to performance projections, standards, past results, goals, and other communities’ results.

Estimates of your community’s future performance. See also GOALS.

Linked activities with the purpose of producing a program or service for a resident, other customer, or other stakeholder (user) group.

Your residents’ and other customers’ investment in or commitment to your community and community excellence group’s brand and offerings.

Outputs and outcomes achieved by your community or community excellence group.

A community’s ability to prepare for anticipated hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Resilience requires agility throughout the community.

One part of your community’s base of residents, other customers, community offerings, or people resources.

All groups that are or might be affected by your community’s actions and success. These include, but are not limited to, residents, organizations, employers and employees, visitors and tourists, and surrounding communities and regions.

Those community benefits and assets that exert a decisive influence on your community’s likelihood of future success. These advantages are frequently sources of current and future success relative to other communities.

Those pressures that exert a decisive influence on your community’s likelihood of future success. These challenges are frequently driven by your community’s anticipated competitive position in the future relative to other communities and might be driven by political and cultural realities.

The aims or responses that your community excellence group articulates to address major change or improvement, competitiveness or social issues, and strategic community advantages. See also ACTION PLANS.

Prospects for new or changed programs, services, processes, business models (including strategic alliances), or customers. They arise from outside-the-box thinking, brainstorming, capitalizing on serendipity, research and innovation processes, nonlinear extrapolation of current conditions, and other approaches to imagining a different future.

Well-ordered, repeatable, and exhibiting the use of data and information so that learning is possible.

Numerical information that shows the direction and rate of change of your community’s or community excellence group’s results or the consistency of its performance over time.

The guiding principles and behaviors that embody how your community excellence group and its people are expected to operate.

Your community’s desired future state.

Your community excellence group’s process for capturing resident and other customer-related information.

Your community excellence group’s most important internal value-creation processes. They might include processes for designing and implementing shared programs and services and for resident and other customer support.

The internal work processes and the external resources your community excellence group uses to develop and produce programs and services, and deliver them successfully to residents and other customers.