Santa Barbara County
Guiding Internal Processes for Capital Improvements Planning
Santa Barbara County uses a continuous improvement mindset to drive change for their county operations. Like most government entities, they produce a variety of policy and financial documents that lay out near- and long-term goals. In 2022, PorchLight Insights worked alongside County staff to gather stakeholder feedback and lay out a roadmap to guide the annual Capital Improvements Plan document.
PorchLight Insights led several focus groups with executive leaders and staff from departments to understand the process of gathering and submitting data and information that populate the plan. This valuable feedback then allowed PorchLight Insights to work with staff responsible for producing the plan to streamline and standardize how the plan is built. In addition, PorchLight Insights used their extensive knowledge of data management to help County staff create a centralized and searchable database that can be used for data collection in the future. The end product was a co-created guidebook that incorporates stakeholder feedback, recommended process improvements and examples of best practices in Capital Planning.
“PorchLight Insights was able to take a rarely used Capital Improvement Plan, taking thousands of staff hours to produce, and recommended a path forward. I recommend using PorchLight Insights if you need to modernize a process, especially from a company passionate about helping others and dedicated to serving the public through career and civic involvement.”